No no, you can't! No one is allowed to create free content in the market! If they do, it's not even worth looking at! Price always equals level of quality! Market!
No exceptions! If you like something that's free more than something that's not, you're an infringment of nature! Criminal!
Corporations won't exist without the government methinks. The corporation (at least the ones we're familiar with, Delaware corporations and the like) are not market entities and wouldn't exist in a libertarian society. Limited liability from torts won't happen without the government backing it with violence.
Not to mention that the profitability of corporations would be(from the point of view of the executives at least) gutted by workers' unions if people were actually free to peacefully associate.
I think a conservative conversion to greater liberty as opposed to some revolution would be good though.
At this point I think even just talking about increasing liberty does good. Getting a message out, at a point like this, does a lot I think. I mean, there's a lot of liberty.
They should just call it "Mozilla." Or some variation on that, like "Mozilla Browser" or whatever. I know they still have the Mozilla Suite, but that can be called the Suite, and not many people use it; I doubt it would be confusing. And is it not being phased out?
"Mozilla" sounds nice and people still know the name, and, for a large part, associate it solely with Firefox. It would be a good choice.
The term "unlawful combatant" is not used once in any of the Geneva Conventions.
No one may be summararily executed because it is infringement of their rights as a human. To be executed you must be found guilty of a crime that warrants execution in a fair trial.
To the extent to which the story tells truth about China, it is good.
The propaganda is not just the article though: it's the entire incident. Not to say it was planned as such, just that it acts as such. MSN banning those words was part of this incident, which is for, loosely, Americans, not the "Chinese." To the "Chinese," it never happened. The incident, the propaganda, is "us versus them" identity politics for Americans, which is dangerous for everyone. This vague and mysterious "China"(which us, the intended audience of this article, know nothing about) is "undemocratic" and "unfree," whereas America is free, is democratic. That's all it's trying to leave the reader with. And that's my answer to the grandparent's question. MSN would write about this because it casts "China" as them and not us, which seems to be their agenda.
Sometimes when I post my opinion I do ramble on, explaining further. Then I get called pretentious, word-drunk, whatever ("yeah, sure, you're smart, but shut the fuck the up; no one cares!"). And sometimes I just speak more straightforwardly. Then people take my words to imply something I don't mean to imply ("how can you defend that idea?"). I can never seem to please everyone: always one of two pains for me whenever I open my mouth. This seems to be no exception.
I of course don't mean to say they're equivalent: if I meant that I would just say it. I meant only to answer the question: why does MSN report on this issue?
Just like you see the press taking a position that the PRC can't be all that bad, which I would agree with(no contradiction here), I see the press taking a position of making "China"(as distinct from the more technical definition of the "PRC") out to be a sort of enemy. The press does whitewash and skip over the atrocities of oppressive governments like the PRC. The press also makes "China"(a vague political entity useful for the identity politics the press plays) out to be an enemy of "democracy" or "freedom". These are just essentially names for us (the West, America, etc.). We are democracy, we are freedom, or, at least, freedom in contingent on us or needs us. As opposed to us needing it, which is true. It needing us is completely false and just used as an emotional/religious rallying point to further some agenda for someone.
So, I disagree with you that it's good that the press make "China" seem worse than other countries. It's just identity politics to make the people who read this emotionally associate "China" with, well, corruption and to see "the West" or "America" as somehow better: when really the ruling parties in the West are just as rotten, even if this rotteness doesn't materialize for the intended audience of the propaganda.
Does that make it any clearer? (I'm a tad fumbly with words after all the wine tonight, and I guess it's late too.) I wouldn't mind explaining more either...
It's just part of the ongoing propaganda to make the Chinese government look corrupt in a way above and beyond Western governments in the eyes of people reading about this. With a proper, though perhaps dehabilitatingly sad perspective, you can see that corruption is everywhere: not just with those people whom most of us really know nothing about.
Then on that definition, how does the invocation of it in your original post make any sense, unless you were trolling?
You mention using the government to fix social problems, and using "saving the kids!" as the pretext for this veiled power grab that using the government for that would be. So...this is what makes them socialist? How does that make them socialist at all?
