In base 13 arithmetic, 6 * 9 = 42. That's 4 13's and 2 1's. People usually count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers, so Adams may have intended for God to have 13.
In the past, people have commented that for every report that SCO is full of shit (which drops their stock price a bit), they have to put another outlandish press release out the door to jack it back up.
But I can't understand how THIS is supposed to rally their stock price. Extorting money from the US Government? I thought We the People didn't negotiate with terrorists.
No, the Linux community is just getting mugged by the corporate buccaneers in charge of SCO. And one of them should be walking the plank if he thinks that demanging money from The Law is going to strengthen their case.
Not to sound like too much of a tinfoil hat, but this may have already happened. I suspect that the people who would like to push this kind of technology aren't going to wait for it to be legal and accepted by the public (even as imprecisely represented by our elected officials).
If that's the case, the best that TIA could have done was make a lot of black-hole surveillance projects legit.
I would have read the part about 'At least thinking about it' as applying to the total rollback option, not the partial rollback option... so I guess that's yet another ambiguity in their survey.
I think that you're right about the part where shops that have made the jump to Linux are unlikely to be scared off by this. Only one of the responses that they posted was a strong 'We're scared of looking like theives' response, and that was from a company that dealt with lots of financial data and could not afford the 'appearance of any impropriety'. I'd guess that this means that they aren't so much worried about SCO coming after them, as some of their customers saying 'You're using Linux and we're worried that SCO might come after you in the future'.
Overall, that's the kind of 'chilling effect' that I'm really worried about, and that I'd like to see measured (because if you can measure it, you can calculate damages, and that's important in a law suit).
Some IT managers have been influenced, but we can't tell how much from this survey. As I said, the numbers would lead you to believe that 9% have.
However, the article is weak because it doesn't indicate how many respondants haven't changed their Linux plans because they didn't have any in the first place, it doesn't say anything about the kinds of shops that are responding (you wouldn't expect somewhere that's 100% COBOL on big iron to even care).
You also can't call the sample truly random because responses were solicited rather than polled at random, so there might be bias in the data.
Finally, they say only that they got 2,172 responses, and nothing about error rates. Scientific polls would have an estimate of probable error.
So some managers have been influenced. But is it a big deal? Can't tell from this. It's not much better than a Slashdot poll. All that's missing is a third option about 'Cowboy Neal is my attack lawyer'.
Go read the article. A 'yes' answer indicated (and I quote): "Yes, we're reducing our Linux deployment, eliminating Linux entirely -- or at least we're thinking about it: 9 percent".
For that matter, go back and read what I posted again. I'm not claiming a damn thing except that these numbers don't mean anything.
9% of RESPONDING IT MANAGERS changed their mind, not 9% of IT MANAGERS PLANNING TO USE LINUX. You'd be right if they'd only surveyed people who were planning to use Linux in the first place.
Of course, this is just another point in favor of my argument. It's too easy to distort numbers.
It's probable, based on the nature of the case, that they will not be changing their plans in favor of linux.
Also, of the remaining 91%, how many of them planned to not use Linux at all? If only 9% of IT managers planned to use Linux in the first place, and now 9% of them are changing their minds, then that would indicate that Linux is about to get wiped out. That can't be the case either, but it's one possible interpretation of the figures.
Bottom line: Statistics can be used to make convincing lies. Most surveys are unscientific in the extreme. And SCOX is still a bunch of bastards.
It's a zip code centered on Grand Avenue in Duluth, Minniseta. Could it be the originator's oddball signature?
Several bulletin boards have more than 55808 messages. Including several mail-order brides sites (Irina looks pretty foxy).
A monitor mounting arm from Eldon.
A quote in the Columbia Book of Quotations, by Marie Stendahl. ('True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.')
The lengths of several documents in the Purdue Judicial Database system, and the Novell documentation library.
Requisition numbers for a 'shoulder or upper arm ultrasound scan' in the Austrailian Medicare system.
I saw WASTE get announced here a few days ago and figured, 'Enh. Windows only. I'll wait until someone does the same thing for Linux.'
Today, I see that AOL is attempting to quash WASTE. And the number of people downloading the source goes up by a factor of ten if not a hundred.
How long until that Linux port now? 72 hours? 36?
How long until someone decides that they can do better and does something as a pure-GPL pure-community project so that it doesn't matter what the courts say, there's an independant means to do the same thing out there already?
