Yeah, and that label would be "a group of individual wheat plants."
Lol. Backed you into a corner and you obviously know it by the way you are grasping at straws, or maybe that's stalks?
For sake of argument, let's say that:
UPS standardizes on a Windows platform;
Amazon standardizes on Linux
and then you attempt to order some stuff using a Mac system;
Verizon services both of their data centers, and your DSL line, and uses Solaris;
Eliminate any one of those operating systems & shut down the company running that OS for a few days. How do you propose to order something, and expect timely delivery? Answer: You don't.
The problem with your example is not the interdependence, it is that you've defined it as a bunch of monocultures, and hugely ironic at that... You presume that the only shipping service is UPS, that the only webstore is Amazon and that Verizon is the only ISP.
Let's take a little bit more of realistic look at the real world where polycultures abound:
Shippers: UPS has standardized on Windows, DHL runs MacOS, Fedex runs Linux, and the USPS runs Solaris. Webstores: Amazon runs Linux, Buy.com runs Windows, Sears.com runs MacOS, Ebay runs HPUX and Walmart runs Xenix. ISPs: Verizon runs Solaris, Earthlink runs FreeBSD, Comcast runs Windows, SBC runs Linux.
Eliminate one of these operating systems and you've only crippled a fraction of each industry. How do you propose to order something and expect timely delivery? Answer: You place your order with a company that is not dependent on the OS that is MIA, and use a shipper that is not dependent on the OS that is MIA via an ISP that is not dependent on the OS that is MIA on a computer that is not running the OS that is MIA. If you personally don't have access to such a computer or such an ISP, well TS. But the guy next door, who is also part of your society DOES and he can still order stuff.
Because of the diversity in all markets, society to continues to function with only minor difficulty despite the loss of one operating system. Thank you for paying.
My analogy of 1 computer == 1 wheat plant in a field is exactly correct.
If 1 organization within a society != 1 wheat plant in a field, then what does it equal? If you insist it is not a monoculture model, then what it is it? Software engineer with biotechnologist training, you must have a label and a criteria to match that distinguishes the two.
My point remains unaddressed, at least by you. In an interdependent network,
Your point is meaningless within the context of my original post. Your presumption of interdependence between hetereogenous systems is certainly true in some cases, but is not an issue when individual organizations standardize on different systems. You want to set up strawmen, go ahead, but all that can do is prove or disprove some other point beside the one under discussion.
I have watched Muslims dancing in the street in celebration of 9/11. I have seen Muslims celebrating in front of burning embassy.
Woah boy, you saw some people dancing on tv and were told they were muslims. Presuming the tv didn't lie to you - that never happens - under what pretense do you believe that the actions of a tiny few, barely 0.0001% of the population of muslims is somehow representative of the whole?
I have watched on the news, one sect of Muslims blowing up one the holiest mosques of another sect.
You saw this on the news? A reporter actually got the scoop to record the people blowing up the mosque? And they did it because they were muslims? Or did they do it because they think they are at war and conducting crude psyops? You sure they weren't CIA? I mean you did see them on the news right?
I have seen reports of Islam growing in many countries, especially third world countries. And, with this rise in Muslims, there has been a rise in violence, murder and terrorist bombings.
I've seen reports of the average ground temperature rising in many countries, especially 3rd world countries. And with this rise in temperature, there has been a rise in violence, murder and terrorist bombings.
In the Koran/Quran, it states that Mohammed married Aisha when she was six years old and then consumated the marriage when she was nine years old. That means the the Prophet Mohammed had sex with a nine year old girl. Having sex with a nine year old child is the act of a pedophile.
It does not say that at all. Cite one passage of the Quran that even mentions Aisha. You can't do it because it isn't there.
So, my question is "When did the truth become hate speach?"
It is amazing how people believe what they want to believe. Your "truths" are just half-assed, illogical justifications for your own personal world view. You have no interest in the truth, you just want a nice simple enemy to blame.
If your writings are representative of what Google has stopped carrying, then they are right to do so because - unlike here on slashdot - Google news does not have a facility to rebutt stupid speech.