Okay, look at it from someone like mine's point of view. I'm a socialist, I can say that. I'm also certainly minarchist in the sense that I wouldn't want government any more than neccessary and libertarian in that I think all associations should be voluntary. So you make this comment "fucking socialists" and guys and gals like me think, "What? Must be a troll." Because we certainly don't approve of these large government power grabs, yet you have made a comment that on review leaves the impression that socialists say that government should take actions like these.
So, maybe the guys pushing the agenda at hand are socialists: that certainly isn't clear just from what we know from this story. And their actions here aren't definitively socialist, so why disparage them as "socialists" when you could use a more apt term? You're perhaps technically not wrong, but that is exactly what makes you seem like a troll: implication and assosciation to create insults masked by a possible naivete or imprecision being a troll trademark.
Who's going to make them though? The cost of entering the market with a new company to produce chips is just plain incredible. The Trusted Computing Group already consists of Intel, AMD, Sun, IBM, NVIDIA, ATI, Sony, Transmeta, HP and everyone else. So who will make these chips? The Trusted Computing cartel will make it extremely hard for them to do so. And, to boot, the total perentage of the population who even cares about DRM is probably similar to the total percentage of the population that goes to Slashdot, which isn't very much.
Don't get your hopes up. DRM is coming to every consumer "general purpose"(with DRM installed, Trusted Computing has broken the general purpose aspect) computing device in the future. You're going to be stuck using today's, and the very near future's, technology for a long time if you don't want DRM. And why not have the ISPs out there not let computers connect to the internet if they're not "Trusted?" Even your old machines will probably be marginalized to a permamnently offline life.
You might as well live up the internet and the computing platforms we have now. Soon these platforms and these protocols will be permamnently broken to make way for Trusted Computing.
Most M-Audio cards work with Linux ALSA and JACK. If you just want some decent audio output you can buy the Audiophile 24/96 for less than $100 at the store. It has SPDIF out as well.
The Mia card by Echo works as well.
RME has soundcards that work well with Linux too. They will get you some higher quality at a price.
Well it's actually a War on Terror. In the future we'll declare War on Horror, maybe a War on War in there somewhere, and eventually War on Evil itself.
Well then why doesn't Bush take Islam Karimov out of Uzbekistan? He tortures his people. He's killed thousands. It's not far from Iraq, the American military could manage it. The truth is that Karimov is friendly to US business interests. Lets them setup oil and gas pipelines.
If Bush wanted to make a good faith effort, he wouldn't have awarded any contracts to American corporations in Iraq. But the whole point of the invasion is to setup Iraq to be friendly to Western business interests, it would be ridiculous to ask him to do such a thing.
War has always been about money and power. Iraq wasn't invaded for humanitarian reasons.
For WWII. No they shouldn't have done it. They should have rounded up all the bankers who financed the Third Reich, and Britian and the US as well. But that's exactly why they didn't just cut the money off: because the same financial groups who backed the Reichsbank for Hitler funded the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England; you can't rightly bite the hand that feeds you, or more accurately, is you. Still no one has done anything about the banks that funded Hitler's war machine. Those financiers never paid a dime in retribution. In reality they should have been hung with the rest of the Nazi leaders. You know the stereotype of all the Swiss bankers who told holocaust victims to fuck off: that's exactly what happened, except it wasn't just Swiss bankers. Germany, Swiss, Dutch, French, American, English. Capital knows no borders. Hitler wasn't buying bombs with just a will and some fiery rhetoric, he needed the investment of the transnational financiers. And America didn't go over to Europe without their Federal Reserve writing the cheques, and that central bank was funded by those the same transnationals.
"And since I'm AC, I'll go ahead and say that I think Chomsky is a fucking choad for his non-linguistics "work", which consists of getting insanely rich by writing books critical of every political view but his version of anarcho-syndicalism. -- but feel free do mod me independently of this viewpoint."
Wait, so you're saying that its bad in itself that he favors one politcal theory over others? I mean, don't lots of people do this? And just for clarity, I think it'd be best to describe his political philosophy as a form of libertarian-socialism. Anarcho-syndicalism would be a form of voluntary organization that he says works well in a truly libertarian political state.