I don't think it's actually illegal to transmit encrypted data , but you have to keep a copy of the transmitted data (in the clear) for inspection by certain parties, definitely including the FCC.
What makes it illegal is that it's abusing a part of the spectrum that's reserved and licensed for a particular type of operations (amateur radio). You need to be licensed, and the terms of the license prohibit commercial use - there's very specific rules about that.
Of course, since only two were ever built, that means that there are only two sets of ROMs out there. Since you can't legally play a MAME game unless you have license for the ROM images (which generally means owning a physical set of ROMs, which generally means owning the actual game), there are only two people out there who can actually USE this patch in MAME.
Which makes me wonder how it was written, tested, etc... seems like prima facie (sp) evidence to me that MAME is an illegal product.
This isn't the People's Republic of China. This is Taiwan. It's not the same thing (unless you believe the PRoC). Taiwain is a democratic republic, a US ally, and the place where they make most of your nifty toys.
And I'm sure this distinction will be made (and lost) a hundred times today, because nobody actually does their homework.
So what he's saying is that if Ep3 sucks, it can't possibly be because Lucas has lost his groove and is making schlock, it must be because of his cheating, stealing, low-down dirty fans.
The movie studios survived VHS, they'll survive DVD... IF they can make something worth watching. I still haven't seen Ep2, and I'm not going to until I can get it used at the used CD store.
The background here is that a lot of people pirated Bill's Altair BASIC program, and Bill wanted to know where good software was going to come from if people didn't get paid for it.
It may not have been legal or ethical for hobbyists to pirate Altair BASIC back in 1976, but very soon thereafter, Free Software gave us an answer and an alternative: share the source, and the software grows even in the absence of monetary incentive. It is immune to the type of 'theft' that Bill was whining about. 26 years later, we have seen that Free Software isn't just surviving, it's thriving.
Now, along comes GotDotNet, which looks suspiciously like an emulation of Open Source practices... except that the AUP includes a few serious distinctions. One is the assignment of certain important rights to Microsoft that basically let them do whatever the hell they please with the sweat of your brow. Here's a quote of (what looks like) the original license from the discussion at Activewin.com:
(Link to the full thread)
By posting Your Stuff, You grant to Microsoft, under all of Your intellectual property and proprietary rights the following worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty free, fully paid up rights: (1) to make, use, copy, modify and create derivative works of Your Stuff; (2) to publicly perform or display, import, broadcast, transmit, distribute, license, offer to sell, and sell, rent, lease, and lend copies of Your Stuff (and derivative works thereof); (3) to sublicense to third parties, including the right to sublicense to further third parties; and (ii) You agree You won't commence any legal action against Microsoft or any Participant or Visitor for exercising any of these rights.
Second, You also agree that You will not use the Workspace for any commercial purposes whatsoever. And last but not least, You agree that Microsoft may remove at any time, without notice, the Workspace or any posting to it.
Note the specific lack of compensation for the original programmer (unless you consider the use of GDN itself to be sufficient recompense, but I'm pretty damn sure that GDN isn't going to be buying your groceries and paying the rent). One must ask - if nobody pays the users of GDN, where will the good software come from? Nothing about GDN sounds like hiring programmers to 'flood the hobby market with good software'. It sounds ripping off the community to serve MS's shareholders (eg, Bill).
So what's the point?
I propose that the fundamental corporate culture of Microsoft embodies Gate's attitude as reflected in the 1976 'Open Letter'. This culture is allergic to piracy, because a consumerist revenue cycle is necessary to improve the software.
The Free Software movement has thoroughly refuted Gate's thesis, by making itself independant of the revenue cycle (and therefore is not harmed by 'piracy' as it is usually understood).
Microsoft's obsolete culture cannot change to adopt Free Software practices - the assumptions that Free Software threaten are the very core of their business. If the company were rebuilt from the ground up on Free principles, the entire culture would have to change - essentially resulting in a totally different company that happens to have the same name.
Since Microsoft cannot adopt free software practices, Microsoft can only regard Free Software as a competing producer of software, taking market share away from them, and therefore, a deadly threat.
Since Microsoft itself regards Free Software as a threat, it seems to follow that nobody else who depends on revenue streams to survive, would ever want to use a system that resembles a Free Software ecology (like GDN), as they would deprive the producer of that stream.
Producers of free software should similarly be suspicious of a system governed by a legal agreement written by someone who considers them to be a deadly enemy.
