With only 4 major labels, and all of them coordinating distribution and pricing to various degrees, we're basically at the monopoly point anyway.
No, no, no, no!
I am currently listening to an album from one of my favorite bands, which happens to be a local band signed to a local record label. After seeing them open for another band, I paid $12 (not $11.99, but $12 even) over paypal to the lead singer's gmail account, and I got a nice CD that looked as professional as it could be less than a week later.
However, I could have gotten the songs for free. There was a flash applet on their page which played their entire album. Using audio capturing software, it wouldn't have taken me very long at all to get a pristine digital copy. But I decided to pay these guys for a CD that is, in my opinion, one of the best CD's I've owned. In fact, I emailed the guys and told them how much I liked their album. In a little over a week (they are on tour), I got a response. You just don't see that from major recording artists.
It feels good to know that I am directly supporting a band that I enjoy. If I download the latest [insert random pop figure here] album, I know that I'm not really hurting the band. They're still going to get their massive signing bonus, and I'm not going to notice a difference when it's on my mp3 player.
Find your local bands! They are there, I promise you. Drift away from what the four labels say are popular; they don't control your music life.
That's a pretty ignorant assumption you have about Africa. The African continent isn't one huge block of savage rural territory ruled by roving tribes. That would be like saying that everyone in Texas rides a horse to work; it might have been true two hundred years ago, but don't base your assumptions on what happened then. Lagos, Nigeria, has a population of over 8 million, which places it above New York City. There are countless other examples of cities that have not just running water and electricity, but just as many luxuries as some American cities. I'm not going to list population statistics (you can look it up yourself), but Africa isn't one huge rural area.
And what do you mean "there will be no geek-students?" Are you saying that most children in Africa are stupider than Americans? And don't say it has to do with the amount of technology you grew up with; fiddling with tech devices has to do with how intuitive and creative you are. Are you saying that African children don't have this?
Most people have this horrific view of Africa from what they see on TV commericals like "Save the Children" and whatnot. They try and paint a horrible, savage view of Africa so that people will donate money to their cause. Yes, there are bad things happening in Africa, but that doesn't mean the entire continent is savage.
I hate it when people think that Africa is a mass of uncivilization, and there is no infrastructure except what the west has so graciously given. Yes, Africa is generally poorer than most continents, but that doesn't mean that all Africans are: a) stupid, b) poor, c)needy of the West's help
They are corporations which hold a license to exist granted by US through our representatives. A. License. To. Exist. Not a right. They have no rights....Corporations are not only legal citizens with civil rights -- they are the ONLY CITIZENS WITH ANY RIGHTS.
In the legal system, Corporations have the same status as human beings. This means that you can sue them.
Anyone remember the Oil for Food program? The UN was given control over selling Iraqi oil and only giving Iraq humanitarian goods in return. Instead of doing this, they siphoned out a significant amount of money and oil for personal use. If they would take money that was supposed to go to the Iraqi people (not Saddam) for their own personal gain, what would they do if they controlled all domains and TLD's?
The UN is not the organization to trust the internet to. Yes, I know that ICANN isn't the internet, but if the UN gains control of what ICANN does, what else are we going to give them?
I think your forgetting about the hundreds (thousands?) of billions the US has in debt for various reasons, including the Bush wars.
Uhhh... the so called "Bush wars" (if you include Iraq I and II) cost 61 and about 300 billion respectively. That is a mere fraction of the over seven TRILLION dollar debt that the US has accumulated over the years. I'm not saying that the Iraq wars were right or wrong; it is just false to state that the massive national debt was caused by the Bush administration(s). We were in debt _long_ before they arrived.
You want someone to point a finger at? Try Hitler. World War II cost the US 2 TRILLION alone. Hell, we haven't even paid off the Spanish-American war yet. Sheesh.
And if you think that national debt is the biggest qualifer for a good president, then FDR (who ushered in the idea of entitlement programs like social security, medicare/caid, etc.) is who you should be blaming. But no one ever does, do they?
if i found out someone had DIVX ripped my latest DVD release and subtitled it in japanese, it wouldnt exactly break my heart. in fact, i'd probably be excited, because if we had any sort of widespread downloading success in japan
Theoretical possibility: This actually happens, and your product becomes the hottest thing ever in Japan. Everybody has watched it. You tell this to your boss/owner of the work, and he gets excited too. He picks up the phone and asks you how many additional copies the presses need to run.