I don't know how rich he gets off of his books, and I wonder how you found this information.
Crusader wasn't cancelled as far as I know. They decreased the order from the original projection of 1100 to 480. The contract was still worth 11 billion dollars. They took a "big hit," of cash.
Or maybe what you're saying is that if he makes an order for 435 trillion dollars worth of arms and then decrease it to a few billion, then all of a sudden that's taking a gargantuan chunk out of that arms manufacturer? I guess you could look at it that way. And maybe you have some other information.
Carlyle is not a secret group that exists in the shadows, and neither is the the military nor the Bush family. There's no secret groups, and there's no dispute to even theorize about, so no conspiracy theory. Carlyle profited from the Iraq war; Bush's father was employed by Carlyle. He was employed by and held stakes in Carlyle through the war until over 4 months after the military claimed "Mission accomplished" in Iraq. So through the entire war? I'm not sure, is the war over? Or have we always been at war with Asia?
Bush Sr. had and probably still has non-ownership equity stakes in Carlyle group. He was also a senior advisor for the group until October 2003 after a number of groups(Judicial Watch, NYT) decried the connection. After Bush Sr. resigned from the position, the Carlyle Group started to widely proclaim that Bush did as much and that he "holds no other positions at Carlyle." They have not said anything about the current state of Bush's investments in the company. Even if he cashed out his stakes on October 2003 when he left the company, he was still employed as advisor and until way past when G.W. declared the "end of major combat operations" in May 2003.
Carlyle group benefitted from the war in Iraq because they invested in and control arms manufacturers. For example, United Defence Industries, a major contractor for the Pentagon. They supply the Bradley troop carrier vehicle which is used in Iraq for just one example. Carlyle is the main shareholder in United Defence.
I would say that awarding money to his father probably benefits him financially. He will most likely inherit a large amount of money from his father at some point.
There'll always be a few sluts who'll just get around a lot.
Or scratch that. They're in international waters, what's stopping the company from buying sex slaves. They can buy them from that other transnational US outsourcing company, DynCorp.
Sounds like the corporations at hand just got smart and outsourced their legal work to the Department of Justice. Now taxpayers pay the millions in lawyers' fees instead.
Punishing copyright infringers works just fine with civil suits. The content industry just found another way to take money from your pocket and put it in their's.
Your sig reminds me of a conversation two people I knew/know had.
One was just a regular guy. One was a girl that knew taekwondo and I guess was pretty good at it. He would bug her that even though she knew a deadly art of self defense he could still beat her, just because she was a girl. This would tick her off and eventually it escalated one day into seriously discussing setting up a "no holds barred" fight between the two.
At one point of the discussion he was like, "Wait wait wait wait wait. If she gives me a compound fracture, am I allowed to stab her with my exposed bone?"
It only made it funnier that he was serious.
They never got to fighting because eventually she became convinced of his psychosis when he started agressively arguing that even biting and the gouging of eyes were not be barred:
"Well, it just so happens that I think my stomach for, and skill in, gouging eyes are my greatest abilities. If I'm barred from such an act then I can't imagine how this fight would not be a handicap fight in your favour. It's tying my hands behind my back."
I'm pretty much just going to refer to your third paragraph, and just about music because I know absolutely nothing about films apart from the fact that I like steadicam.
I disagree that filtering through indie music requires hefty time dedication. I mean if you're not a music expert and you want some good music to listen to, then ask an expert. Hasn't this been the same thing everywhere? It's my understanding that they have it for Hollywood movies too: the various critics. There's experts in indie circles who you can listen to as well. It's even easier nowadays with the internet, as you can get much info just on the net. I mean, even mainstream reviewers of various sorts review indie stuff, and even those unhip characters can tell a really good album apart from trash when they hear it, and even the deaf ones can pick out the transcendental pieces that come out every so often.
Indie in general may focus on fairly specific genres, but I'm highly suspect that that has anything to do with necessity, unless you're using a different definition of genre than the rest of us, and I wouldn't say they are too specific. And that this range of genres that take part in the indie model of things is enough to give strong evidence that indie isn't limited to them. Indie has its most sizeable groups in the rock, pop and punk genres which I guess is what it's "known" for, but there's plenty going in the electronic genres, however one may split them apart exactly, and also folk, metal, and avant-garde. What genres of note does the mainstream have apart from those? Rap, hip-hop, country, and what else, jazz? Maybe world music? Is jazz dead yet? I'm not really sure.