Therefore, Microsoft's own pseudo-Free intiatives (such as GotDotNet, the Shared Source license, and the Software Choice initiative) are probably (a) Shams that will perpetuate Microsoft's revenue stream at the expense of the rights of members of the community, and/or (b) exceedingly stupid mistakes on Microsoft's part.
In the absence of further evidence (especially since GDN is slashdotted and I can't read the text of the new license), it is impossible to tell to which degree GDN (or any other pseudo-Free effort by Microsoft) will be (a) or (b). In either case, it seems imprudent for users or programmers - whether they produce in open or closed software - to place their trust in these intiatives.
I wonder, as an aside, if Bill himself ever paid anything to the original inventors of BASIC, a pair of researchers at Dartmouth University. So I wonder if Bill's logic reflexively implies that he stole BASIC from Kemeny and Kurtz. Gee. Where will the good ideas come from? Oh, wait academia has been going as a not-for-profit institution for centuries. You may have heard of some of their other 'products' - the theory of universal gravitation, electricty, the rabies vaccine...
Flying today is more like sentencing yourself to prison for a day. You start by getting shaken down for cash (by the SkyCap and/or cabbie), questioned, proving your identity, securing the proper documents, then file past metal detectors and x-ray machines where they declaw you of any possible offensive device (along with your privacy and dignity). THEN, after waiting in an antiseptic, mind-numbing holding tank (departure lounge), you get shown to your cell - a fourteen-inch seat, made out of material that will give off toxic fumes when burned, assuming you don't die of 'economy class syndrome'. Once in a while one of the 'bulls' will decide that you're causing a problem, point a gun at you, detain you at the other end for even more indignity.
And if anything goes wrong, they LITERALLY tell you to try and bend over and kiss your ass goodbye (with that cute little 'crash tuck'). From back in coach, that's about as much control as you have over your destiny in a fatal crash.
And now, they want to ban the most effective passenger distraction device since the triple martini? Whoops, those are banned, too.
Let's not even get started on the bizzare, arcane, nonsensical way airline tickets are priced. It makes tax law look as simple as the Ten Commandments.
A night in the drunk tank is probably safer. It could hardly be LESS comfortable.
Of course, they airlines are the only game in town. If you want better service you have to start your own airline.
So screw it. I've got 38 more training hours until I get my own damn pilot's license, after that I'll do all my own flying.
One win about not having Windows, even if it doesn't save you money, is that it saves you from legal obligation. If the machine comes with Windows pre-installed you're stuck with the EULA just for turning it on (unless the VERY FIRST TIME that you turn it on, you've got a boot floppy in it and use that to wipe out Windows - and I bet that MS would still argue with that one). To me, the EULA 'costs' more than the cost of Windows, in terms of risk.
And yes, it sucks that this is an industry where the only way you get a break, is to avoid liability, rather than actually saving some money.
Businesses have been making dumb decisions for centuries, under or overvaluing their IT departments isn't a greater or lesser sin.
Let them cut their budgets, that will only force more and more IT departments to use Linux and other free software to implement their mission critical projects.
Innocent prank, or identity theft? I wonder how well the law draws the line. Doing this with (say) a driver's license should be a crime. But in the current climate, even falsifying your Mickey Mouse Club card number might get you shot.
Companys exist to make money for their shareholders AND FOR NO OTHER REASON. Companies that do NOT behave in the best interests of making money for their shareholders, are liable to get sued by the shareholders.
Even a company that's 51% owned by one person, can get a 'minority shareholder' suit if that one person makes the company do something that benefits him more that the other shareholders.
That's the problem with trusting stuff to a corp, and why you can't ever expect a corporation to ever do anything 'nice' (unless it can get a tax break or better sales out of it). There are good places to work, and bad places to work, but in the end, if you want an organization that's motivated by something other than money, go start a not-for-profit. Duh.
(IANAL) I think that in antitrust law, you can't force people to buy bundled services that come with an 'essential facility' (eg, if you own a railroad, you can't force your customers to also buy coal from you when they ship things, or transactions of that nature).
If an individual musical track is the 'essential facility' of a musical compilation, then it may be unfair to force you to buy other tracks on the CD at the same time.
However, I can't imagine this going over very well in court - how finely do you divide access to music? Will the court really have the patience for that kind of argument? You don't NEED recorded music to be in business (unless you're a professional DJ or running a dance club; radio's got it's own tradition of payola).