What do you tell him? The 20 million viewers that you just gained didn't pay a cent for it? That if you did translate and release the copy, no one would buy it because they already have it? Or do you just mumble that it has been put up for free and start looking for a new job?
Just because the number of spam messages increased after the law was passed, it is faulty logic to assume that the cause of the increase _was_ the law. It's called the Post Hoc fallacy. Just because B happens after A, it doesn't prove that A caused B.
The real reason could be that spam grows with time, just like the population of a species. Sure, the act could have affected it, but it doesn't prove that the growth was 100% attributed to it.
The problem is that the courts always overlook the word CONGRESS. That is the key. Congress can make no law, nothing in the Constitution prevents states or their legislatures from doing it
What you seemed to overlook is the 14th amendment. After slavery was stopped and blacks were given the right to vote, some states enacted very tricky and carefully crafted laws to prohibit blacks from voting. Some just ignored the amendment, and said that blacks could vote in federal elections, but congress had no power over the states.
Thus, the 14th amendment: No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as meaning that the bill of rights and amendments apply to the states as well as the feds.
I'm sorry, but your principal and/or school board owns the presses. He/she/they also "hired" you to run a publication, and are "paying" you in school credits. If the Commander in Chief or the Secretary of Defense doesn't want something printed in the US Army Field manuals, they have complete control over that. Just because they are the government doesn't mean that everything they regulate is censorship.
Now, if you were to spend _your own_ money on a paper, printed it yourself, didn't do it during school-time, didn't distribute it in a way that interrupted class, wasn't obscene, then it would be cool.
Learning to deal and negotiate with authority is one of the steps of maturity. Just like a job, you have to follow the rules that your company sets up. In the "real world," if you work for a newspaper, you've gotta do what the owner of the paper says. He/she is paying you, and whatever you do on company time can be regulated, and whatever you create on company time could not belong to you any more.
There was a situation in my town where the staff was split over the issue of publishing the Abu Gharab prison photos. The owner and editor made the final decision, even though they were in the minority.
Fundamentalist religious forces are demanding the weaking of science and math education in schools because these subjects don't coincide with their mythology. No wonder U.S. students are so weak in these subjects!
Could you please name one thing besides evolution v. creationism that the religious right has wrecked in the basis of science and math? I don't see Jerry Fallwell jumping up saying that cosine functions are the devil, or that kinematic equations violate the 10th commandment. There is so much more to science than just evolution.
You do have a point, but you're killing your own case by saying just as many generalizations and mis-facts as the other side is.
Wasn't there an idiotic TCO sheet running around the internet a while back?
Sorry to break it to you, but _all_ TCO sheets are idiotic. It seems that all sides can hire an "independant agency" to perform a TCO analysis, which just happen to find exactly what they are looking for. If I were setting up an enterprise system, I wouldn't trust a TCO sheet as far as I could throw it.
TCO sheets are used in this manner: 1. IT Dept announces major overhaul of all systems 2. Sysadmin loves $RANDOMOS 3.Sysadmin sifts through the sands of Google to find a TCO sheet that supports $RANDOMOS 4.Sysadmin sends the sheet to the corporate powers that be 5.CEO/CFO/Board of Directors sees the great savings that could happen, and authorizes a switch to $RANDOMOS
It's a sad day whenever someone has to worry about what their competitor is going to do when they open up a new business.
I'm not talking about the "Will I be able to compete?" worries, or the "What if they run negative ads against me?" worries. This guy is honestly afraid that one of his competitors could squash him in court, take down his service, or break his legs JUST for providing a competing service.
It doesn't matter that they really don't have the power to stop you from competing before you begin (hooray for the bit of capitalism still in America), but just think about it for a minute. This guy, who sounds like a smart, tech-oriented person, thinks that the cable companies have a legal monopoly, and can shut him down just for providing a service that is an alternative to their own.
The cable companies have already won. I hate to sound like a anti-business zealot, but if people start thinking that corporations are more powerful than they actually are, then they will eventually get those powers legally.
Uh, that would be true if the trend kept going along. All he states is that in the next hundred years, our chances are 1 in 455, not "every hundred years we have a 1 in 455 chance of dying."
You can make that kind of statistical analysis when the events are independant (not influenced by the outcome of the previous trial), but they are not. Obviously, our odds of dying from 2105-2205 are going to be different than our odds from 2005-2105.