Incidentally, Kephart and White have used biological epidemiological math to model the spread of malware, as have Williamson and Leveille. Actual researchers are finding the pathogen analogy fruitful.
Dude! Look out the window! It is so untrue that nobody even needs to prove it. Facts like that always lack essential truthiness!
In a field of wheat, wheat stalk #1 does not depend, in any appreciable way, on stalks #2, 3, 4, 5,... , n -- each plant is a self-contained entity... if one stalk of wheat dies over here, the other stalks continue growing, completely oblivious to the death of the first.
You are presuming that each "stalk" is a computer within an organization. The analogy works just fine where each "stalk" is a seperate grouping of computers - be it an entire corporatation, a division within the corp or just the server room versus the office area.
The point is that a true monoculture in computing can make an entire society, perhaps even the entire world, vulnerable. But if there is diversity, even at the macro level, the society/economy is not 100% vulnerable. It may suffer huge damages, but 30% inoperable is a hell of a lot better than 100% inoperable.
For example - a bacteria comes along that decimates the tiger population in "the jungle." There are plenty of other predators like leopards, panthers that are close enough in form and function to fill the ecological niche of the tigers in the jungle without severely upsetting the ecosystem. Sure it will be out of whack for a while, but it will restablize. But, if tigers were the only predators at all, the entire ecosystem of that jungle would eventually collapse once they died off.
Hmm. A targetted attack pretty much undermines the "eco-pocolypse" argument.
You keep making these ridiculous assertations.
How is this "targetted attack" any different from say a weaponized malaria?
If you are unfamiliar with the relationship between malaria, racial genetics and sickle cell anemia, you should look it up before responding. Unless of course you just decide to say something like, "Try looking out the window. There's no point in dissecting something that's just a literary mechanism." Then you don't need to know anything about what you are talking about.
Just because your analogy "sounds right" doesn't make make it a valid thesis. The fact is that computers are not biological organisms and "viruses" don't work the same way. And if you take the analogy for anything more than a mild curiosity, it really exposes your underlying idiocy.
Just because you say that biological organisms and "viruses" don't work the same way, doesn't make it a valid thesis. If you can't explain how, for the purposes of the discussion, the two differ, then you are really just exposing your inate idiocy.
Not to mention it completely ignores the economic factors which created the "monoculture". It's cheaper for society to buy anti-virus than to support multiple OSes, and the analogists just have to deal with that. Computers are tools. Period.
I'm not sure what being "tools" has to do with the rest of your statement, but your assertion that it is cheaper for society to buy anti-virus (software?) than to support multiple OSes is hanging out there just dangling in the wind. You got anything besides your ass to back up that claim?
And how exactly does yet another word virus suddnely prove this theory? It's not like there haven't been many since the paper was published.
Wait, wait, wait. Now you say there is lots of proof for this theory, the one you've been claiming is false up until now? If there are so "many" cases since the paper was published, doesn't that mean that this "anti-virus" really doesn't work so well?
These were literally the first two websites I checked. I am sure I could find plenty more like them if I wanted to. Both companies appear to do their work in the USA, and not mexico or the far east, so should be even more expensive than what's available to any large publisher. http://www.mediatechnics.com/phpquote/dvdreplicati on.php http://www.groovehouse.com/
Your turn to put up or shut up. Let's see an actual source for your numbers besides your ass.
Also, I happen to have some experience designing CD/DVD artwork & layouts, and I do in fact own a copy of the Chris Cunningham DVD myself. The design, quality, and artwork of the inserts, booklets, along with the DVD contents all happen to be superb.
I'm confident I own more than an order of magnitude more DVDs than you do. Palm has always struck with me the low quality of their physical presentation. While the "Work of Director..." series is a step up in quality for them, it still ain't very slick. I have indeed seen worse, and in my collection, of which there are 30-40 music video/concert DVDs, those are consistently bottom of the barrel. Rarely even in the league of Amaray.