Anyway, my point is, I'm pretty sure the indie system can create all the genres of music that people enjoy nowadays. I agree that it can never create the exact aesthetic values that the mainstream does with their huge budgets for creating the slickest of slick production and all the big hype through advertising and what not. Perhaps the super-stars will die if the mainstream dies and only indie is left. But the light of super-stars has been fading since Elvis so I don't really see that as a deviation from the norm. And the super slick production is close to being in the hands of everyone else with all the increasingly advancing technologies.
So music will exist nicely I think even if the mainstream does die off. Not to mention classical musics, which seem to have had the highest ratio of quality music throughout history ("seems" because you can't exactly compare to folk music which never got recorded, and isn't given any justice when merely written down). But even comparing modern classical to other modern genres, classical still seems to have the highest quality, though esoteric. And classical seems to get by fine without the mainstream system of distribution and compensation.
It could be a completely different story for movies or video games and others, I don't really know about them.
I think I'll end by saying that in a free market, I feel, profits, in large, should always be heading towards zero, though never reaching that of course. Most of the guys who are involved in the markets are interested in the exact opposite: maximizing profits. And if you look at it, profits for those guys, the big rich I guess, have never been higher, even the content/entertainment industries. There needs to more people who try bring those profits down to zero, where they should be heading, though never reaching. So I would, roughly, side with the "Slashdotters" that you mention in the first part of your post, since they seem to be on the losing side.
Slashdot Mirror
No no, you can't! No one is allowed to create free content in the market! If they do, it's not even worth looking at! Price always equals level of quality! Market!
No exceptions! If you like something that's free more than something that's not, you're an infringment of nature! Criminal!
corporate fascism without its mediagenic face
Corporations won't exist without the government methinks. The corporation (at least the ones we're familiar with, Delaware corporations and the like) are not market entities and wouldn't exist in a libertarian society. Limited liability from torts won't happen without the government backing it with violence.
Not to mention that the profitability of corporations would be(from the point of view of the executives at least) gutted by workers' unions if people were actually free to peacefully associate.
I think a conservative conversion to greater liberty as opposed to some revolution would be good though.
At this point I think even just talking about increasing liberty does good. Getting a message out, at a point like this, does a lot I think. I mean, there's a lot of liberty.
They should just call it "Mozilla." Or some variation on that, like "Mozilla Browser" or whatever. I know they still have the Mozilla Suite, but that can be called the Suite, and not many people use it; I doubt it would be confusing. And is it not being phased out?
"Mozilla" sounds nice and people still know the name, and, for a large part, associate it solely with Firefox. It would be a good choice.
The term "unlawful combatant" is not used once in any of the Geneva Conventions.
No one may be summararily executed because it is infringement of their rights as a human. To be executed you must be found guilty of a crime that warrants execution in a fair trial.
"Just remember that Mr. Blue dies and Mr. Pink gets away with the diamonds. Do we really want MS to be Mr. Pink?"
Listen very carefully near the end; Pink gets caught by the cops.
To the extent to which the story tells truth about China, it is good.
The propaganda is not just the article though: it's the entire incident. Not to say it was planned as such, just that it acts as such. MSN banning those words was part of this incident, which is for, loosely, Americans, not the "Chinese." To the "Chinese," it never happened. The incident, the propaganda, is "us versus them" identity politics for Americans, which is dangerous for everyone. This vague and mysterious "China"(which us, the intended audience of this article, know nothing about) is "undemocratic" and "unfree," whereas America is free, is democratic. That's all it's trying to leave the reader with. And that's my answer to the grandparent's question. MSN would write about this because it casts "China" as them and not us, which seems to be their agenda.
Okay, I'll ramble more.