For a truly free state the Ben Franklin was right on, but many (most?) people these days don't _want_ a truly free state: consider the millions of people who consider a prohibition of random searches and seizures to be a quaint idea that is little more than an idealistic suggestion.
I could see you making this kind of argument if we were having a round-table discussion on what the ideal form of government was, but your statement is utterly wrong when applied to the U.S. The founding fathers sat down and decided on a certain form of government that _was_ a truly free state. Everyone else said, "Yeah guys, that's cool," and it became The Supreme Law Of The Land.
Thus, you have to follow it. George Bush has to follow it. Officer Barbrady down the street has to follow it. By turning 18 and not renouncing their citizenship, those "millions of people" you cited who don't totally agree with the 4th amendment pretty much said that they were okay with it, and have to follow it.
War should be waged because it is morally necessary. Not for profit.
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't buy the moral obligation argument. Look at pretty much every war ever fought in all of history. They were all about economics, be it spheres of influence, natural resources, etc.
You might be able to make the moral obligation argument tie into economics (we have a MO to increase the wealth of our nation), but otherwise, it's pretty much bunk. We didn't have a moral obligation to defend/invade [Mexico, Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq], we did it for strategic reasons.
Yes, I see your point that it _should_ be based on morals only, but what kind of morals are we talking about? During the cold war, both US and USSR spent one helluva lot of money because they both wanted to save the world from the evils of either Communism or Democracy. If we accept your viewpoint, there is nothing to judge it by.
One of the largest problems I have had with coworkers/friends/family when they switch to OO.o is the document format. Sure, it works great on their own computer, and even takes up less space. However, I was phoned at one o'clock in the morning from a Kinko's because someone had to print up a report and the computers there didn't have OO.o.
The problem (IMO) with OO.o is that it saves the documents in its own format by default. Sure, you can select to save it to any number of formats, but most people just type it a name and check "OK." This leads to many, many problems when it comes time to interact with other computers.
Some might say that having the.sxw format be the default will help OO.o get into the mainstream. However, this is faulty logic. The person I talked about above ended switching back to MS Office because she just wanted things to work all the time. Even though she had no previous problems with OO.o, and I explained to her that you _could_ save in.doc format, she switched anyway. Her words: "I just can't stand being stranded."
I think that the open source community should really take those words to heart. If OS wants to grow, developers are going to have to step away from their niche market of people who really care about software being free and all that jazz. People just want things to work.
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With only 4 major labels, and all of them coordinating distribution and pricing to various degrees, we're basically at the monopoly point anyway.
No, no, no, no!
I am currently listening to an album from one of my favorite bands, which happens to be a local band signed to a local record label. After seeing them open for another band, I paid $12 (not $11.99, but $12 even) over paypal to the lead singer's gmail account, and I got a nice CD that looked as professional as it could be less than a week later.
However, I could have gotten the songs for free. There was a flash applet on their page which played their entire album. Using audio capturing software, it wouldn't have taken me very long at all to get a pristine digital copy. But I decided to pay these guys for a CD that is, in my opinion, one of the best CD's I've owned. In fact, I emailed the guys and told them how much I liked their album. In a little over a week (they are on tour), I got a response. You just don't see that from major recording artists.
It feels good to know that I am directly supporting a band that I enjoy. If I download the latest [insert random pop figure here] album, I know that I'm not really hurting the band. They're still going to get their massive signing bonus, and I'm not going to notice a difference when it's on my mp3 player.
Find your local bands! They are there, I promise you. Drift away from what the four labels say are popular; they don't control your music life.
That's a pretty ignorant assumption you have about Africa. The African continent isn't one huge block of savage rural territory ruled by roving tribes. That would be like saying that everyone in Texas rides a horse to work; it might have been true two hundred years ago, but don't base your assumptions on what happened then. Lagos, Nigeria, has a population of over 8 million, which places it above New York City. There are countless other examples of cities that have not just running water and electricity, but just as many luxuries as some American cities. I'm not going to list population statistics (you can look it up yourself), but Africa isn't one huge rural area.
And what do you mean "there will be no geek-students?" Are you saying that most children in Africa are stupider than Americans? And don't say it has to do with the amount of technology you grew up with; fiddling with tech devices has to do with how intuitive and creative you are. Are you saying that African children don't have this?
Most people have this horrific view of Africa from what they see on TV commericals like "Save the Children" and whatnot. They try and paint a horrible, savage view of Africa so that people will donate money to their cause. Yes, there are bad things happening in Africa, but that doesn't mean the entire continent is savage.