The point being that even the moderate quality of the "Work of Director..." series is atypical of the field. Which just goes to show that the publishers see them as unimportant sidelines to their real money-maker - selling music.
for someone who thinks he has such an astute understanding of how the music business works, you sure seem to be pretty oblivious to the economics of merchandising.
Not as oblivious as you just proved yourself to be:
A DVD, including packaging, usually costs about $4 to $9 per unit to manufacture in bulk.
You are off by an order of magnitude. I just priced out 10,000 DVDs, with Amaray cases, 4/0 wrap with 4-color printing and shrink wrap. That's 88 cents per disc at the first place I checked and $1.03 at the 2nd. Don't even bother scrambling to add in authoring costs, I own the Gondry/Jonze/Cunningham DVDs from Palm and my 5 year-old could have done a better job of authoring.
So having 10,000 DVDs manufactured easily costs more than the original production costs of the video
Let's just pretend you were actually right about the costs. The answer would still be the same - as long as they can sell them for more than the production costs, it is gravy. Got it? G-R-A-V-Y. Even if they did cost $9 to manufacture and distribute, they still sell for at least $11 each.
Now, why would a record label have all these DVDs manufactured and stocked in retail stores if there weren't a demand for them?
You continually conflate miniscule demand with large demand. It isn't binary. It isn't all or nothing. But, for the 3rd time, it is TINY compared to the demand for the music itself. Talk about someone who "conveniently ignores facts that contradict him" - 3 freaking times and it still hasn't sunk in.
But I guess since I disagree with the OP I must be off-topic--what a tactful way to weasel out of the argument
Hey, you were on-topic with your first post. Wrong, but at least on-topic. Once proved wrong, you scrambled for a red herring and have been desperately milking it ever since. It's going to take you days to get that fish smell off your hands.
However, I choose to back up my position with reasoned arguments and by pointing out the gaping holes in your reasoning. But apparently you still don't get it.
Far from it. For example, in my first post I said that citing the relatively miniscule number of video sales in comparison to actual music sales would be meaningless. Yet just a post ago you start off trying to do just that, completely oblivious to the already established point that since the video production costs are all ready paid for it is all just gravy.
In other words, your position was anticipated, debunked and passed by in my very first post, yet you continued down that irrelevant path anyway. That's why my prior post was not ad hominem, it was an accurately humorous depiction of your argument.
I could just as well post:
You could - but you would be just as off-topic as you have been ever since your 2nd post. Go back and read the OP. "Art" is not a factor, not even a mitigating factor, in his point -- NOR IN YOUR INITIAL RESPONSE.
He's put his music knowledge cards on the table, while you've shown everyone how bitter you are today:(
Big deal. He could be Liberace reincarnate for all the bearing it would have on the discussion. Neither the word "art" nor any of its synonyms appear in the OP, nor in lysergic.acid's response to the OP. It's only when his patently silly claim that music videos are not advertisements is shown up that he goes off on a interminable tangent about "art," completely ignoring the actual topic at hand - namely that the release of the video under these specific terms is just another promotional tool in the music biz's portfolio of tools.
As at least one other poster has spelled out, if this release was about the "art" of music, then they would have followed in NIN's footsteps by releasing the components that went into the final product along with a license that gives people the liberty to use the stuff for new artistic creations.
Except music videos aren't advertisements; how does adding a cinematic dimension to the musical content reduce it to advertising?
People don't buy videos. They buy albums and singles. And don't get all pedantic on me about how some people do buy videos, its a teeny-tiny minority of sales, and would not be financially viable if the videos were not already made for some other reason, like say, advertising.
just because you can't make money off of the video or create derivative works from it doesn't mean it's not free anymore.
The simplest thing with the most utility that someone might do is rip the audio out of the video and make it into an mp3. But that would be a derivative work and is thus prohibited.
So yeah, this is a rather useless bit of fluff advertising, nothing more.
I am going to back you up on the marketing hoopla bit.
If you look at the edit history for the article on wikipedia, there is one group of edits made very early on that were 'anonymous' and thus listed the IP address they came from - 66.181.95.90.