Sometimes when I post my opinion I do ramble on, explaining further. Then I get called pretentious, word-drunk, whatever ("yeah, sure, you're smart, but shut the fuck the up; no one cares!"). And sometimes I just speak more straightforwardly. Then people take my words to imply something I don't mean to imply ("how can you defend that idea?"). I can never seem to please everyone: always one of two pains for me whenever I open my mouth. This seems to be no exception.
I of course don't mean to say they're equivalent: if I meant that I would just say it. I meant only to answer the question: why does MSN report on this issue?
Just like you see the press taking a position that the PRC can't be all that bad, which I would agree with(no contradiction here), I see the press taking a position of making "China"(as distinct from the more technical definition of the "PRC") out to be a sort of enemy. The press does whitewash and skip over the atrocities of oppressive governments like the PRC. The press also makes "China"(a vague political entity useful for the identity politics the press plays) out to be an enemy of "democracy" or "freedom". These are just essentially names for us (the West, America, etc.). We are democracy, we are freedom, or, at least, freedom in contingent on us or needs us. As opposed to us needing it, which is true. It needing us is completely false and just used as an emotional/religious rallying point to further some agenda for someone.
So, I disagree with you that it's good that the press make "China" seem worse than other countries. It's just identity politics to make the people who read this emotionally associate "China" with, well, corruption and to see "the West" or "America" as somehow better: when really the ruling parties in the West are just as rotten, even if this rotteness doesn't materialize for the intended audience of the propaganda.
Does that make it any clearer? (I'm a tad fumbly with words after all the wine tonight, and I guess it's late too.) I wouldn't mind explaining more either...
It's just part of the ongoing propaganda to make the Chinese government look corrupt in a way above and beyond Western governments in the eyes of people reading about this. With a proper, though perhaps dehabilitatingly sad perspective, you can see that corruption is everywhere: not just with those people whom most of us really know nothing about.
Then on that definition, how does the invocation of it in your original post make any sense, unless you were trolling?
You mention using the government to fix social problems, and using "saving the kids!" as the pretext for this veiled power grab that using the government for that would be. So...this is what makes them socialist? How does that make them socialist at all?
Okay, look at it from someone like mine's point of view. I'm a socialist, I can say that. I'm also certainly minarchist in the sense that I wouldn't want government any more than neccessary and libertarian in that I think all associations should be voluntary. So you make this comment "fucking socialists" and guys and gals like me think, "What? Must be a troll." Because we certainly don't approve of these large government power grabs, yet you have made a comment that on review leaves the impression that socialists say that government should take actions like these.
So, maybe the guys pushing the agenda at hand are socialists: that certainly isn't clear just from what we know from this story. And their actions here aren't definitively socialist, so why disparage them as "socialists" when you could use a more apt term? You're perhaps technically not wrong, but that is exactly what makes you seem like a troll: implication and assosciation to create insults masked by a possible naivete or imprecision being a troll trademark.
Who's going to make them though? The cost of entering the market with a new company to produce chips is just plain incredible. The Trusted Computing Group already consists of Intel, AMD, Sun, IBM, NVIDIA, ATI, Sony, Transmeta, HP and everyone else. So who will make these chips? The Trusted Computing cartel will make it extremely hard for them to do so. And, to boot, the total perentage of the population who even cares about DRM is probably similar to the total percentage of the population that goes to Slashdot, which isn't very much.
Don't get your hopes up. DRM is coming to every consumer "general purpose"(with DRM installed, Trusted Computing has broken the general purpose aspect) computing device in the future. You're going to be stuck using today's, and the very near future's, technology for a long time if you don't want DRM. And why not have the ISPs out there not let computers connect to the internet if they're not "Trusted?" Even your old machines will probably be marginalized to a permamnently offline life.
You might as well live up the internet and the computing platforms we have now. Soon these platforms and these protocols will be permamnently broken to make way for Trusted Computing.
This man speaks the truth.
Most M-Audio cards work with Linux ALSA and JACK. If you just want some decent audio output you can buy the Audiophile 24/96 for less than $100 at the store. It has SPDIF out as well.
The Mia card by Echo works as well.
RME has soundcards that work well with Linux too. They will get you some higher quality at a price.
"If you'd learn some synonyms..."
Or, instead of learning, he could call it those by copying and pasting straight from reference.com like you did?