I hate it when people think that Africa is a mass of uncivilization, and there is no infrastructure except what the west has so graciously given. Yes, Africa is generally poorer than most continents, but that doesn't mean that all Africans are: a) stupid, b) poor, c)needy of the West's help
They are corporations which hold a license to exist granted by US through our representatives. A. License. To. Exist. Not a right. They have no rights....Corporations are not only legal citizens with civil rights -- they are the ONLY CITIZENS WITH ANY RIGHTS.
In the legal system, Corporations have the same status as human beings. This means that you can sue them.
Anyone remember the Oil for Food program? The UN was given control over selling Iraqi oil and only giving Iraq humanitarian goods in return. Instead of doing this, they siphoned out a significant amount of money and oil for personal use. If they would take money that was supposed to go to the Iraqi people (not Saddam) for their own personal gain, what would they do if they controlled all domains and TLD's?
The UN is not the organization to trust the internet to. Yes, I know that ICANN isn't the internet, but if the UN gains control of what ICANN does, what else are we going to give them?
I think your forgetting about the hundreds (thousands?) of billions the US has in debt for various reasons, including the Bush wars.
Uhhh... the so called "Bush wars" (if you include Iraq I and II) cost 61 and about 300 billion respectively. That is a mere fraction of the over seven TRILLION dollar debt that the US has accumulated over the years. I'm not saying that the Iraq wars were right or wrong; it is just false to state that the massive national debt was caused by the Bush administration(s). We were in debt _long_ before they arrived.
You want someone to point a finger at? Try Hitler. World War II cost the US 2 TRILLION alone. Hell, we haven't even paid off the Spanish-American war yet. Sheesh.
And if you think that national debt is the biggest qualifer for a good president, then FDR (who ushered in the idea of entitlement programs like social security, medicare/caid, etc.) is who you should be blaming. But no one ever does, do they?
if i found out someone had DIVX ripped my latest DVD release and subtitled it in japanese, it wouldnt exactly break my heart. in fact, i'd probably be excited, because if we had any sort of widespread downloading success in japan
Theoretical possibility: This actually happens, and your product becomes the hottest thing ever in Japan. Everybody has watched it. You tell this to your boss/owner of the work, and he gets excited too. He picks up the phone and asks you how many additional copies the presses need to run.
What do you tell him? The 20 million viewers that you just gained didn't pay a cent for it? That if you did translate and release the copy, no one would buy it because they already have it? Or do you just mumble that it has been put up for free and start looking for a new job?
Just because the number of spam messages increased after the law was passed, it is faulty logic to assume that the cause of the increase _was_ the law. It's called the Post Hoc fallacy. Just because B happens after A, it doesn't prove that A caused B.
The real reason could be that spam grows with time, just like the population of a species. Sure, the act could have affected it, but it doesn't prove that the growth was 100% attributed to it.
The problem is that the courts always overlook the word CONGRESS. That is the key. Congress can make no law, nothing in the Constitution prevents states or their legislatures from doing it
What you seemed to overlook is the 14th amendment. After slavery was stopped and blacks were given the right to vote, some states enacted very tricky and carefully crafted laws to prohibit blacks from voting. Some just ignored the amendment, and said that blacks could vote in federal elections, but congress had no power over the states.
Thus, the 14th amendment: No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as meaning that the bill of rights and amendments apply to the states as well as the feds.
I'm sorry, but your principal and/or school board owns the presses. He/she/they also "hired" you to run a publication, and are "paying" you in school credits. If the Commander in Chief or the Secretary of Defense doesn't want something printed in the US Army Field manuals, they have complete control over that. Just because they are the government doesn't mean that everything they regulate is censorship.
Now, if you were to spend _your own_ money on a paper, printed it yourself, didn't do it during school-time, didn't distribute it in a way that interrupted class, wasn't obscene, then it would be cool. Learning to deal and negotiate with authority is one of the steps of maturity. Just like a job, you have to follow the rules that your company sets up. In the "real world," if you work for a newspaper, you've gotta do what the owner of the paper says. He/she is paying you, and whatever you do on company time can be regulated, and whatever you create on company time could not belong to you any more.
There was a situation in my town where the staff was split over the issue of publishing the Abu Gharab prison photos. The owner and editor made the final decision, even though they were in the minority.
Fundamentalist religious forces are demanding the weaking of science and math education in schools because these subjects don't coincide with their mythology. No wonder U.S. students are so weak in these subjects!