Reverse DNS on that IP address reveals that it is y2m-gw0.cust.e-xpedient.com
Google on "y2m" and the first hit is: www.y2m.com
Right on the first page of their website it says:
Y2M is a strategic marketing services company that focuses exclusively on the college and recent graduate market.
Anybody want to update the wikipedia entry to tell the truth about this fucking astroturf bullshit? Send some script kiddies y2m's way too while you are at it.
and what law is that? what law, specifically, has been broken?
Title III of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- also known as the Pen Register Act.
The Pen Register Act requires that law enforcement obtain a court order from a judge before using a pen register or trap and trace device for surveillance.
The terms "pen register or trap and trace device" refer to a device which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a a wire or electronic communication is transmitted.
Regardless of whether they hand their records over to the NSA, every phone company keeps a record of all calls made.
However:
1) It is not cross-referenced with a relationship graph already in place. 2) It only needs to exist until the bill is paid. They probably do keep it longer than that, but they only actually need to do so in very limited circumstances.
At the very least, we can file this under "better and under no circumstances worse."
I disagree. If such an ineffective 'protection' is enough to make such surveillence politically palatable that it is allowed to continue, then it is indeed worse than the original program.
Slashdot Mirror
Lol. Backed you into a corner and you obviously know it by the way you are grasping at straws, or maybe that's stalks?
For sake of argument, let's say that:
Eliminate any one of those operating systems & shut down the company running that OS for a few days. How do you propose to order something, and expect timely delivery? Answer: You don't.
The problem with your example is not the interdependence, it is that you've defined it as a bunch of monocultures, and hugely ironic at that... You presume that the only shipping service is UPS, that the only webstore is Amazon and that Verizon is the only ISP.
Let's take a little bit more of realistic look at the real world where polycultures abound:
Shippers: UPS has standardized on Windows, DHL runs MacOS, Fedex runs Linux, and the USPS runs Solaris.
Webstores: Amazon runs Linux, Buy.com runs Windows, Sears.com runs MacOS, Ebay runs HPUX and Walmart runs Xenix.
ISPs: Verizon runs Solaris, Earthlink runs FreeBSD, Comcast runs Windows, SBC runs Linux.
Eliminate one of these operating systems and you've only crippled a fraction of each industry. How do you propose to order something and expect timely delivery? Answer: You place your order with a company that is not dependent on the OS that is MIA, and use a shipper that is not dependent on the OS that is MIA via an ISP that is not dependent on the OS that is MIA on a computer that is not running the OS that is MIA. If you personally don't have access to such a computer or such an ISP, well TS. But the guy next door, who is also part of your society DOES and he can still order stuff.
Because of the diversity in all markets, society to continues to function with only minor difficulty despite the loss of one operating system. Thank you for paying.
My analogy of 1 computer == 1 wheat plant in a field is exactly correct.
If 1 organization within a society != 1 wheat plant in a field, then what does it equal? If you insist it is not a monoculture model, then what it is it? Software engineer with biotechnologist training, you must have a label and a criteria to match that distinguishes the two.
My point remains unaddressed, at least by you. In an interdependent network,
Your point is meaningless within the context of my original post. Your presumption of interdependence between hetereogenous systems is certainly true in some cases, but is not an issue when individual organizations standardize on different systems. You want to set up strawmen, go ahead, but all that can do is prove or disprove some other point beside the one under discussion.
I have watched Muslims dancing in the street in celebration of 9/11. I have seen Muslims celebrating in front of burning embassy.
Woah boy, you saw some people dancing on tv and were told they were muslims. Presuming the tv didn't lie to you - that never happens - under what pretense do you believe that the actions of a tiny few, barely 0.0001% of the population of muslims is somehow representative of the whole?
I have watched on the news, one sect of Muslims blowing up one the holiest mosques of another sect.
You saw this on the news? A reporter actually got the scoop to record the people blowing up the mosque? And they did it because they were muslims? Or did they do it because they think they are at war and conducting crude psyops? You sure they weren't CIA? I mean you did see them on the news right?
I have seen reports of Islam growing in many countries, especially third world countries. And, with this rise in Muslims, there has been a rise in violence, murder and terrorist bombings.