Slashdot Mirror
In base 13 arithmetic, 6 * 9 = 42. That's 4 13's and 2 1's. People usually count in base 10 because we have 10 fingers, so Adams may have intended for God to have 13.
What do you get if you multiply six by nine?
Answer: 42.
Better answer: God has thirteen fingers.
In the past, people have commented that for every report that SCO is full of shit (which drops their stock price a bit), they have to put another outlandish press release out the door to jack it back up.
But I can't understand how THIS is supposed to rally their stock price. Extorting money from the US Government? I thought We the People didn't negotiate with terrorists.
No, the Linux community is just getting mugged by the corporate buccaneers in charge of SCO. And one of them should be walking the plank if he thinks that demanging money from The Law is going to strengthen their case.
Not to sound like too much of a tinfoil hat, but this may have already happened. I suspect that the people who would like to push this kind of technology aren't going to wait for it to be legal and accepted by the public (even as imprecisely represented by our elected officials).
If that's the case, the best that TIA could have done was make a lot of black-hole surveillance projects legit.
I would have read the part about 'At least thinking about it' as applying to the total rollback option, not the partial rollback option... so I guess that's yet another ambiguity in their survey.
I think that you're right about the part where shops that have made the jump to Linux are unlikely to be scared off by this. Only one of the responses that they posted was a strong 'We're scared of looking like theives' response, and that was from a company that dealt with lots of financial data and could not afford the 'appearance of any impropriety'. I'd guess that this means that they aren't so much worried about SCO coming after them, as some of their customers saying 'You're using Linux and we're worried that SCO might come after you in the future'.
Overall, that's the kind of 'chilling effect' that I'm really worried about, and that I'd like to see measured (because if you can measure it, you can calculate damages, and that's important in a law suit).
Some IT managers have been influenced, but we can't tell how much from this survey. As I said, the numbers would lead you to believe that 9% have.
However, the article is weak because it doesn't indicate how many respondants haven't changed their Linux plans because they didn't have any in the first place, it doesn't say anything about the kinds of shops that are responding (you wouldn't expect somewhere that's 100% COBOL on big iron to even care).
You also can't call the sample truly random because responses were solicited rather than polled at random, so there might be bias in the data.
Finally, they say only that they got 2,172 responses, and nothing about error rates. Scientific polls would have an estimate of probable error.
So some managers have been influenced. But is it a big deal? Can't tell from this. It's not much better than a Slashdot poll. All that's missing is a third option about 'Cowboy Neal is my attack lawyer'.
Go read the article. A 'yes' answer indicated (and I quote): "Yes, we're reducing our Linux deployment, eliminating Linux entirely -- or at least we're thinking about it: 9 percent".
For that matter, go back and read what I posted again. I'm not claiming a damn thing except that these numbers don't mean anything.
9% of RESPONDING IT MANAGERS changed their mind, not 9% of IT MANAGERS PLANNING TO USE LINUX. You'd be right if they'd only surveyed people who were planning to use Linux in the first place.
Of course, this is just another point in favor of my argument. It's too easy to distort numbers.
91% will not change their plans.
That means that 9% WILL.
It's probable, based on the nature of the case, that they will not be changing their plans in favor of linux.
Also, of the remaining 91%, how many of them planned to not use Linux at all? If only 9% of IT managers planned to use Linux in the first place, and now 9% of them are changing their minds, then that would indicate that Linux is about to get wiped out. That can't be the case either, but it's one possible interpretation of the figures.
Bottom line: Statistics can be used to make convincing lies. Most surveys are unscientific in the extreme. And SCOX is still a bunch of bastards.
It's a zip code centered on Grand Avenue in Duluth, Minniseta. Could it be the originator's oddball signature?
Several bulletin boards have more than 55808 messages. Including several mail-order brides sites (Irina looks pretty foxy).
A monitor mounting arm from Eldon.
A quote in the Columbia Book of Quotations, by Marie Stendahl. ('True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.')
The lengths of several documents in the Purdue Judicial Database system, and the Novell documentation library.
Requisition numbers for a 'shoulder or upper arm ultrasound scan' in the Austrailian Medicare system.
I saw WASTE get announced here a few days ago and figured, 'Enh. Windows only. I'll wait until someone does the same thing for Linux.'
Today, I see that AOL is attempting to quash WASTE. And the number of people downloading the source goes up by a factor of ten if not a hundred.
How long until that Linux port now? 72 hours? 36?
How long until someone decides that they can do better and does something as a pure-GPL pure-community project so that it doesn't matter what the courts say, there's an independant means to do the same thing out there already?