No no no, we have to kill all the freeloaders, they're just bringing us down. No one deserves to live unless they're slaves to society.
Well it's actually a War on Terror. In the future we'll declare War on Horror, maybe a War on War in there somewhere, and eventually War on Evil itself.
...with Firefox 1.0.3 on Windows 2000, and it didn't execute anything. Anyone else try it on Windows?
Well then why doesn't Bush take Islam Karimov out of Uzbekistan? He tortures his people. He's killed thousands. It's not far from Iraq, the American military could manage it. The truth is that Karimov is friendly to US business interests. Lets them setup oil and gas pipelines.
If Bush wanted to make a good faith effort, he wouldn't have awarded any contracts to American corporations in Iraq. But the whole point of the invasion is to setup Iraq to be friendly to Western business interests, it would be ridiculous to ask him to do such a thing.
War has always been about money and power. Iraq wasn't invaded for humanitarian reasons.
For WWII. No they shouldn't have done it. They should have rounded up all the bankers who financed the Third Reich, and Britian and the US as well. But that's exactly why they didn't just cut the money off: because the same financial groups who backed the Reichsbank for Hitler funded the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England; you can't rightly bite the hand that feeds you, or more accurately, is you. Still no one has done anything about the banks that funded Hitler's war machine. Those financiers never paid a dime in retribution. In reality they should have been hung with the rest of the Nazi leaders. You know the stereotype of all the Swiss bankers who told holocaust victims to fuck off: that's exactly what happened, except it wasn't just Swiss bankers. Germany, Swiss, Dutch, French, American, English. Capital knows no borders. Hitler wasn't buying bombs with just a will and some fiery rhetoric, he needed the investment of the transnational financiers. And America didn't go over to Europe without their Federal Reserve writing the cheques, and that central bank was funded by those the same transnationals.
"And since I'm AC, I'll go ahead and say that I think Chomsky is a fucking choad for his non-linguistics "work", which consists of getting insanely rich by writing books critical of every political view but his version of anarcho-syndicalism. -- but feel free do mod me independently of this viewpoint."
Wait, so you're saying that its bad in itself that he favors one politcal theory over others? I mean, don't lots of people do this? And just for clarity, I think it'd be best to describe his political philosophy as a form of libertarian-socialism. Anarcho-syndicalism would be a form of voluntary organization that he says works well in a truly libertarian political state.
I don't know how rich he gets off of his books, and I wonder how you found this information.
Everyday is like a new type of hell.
Crusader wasn't cancelled as far as I know. They decreased the order from the original projection of 1100 to 480. The contract was still worth 11 billion dollars. They took a "big hit," of cash.
Or maybe what you're saying is that if he makes an order for 435 trillion dollars worth of arms and then decrease it to a few billion, then all of a sudden that's taking a gargantuan chunk out of that arms manufacturer? I guess you could look at it that way. And maybe you have some other information.
Carlyle is not a secret group that exists in the shadows, and neither is the the military nor the Bush family. There's no secret groups, and there's no dispute to even theorize about, so no conspiracy theory. Carlyle profited from the Iraq war; Bush's father was employed by Carlyle. He was employed by and held stakes in Carlyle through the war until over 4 months after the military claimed "Mission accomplished" in Iraq. So through the entire war? I'm not sure, is the war over? Or have we always been at war with Asia?
Bush Sr. had and probably still has non-ownership equity stakes in Carlyle group. He was also a senior advisor for the group until October 2003 after a number of groups(Judicial Watch, NYT) decried the connection. After Bush Sr. resigned from the position, the Carlyle Group started to widely proclaim that Bush did as much and that he "holds no other positions at Carlyle." They have not said anything about the current state of Bush's investments in the company. Even if he cashed out his stakes on October 2003 when he left the company, he was still employed as advisor and until way past when G.W. declared the "end of major combat operations" in May 2003.
Carlyle group benefitted from the war in Iraq because they invested in and control arms manufacturers. For example, United Defence Industries, a major contractor for the Pentagon. They supply the Bradley troop carrier vehicle which is used in Iraq for just one example. Carlyle is the main shareholder in United Defence.