I've seen reports of the average ground temperature rising in many countries, especially 3rd world countries. And with this rise in temperature, there has been a rise in violence, murder and terrorist bombings.
In the Koran/Quran, it states that Mohammed married Aisha when she was six years old and then consumated the marriage when she was nine years old. That means the the Prophet Mohammed had sex with a nine year old girl. Having sex with a nine year old child is the act of a pedophile.
It does not say that at all. Cite one passage of the Quran that even mentions Aisha. You can't do it because it isn't there.
So, my question is "When did the truth become hate speach?"
It is amazing how people believe what they want to believe. Your "truths" are just half-assed, illogical justifications for your own personal world view. You have no interest in the truth, you just want a nice simple enemy to blame.
If your writings are representative of what Google has stopped carrying, then they are right to do so because - unlike here on slashdot - Google news does not have a facility to rebutt stupid speech.
Ah, so we're redefining the term "monoculture" to mean something else now?
No, you redefined it first. Your redefinition is far more narrow than the working definition.
Damn! It seems no one has a sense of humor.
BBC News is reporting on some amazing effects of a drug called Zolpidem on patients suffering from persistent vegetative state.
Unfortunately, Zolpidem is made of 100% pure, 1st generation, fetal stem cells.
Leaving the Schiavo advocates with a huge dilemma!
Incidentally, Kephart and White have used biological epidemiological math to model the spread of malware, as have Williamson and Leveille. Actual researchers are finding the pathogen analogy fruitful.
Dude! Look out the window! It is so untrue that nobody even needs to prove it.
Facts like that always lack essential truthiness!
In a field of wheat, wheat stalk #1 does not depend, in any appreciable way, on stalks #2, 3, 4, 5, ... , n -- each plant is a self-contained entity... if one stalk of wheat dies over here, the other stalks continue growing, completely oblivious to the death of the first.
You are presuming that each "stalk" is a computer within an organization. The analogy works just fine where each "stalk" is a seperate grouping of computers - be it an entire corporatation, a division within the corp or just the server room versus the office area.
The point is that a true monoculture in computing can make an entire society, perhaps even the entire world, vulnerable. But if there is diversity, even at the macro level, the society/economy is not 100% vulnerable. It may suffer huge damages, but 30% inoperable is a hell of a lot better than 100% inoperable.
For example - a bacteria comes along that decimates the tiger population in "the jungle." There are plenty of other predators like leopards, panthers that are close enough in form and function to fill the ecological niche of the tigers in the jungle without severely upsetting the ecosystem. Sure it will be out of whack for a while, but it will restablize. But, if tigers were the only predators at all, the entire ecosystem of that jungle would eventually collapse once they died off.
Hmm. A targetted attack pretty much undermines the "eco-pocolypse" argument.
You keep making these ridiculous assertations.
How is this "targetted attack" any different from say a weaponized malaria?
If you are unfamiliar with the relationship between malaria, racial genetics and sickle cell anemia, you should look it up before responding. Unless of course you just decide to say something like, "Try looking out the window. There's no point in dissecting something that's just a literary mechanism." Then you don't need to know anything about what you are talking about.
NEWSFLASH: Sony and the RIAA are not law enforcement agencies.
Correct, they are lawsuit engagement agencies.
Just because your analogy "sounds right" doesn't make make it a valid thesis. The fact is that computers are not biological organisms and "viruses" don't work the same way. And if you take the analogy for anything more than a mild curiosity, it really exposes your underlying idiocy.
Just because you say that biological organisms and "viruses" don't work the same way, doesn't make it a valid thesis. If you can't explain how, for the purposes of the discussion, the two differ, then you are really just exposing your inate idiocy.
Not to mention it completely ignores the economic factors which created the "monoculture". It's cheaper for society to buy anti-virus than to support multiple OSes, and the analogists just have to deal with that. Computers are tools. Period.
I'm not sure what being "tools" has to do with the rest of your statement, but your assertion that it is cheaper for society to buy anti-virus (software?) than to support multiple OSes is hanging out there just dangling in the wind. You got anything besides your ass to back up that claim?