You can't BUY publicity like this.
I don't think it's actually illegal to transmit encrypted data , but you have to keep a copy of the transmitted data (in the clear) for inspection by certain parties, definitely including the FCC.
What makes it illegal is that it's abusing a part of the spectrum that's reserved and licensed for a particular type of operations (amateur radio). You need to be licensed, and the terms of the license prohibit commercial use - there's very specific rules about that.
Of course, since only two were ever built, that means that there are only two sets of ROMs out there. Since you can't legally play a MAME game unless you have license for the ROM images (which generally means owning a physical set of ROMs, which generally means owning the actual game), there are only two people out there who can actually USE this patch in MAME.
Which makes me wonder how it was written, tested, etc... seems like prima facie (sp) evidence to me that MAME is an illegal product.
This isn't the People's Republic of China. This is Taiwan. It's not the same thing (unless you believe the PRoC). Taiwain is a democratic republic, a US ally, and the place where they make most of your nifty toys.
And I'm sure this distinction will be made (and lost) a hundred times today, because nobody actually does their homework.
So what he's saying is that if Ep3 sucks, it can't possibly be because Lucas has lost his groove and is making schlock, it must be because of his cheating, stealing, low-down dirty fans.
The movie studios survived VHS, they'll survive DVD... IF they can make something worth watching. I still haven't seen Ep2, and I'm not going to until I can get it used at the used CD store.
It's usually instructive in situations like this to consider the historical context of the issues. Here's the original 'Open Letter' from Bill Gates to the hobbyist community
The background here is that a lot of people pirated Bill's Altair BASIC program, and Bill wanted to know where good software was going to come from if people didn't get paid for it.
It may not have been legal or ethical for hobbyists to pirate Altair BASIC back in 1976, but very soon thereafter, Free Software gave us an answer and an alternative: share the source, and the software grows even in the absence of monetary incentive. It is immune to the type of 'theft' that Bill was whining about. 26 years later, we have seen that Free Software isn't just surviving, it's thriving.
Now, along comes GotDotNet, which looks suspiciously like an emulation of Open Source practices... except that the AUP includes a few serious distinctions. One is the assignment of certain important rights to Microsoft that basically let them do whatever the hell they please with the sweat of your brow. Here's a quote of (what looks like) the original license from the discussion at Activewin.com: (Link to the full thread)
Note the specific lack of compensation for the original programmer (unless you consider the use of GDN itself to be sufficient recompense, but I'm pretty damn sure that GDN isn't going to be buying your groceries and paying the rent). One must ask - if nobody pays the users of GDN, where will the good software come from? Nothing about GDN sounds like hiring programmers to 'flood the hobby market with good software'. It sounds ripping off the community to serve MS's shareholders (eg, Bill).
So what's the point?
I propose that the fundamental corporate culture of Microsoft embodies Gate's attitude as reflected in the 1976 'Open Letter'. This culture is allergic to piracy, because a consumerist revenue cycle is necessary to improve the software.
The Free Software movement has thoroughly refuted Gate's thesis, by making itself independant of the revenue cycle (and therefore is not harmed by 'piracy' as it is usually understood).
Microsoft's obsolete culture cannot change to adopt Free Software practices - the assumptions that Free Software threaten are the very core of their business. If the company were rebuilt from the ground up on Free principles, the entire culture would have to change - essentially resulting in a totally different company that happens to have the same name.
Since Microsoft cannot adopt free software practices, Microsoft can only regard Free Software as a competing producer of software, taking market share away from them, and therefore, a deadly threat.
Since Microsoft itself regards Free Software as a threat, it seems to follow that nobody else who depends on revenue streams to survive, would ever want to use a system that resembles a Free Software ecology (like GDN), as they would deprive the producer of that stream.
Producers of free software should similarly be suspicious of a system governed by a legal agreement written by someone who considers them to be a deadly enemy.
Therefore, Microsoft's own pseudo-Free intiatives (such as GotDotNet, the Shared Source license, and the Software Choice initiative) are probably (a) Shams that will perpetuate Microsoft's revenue stream at the expense of the rights of members of the community, and/or (b) exceedingly stupid mistakes on Microsoft's part.
In the absence of further evidence (especially since GDN is slashdotted and I can't read the text of the new license), it is impossible to tell to which degree GDN (or any other pseudo-Free effort by Microsoft) will be (a) or (b). In either case, it seems imprudent for users or programmers - whether they produce in open or closed software - to place their trust in these intiatives.