I would say that awarding money to his father probably benefits him financially. He will most likely inherit a large amount of money from his father at some point.
There'll always be a few sluts who'll just get around a lot.
Or scratch that. They're in international waters, what's stopping the company from buying sex slaves. They can buy them from that other transnational US outsourcing company, DynCorp.
Sounds like the corporations at hand just got smart and outsourced their legal work to the Department of Justice. Now taxpayers pay the millions in lawyers' fees instead.
Punishing copyright infringers works just fine with civil suits. The content industry just found another way to take money from your pocket and put it in their's.
Same thing here.
Your sig reminds me of a conversation two people I knew/know had.
One was just a regular guy. One was a girl that knew taekwondo and I guess was pretty good at it. He would bug her that even though she knew a deadly art of self defense he could still beat her, just because she was a girl. This would tick her off and eventually it escalated one day into seriously discussing setting up a "no holds barred" fight between the two.
At one point of the discussion he was like, "Wait wait wait wait wait. If she gives me a compound fracture, am I allowed to stab her with my exposed bone?"
It only made it funnier that he was serious.
They never got to fighting because eventually she became convinced of his psychosis when he started agressively arguing that even biting and the gouging of eyes were not be barred:
"Well, it just so happens that I think my stomach for, and skill in, gouging eyes are my greatest abilities. If I'm barred from such an act then I can't imagine how this fight would not be a handicap fight in your favour. It's tying my hands behind my back."
I'm pretty much just going to refer to your third paragraph, and just about music because I know absolutely nothing about films apart from the fact that I like steadicam.
I disagree that filtering through indie music requires hefty time dedication. I mean if you're not a music expert and you want some good music to listen to, then ask an expert. Hasn't this been the same thing everywhere? It's my understanding that they have it for Hollywood movies too: the various critics. There's experts in indie circles who you can listen to as well. It's even easier nowadays with the internet, as you can get much info just on the net. I mean, even mainstream reviewers of various sorts review indie stuff, and even those unhip characters can tell a really good album apart from trash when they hear it, and even the deaf ones can pick out the transcendental pieces that come out every so often.
Indie in general may focus on fairly specific genres, but I'm highly suspect that that has anything to do with necessity, unless you're using a different definition of genre than the rest of us, and I wouldn't say they are too specific. And that this range of genres that take part in the indie model of things is enough to give strong evidence that indie isn't limited to them. Indie has its most sizeable groups in the rock, pop and punk genres which I guess is what it's "known" for, but there's plenty going in the electronic genres, however one may split them apart exactly, and also folk, metal, and avant-garde. What genres of note does the mainstream have apart from those? Rap, hip-hop, country, and what else, jazz? Maybe world music? Is jazz dead yet? I'm not really sure.
Anyway, my point is, I'm pretty sure the indie system can create all the genres of music that people enjoy nowadays. I agree that it can never create the exact aesthetic values that the mainstream does with their huge budgets for creating the slickest of slick production and all the big hype through advertising and what not. Perhaps the super-stars will die if the mainstream dies and only indie is left. But the light of super-stars has been fading since Elvis so I don't really see that as a deviation from the norm. And the super slick production is close to being in the hands of everyone else with all the increasingly advancing technologies.
So music will exist nicely I think even if the mainstream does die off. Not to mention classical musics, which seem to have had the highest ratio of quality music throughout history ("seems" because you can't exactly compare to folk music which never got recorded, and isn't given any justice when merely written down). But even comparing modern classical to other modern genres, classical still seems to have the highest quality, though esoteric. And classical seems to get by fine without the mainstream system of distribution and compensation.
It could be a completely different story for movies or video games and others, I don't really know about them.
I think I'll end by saying that in a free market, I feel, profits, in large, should always be heading towards zero, though never reaching that of course. Most of the guys who are involved in the markets are interested in the exact opposite: maximizing profits. And if you look at it, profits for those guys, the big rich I guess, have never been higher, even the content/entertainment industries. There needs to more people who try bring those profits down to zero, where they should be heading, though never reaching. So I would, roughly, side with the "Slashdotters" that you mention in the first part of your post, since they seem to be on the losing side.