And how exactly does yet another word virus suddnely prove this theory? It's not like there haven't been many since the paper was published.
Wait, wait, wait. Now you say there is lots of proof for this theory, the one you've been claiming is false up until now? If there are so "many" cases since the paper was published, doesn't that mean that this "anti-virus" really doesn't work so well?
I call bullshit.
i on.php
These were literally the first two websites I checked. I am sure I could find plenty more like them if I wanted to. Both companies appear to do their work in the USA, and not mexico or the far east, so should be even more expensive than what's available to any large publisher.
http://www.mediatechnics.com/phpquote/dvdreplicat
http://www.groovehouse.com/
Your turn to put up or shut up. Let's see an actual source for your numbers besides your ass.
Also, I happen to have some experience designing CD/DVD artwork & layouts, and I do in fact own a copy of the Chris Cunningham DVD myself. The design, quality, and artwork of the inserts, booklets, along with the DVD contents all happen to be superb.
I'm confident I own more than an order of magnitude more DVDs than you do. Palm has always struck with me the low quality of their physical presentation. While the "Work of Director..." series is a step up in quality for them, it still ain't very slick. I have indeed seen worse, and in my collection, of which there are 30-40 music video/concert DVDs, those are consistently bottom of the barrel. Rarely even in the league of Amaray.
The point being that even the moderate quality of the "Work of Director..." series is atypical of the field. Which just goes to show that the publishers see them as unimportant sidelines to their real money-maker - selling music.
for someone who thinks he has such an astute understanding of how the music business works, you sure seem to be pretty oblivious to the economics of merchandising.
Not as oblivious as you just proved yourself to be:
A DVD, including packaging, usually costs about $4 to $9 per unit to manufacture in bulk.
You are off by an order of magnitude. I just priced out 10,000 DVDs, with Amaray cases, 4/0 wrap with 4-color printing and shrink wrap. That's 88 cents per disc at the first place I checked and $1.03 at the 2nd. Don't even bother scrambling to add in authoring costs, I own the Gondry/Jonze/Cunningham DVDs from Palm and my 5 year-old could have done a better job of authoring.
So having 10,000 DVDs manufactured easily costs more than the original production costs of the video
Let's just pretend you were actually right about the costs. The answer would still be the same - as long as they can sell them for more than the production costs, it is gravy. Got it? G-R-A-V-Y. Even if they did cost $9 to manufacture and distribute, they still sell for at least $11 each.
Now, why would a record label have all these DVDs manufactured and stocked in retail stores if there weren't a demand for them?
You continually conflate miniscule demand with large demand. It isn't binary. It isn't all or nothing. But, for the 3rd time, it is TINY compared to the demand for the music itself. Talk about someone who "conveniently ignores facts that contradict him" - 3 freaking times and it still hasn't sunk in.
But I guess since I disagree with the OP I must be off-topic--what a tactful way to weasel out of the argument
Hey, you were on-topic with your first post. Wrong, but at least on-topic. Once proved wrong, you scrambled for a red herring and have been desperately milking it ever since. It's going to take you days to get that fish smell off your hands.
However, I choose to back up my position with reasoned arguments and by pointing out the gaping holes in your reasoning. But apparently you still don't get it.
Far from it. For example, in my first post I said that citing the relatively miniscule number of video sales in comparison to actual music sales would be meaningless. Yet just a post ago you start off trying to do just that, completely oblivious to the already established point that since the video production costs are all ready paid for it is all just gravy.
In other words, your position was anticipated, debunked and passed by in my very first post, yet you continued down that irrelevant path anyway. That's why my prior post was not ad hominem, it was an accurately humorous depiction of your argument.
I could just as well post:
You could - but you would be just as off-topic as you have been ever since your 2nd post. Go back and read the OP. "Art" is not a factor, not even a mitigating factor, in his point -- NOR IN YOUR INITIAL RESPONSE.
There's nothing about the format that precludes it from having intrinsic artistic and entertainment value.
Dooood. Art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art, art.