I wonder, as an aside, if Bill himself ever paid anything to the original inventors of BASIC, a pair of researchers at Dartmouth University. So I wonder if Bill's logic reflexively implies that he stole BASIC from Kemeny and Kurtz. Gee. Where will the good ideas come from? Oh, wait academia has been going as a not-for-profit institution for centuries. You may have heard of some of their other 'products' - the theory of universal gravitation, electricty, the rabies vaccine...
Well, I take them back. Or at least, suspend them until this gets resolved.
Not like it really matters that much, but this kind of shennanigans - whatever the justification - would make me very, very nervous.
I really hate it when RMS is right.
Flying today is more like sentencing yourself to prison for a day. You start by getting shaken down for cash (by the SkyCap and/or cabbie), questioned, proving your identity, securing the proper documents, then file past metal detectors and x-ray machines where they declaw you of any possible offensive device (along with your privacy and dignity). THEN, after waiting in an antiseptic, mind-numbing holding tank (departure lounge), you get shown to your cell - a fourteen-inch seat, made out of material that will give off toxic fumes when burned, assuming you don't die of 'economy class syndrome'. Once in a while one of the 'bulls' will decide that you're causing a problem, point a gun at you, detain you at the other end for even more indignity.
And if anything goes wrong, they LITERALLY tell you to try and bend over and kiss your ass goodbye (with that cute little 'crash tuck'). From back in coach, that's about as much control as you have over your destiny in a fatal crash.
And now, they want to ban the most effective passenger distraction device since the triple martini? Whoops, those are banned, too.
Let's not even get started on the bizzare, arcane, nonsensical way airline tickets are priced. It makes tax law look as simple as the Ten Commandments.
A night in the drunk tank is probably safer. It could hardly be LESS comfortable.
Of course, they airlines are the only game in town. If you want better service you have to start your own airline.
So screw it. I've got 38 more training hours until I get my own damn pilot's license, after that I'll do all my own flying.
... at Stevens Institute of Technology, where I got my BsC. So it's not like this is the first school to come up with the idea.
What is kinda neat is that, unlike me, you won't have $50k in student loans when you get out the other end.
One win about not having Windows, even if it doesn't save you money, is that it saves you from legal obligation. If the machine comes with Windows pre-installed you're stuck with the EULA just for turning it on (unless the VERY FIRST TIME that you turn it on, you've got a boot floppy in it and use that to wipe out Windows - and I bet that MS would still argue with that one). To me, the EULA 'costs' more than the cost of Windows, in terms of risk.
And yes, it sucks that this is an industry where the only way you get a break, is to avoid liability, rather than actually saving some money.
Businesses have been making dumb decisions for centuries, under or overvaluing their IT departments isn't a greater or lesser sin.
Let them cut their budgets, that will only force more and more IT departments to use Linux and other free software to implement their mission critical projects.
Innocent prank, or identity theft?
I wonder how well the law draws the line. Doing this with (say) a driver's license should be a crime. But in the current climate, even falsifying your Mickey Mouse Club card number might get you shot.
Companys exist to make money for their shareholders AND FOR NO OTHER REASON. Companies that do NOT behave in the best interests of making money for their shareholders, are liable to get sued by the shareholders.
Even a company that's 51% owned by one person, can get a 'minority shareholder' suit if that one person makes the company do something that benefits him more that the other shareholders.
That's the problem with trusting stuff to a corp, and why you can't ever expect a corporation to ever do anything 'nice' (unless it can get a tax break or better sales out of it). There are good places to work, and bad places to work, but in the end, if you want an organization that's motivated by something other than money, go start a not-for-profit. Duh.
(IANAL) I think that in antitrust law, you can't force people to buy bundled services that come with an 'essential facility' (eg, if you own a railroad, you can't force your customers to also buy coal from you when they ship things, or transactions of that nature).
If an individual musical track is the 'essential facility' of a musical compilation, then it may be unfair to force you to buy other tracks on the CD at the same time.
However, I can't imagine this going over very well in court - how finely do you divide access to music? Will the court really have the patience for that kind of argument? You don't NEED recorded music to be in business (unless you're a professional DJ or running a dance club; radio's got it's own tradition of payola).
Just random ramblings.
Then you are breaking the DMCA and must be an evil terrorist out to ruin our economy with your radical anti-American ways.
And you probably didn't give to the United Way, either.