We got it after your first post using the word.
Here's the summary of all responses -- Irrelevant to business.
So what?
Do a traceroute to y2m.com - you'll see that they use internap, so deductions based on netblock are meaningless.
I didn't bother to list all the supporting evidence. But just for you, here's one more point:
13 as1.300bn.bstnma.e-xpedient.com (66.230.77.178) 134.456 ms 136.681 ms 1 36.451 ms
14 y2m-gw0.cust.e-xpedient.com (66.181.95.90) 153.163 ms * *
----
Note the "bstnma" as in Boston, Massachusettes.
Go to the www.y2m.com, read up that they are in Boston.
you both remind me of the self-absorbed comic book store owner on the Simpsons.
Lollerskates! Funny that. You remind me of the stereotypical macintosh user. I never knew that Pearl Jam had a reality distortion field.
He's put his music knowledge cards on the table, while you've shown everyone how bitter you are today :(
Big deal. He could be Liberace reincarnate for all the bearing it would have on the discussion. Neither the word "art" nor any of its synonyms appear in the OP, nor in lysergic.acid's response to the OP. It's only when his patently silly claim that music videos are not advertisements is shown up that he goes off on a interminable tangent about "art," completely ignoring the actual topic at hand - namely that the release of the video under these specific terms is just another promotional tool in the music biz's portfolio of tools.
As at least one other poster has spelled out, if this release was about the "art" of music, then they would have followed in NIN's footsteps by releasing the components that went into the final product along with a license that gives people the liberty to use the stuff for new artistic creations.
You don't seem to understand a lot of things about music or art.
It's called the music business for a reason, and you've done a remarkably thorough job of proving that you don't know a thing about business.
Except music videos aren't advertisements; how does adding a cinematic dimension to the musical content reduce it to advertising?
People don't buy videos. They buy albums and singles. And don't get all pedantic on me about how some people do buy videos, its a teeny-tiny minority of sales, and would not be financially viable if the videos were not already made for some other reason, like say, advertising.
just because you can't make money off of the video or create derivative works from it doesn't mean it's not free anymore.
The simplest thing with the most utility that someone might do is rip the audio out of the video and make it into an mp3. But that would be a derivative work and is thus prohibited.
So yeah, this is a rather useless bit of fluff advertising, nothing more.
I am going to back you up on the marketing hoopla bit.
If you look at the edit history for the article on wikipedia, there is one group of edits made very early on that were 'anonymous' and thus listed the IP address they came from - 66.181.95.90.
Reverse DNS on that IP address reveals that it is y2m-gw0.cust.e-xpedient.com
Google on "y2m" and the first hit is: www.y2m.com
Right on the first page of their website it says:
Y2M is a strategic marketing services company that focuses exclusively on the college and recent graduate market.
Anybody want to update the wikipedia entry to tell the truth about this fucking astroturf bullshit?
Send some script kiddies y2m's way too while you are at it.
and what law is that? what law, specifically, has been broken?
Title III of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- also known as the Pen Register Act.
The Pen Register Act requires that law enforcement obtain a court order from a judge before using a pen register or trap and trace device for surveillance.
The terms "pen register or trap and trace device" refer to a device which records or decodes dialing, routing, addressing or signaling information transmitted by an instrument or facility from which a a wire or electronic communication is transmitted.
As much as we hate the NSA and other invasive orginizations they impose structure and laws. Chaos is the alternative.
I don't know where you got the idea that NSA's activities have done anything to "impose structure and law" on the Internet.
If anything, the NSA has been actively participating in the chaos by going ahead and doing their own thing with no regard to the law.
Regardless of whether they hand their records over to the NSA, every phone company keeps a record of all calls made.
However:
1) It is not cross-referenced with a relationship graph already in place.
2) It only needs to exist until the bill is paid. They probably do keep it longer than that, but they only actually need to do so in very limited circumstances.
At the very least, we can file this under "better and under no circumstances worse."
I disagree. If such an ineffective 'protection' is enough to make such surveillence politically palatable that it is allowed to continue, then it is indeed worse than the original program.