Could you please name one thing besides evolution v. creationism that the religious right has wrecked in the basis of science and math? I don't see Jerry Fallwell jumping up saying that cosine functions are the devil, or that kinematic equations violate the 10th commandment. There is so much more to science than just evolution.
You do have a point, but you're killing your own case by saying just as many generalizations and mis-facts as the other side is.
"I don't really care how people label me," Tweiten says. "If they are so narrow-minded and can only see that one aspect of me, I kind of pity them."
And this guy is complaining about other people being narrow-minded?
In my opinion his opinion is fact.
In my opinion, his opinion is crap.
But you know, just my opinion.
Wasn't there an idiotic TCO sheet running around the internet a while back?
Sorry to break it to you, but _all_ TCO sheets are idiotic. It seems that all sides can hire an "independant agency" to perform a TCO analysis, which just happen to find exactly what they are looking for. If I were setting up an enterprise system, I wouldn't trust a TCO sheet as far as I could throw it.
TCO sheets are used in this manner:
1. IT Dept announces major overhaul of all systems
2. Sysadmin loves $RANDOMOS
3.Sysadmin sifts through the sands of Google to find a TCO sheet that supports $RANDOMOS
4.Sysadmin sends the sheet to the corporate powers that be
5.CEO/CFO/Board of Directors sees the great savings that could happen, and authorizes a switch to $RANDOMOS
I swear, those people with the free iPod links will be FIRST up against the wall when the revolution comes.
It's a sad day whenever someone has to worry about what their competitor is going to do when they open up a new business.
I'm not talking about the "Will I be able to compete?" worries, or the "What if they run negative ads against me?" worries. This guy is honestly afraid that one of his competitors could squash him in court, take down his service, or break his legs JUST for providing a competing service.
It doesn't matter that they really don't have the power to stop you from competing before you begin (hooray for the bit of capitalism still in America), but just think about it for a minute. This guy, who sounds like a smart, tech-oriented person, thinks that the cable companies have a legal monopoly, and can shut him down just for providing a service that is an alternative to their own.
The cable companies have already won. I hate to sound like a anti-business zealot, but if people start thinking that corporations are more powerful than they actually are, then they will eventually get those powers legally.
What ever happened to: "You screwed the plaintiffs over. Make full restitution now or go to jail."
Lawyers that are able to charge $1500 an hour.
Woah, someone stop these people! You can't make an alternative to open source software, it's against everything that we stand for!
Uh, that would be true if the trend kept going along. All he states is that in the next hundred years, our chances are 1 in 455, not "every hundred years we have a 1 in 455 chance of dying."
You can make that kind of statistical analysis when the events are independant (not influenced by the outcome of the previous trial), but they are not. Obviously, our odds of dying from 2105-2205 are going to be different than our odds from 2005-2105.
For a truly free state the Ben Franklin was right on, but many (most?) people these days don't _want_ a truly free state: consider the millions of people who consider a prohibition of random searches and seizures to be a quaint idea that is little more than an idealistic suggestion.
I could see you making this kind of argument if we were having a round-table discussion on what the ideal form of government was, but your statement is utterly wrong when applied to the U.S. The founding fathers sat down and decided on a certain form of government that _was_ a truly free state. Everyone else said, "Yeah guys, that's cool," and it became The Supreme Law Of The Land.
Thus, you have to follow it. George Bush has to follow it. Officer Barbrady down the street has to follow it. By turning 18 and not renouncing their citizenship, those "millions of people" you cited who don't totally agree with the 4th amendment pretty much said that they were okay with it, and have to follow it.
War should be waged because it is morally necessary. Not for profit.
Maybe it's just me, but I really don't buy the moral obligation argument. Look at pretty much every war ever fought in all of history. They were all about economics, be it spheres of influence, natural resources, etc.
You might be able to make the moral obligation argument tie into economics (we have a MO to increase the wealth of our nation), but otherwise, it's pretty much bunk. We didn't have a moral obligation to defend/invade [Mexico, Germany, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq], we did it for strategic reasons.
Yes, I see your point that it _should_ be based on morals only, but what kind of morals are we talking about? During the cold war, both US and USSR spent one helluva lot of money because they both wanted to save the world from the evils of either Communism or Democracy. If we accept your viewpoint, there is nothing to judge it by.
One of the largest problems I have had with coworkers/friends/family when they switch to OO.o is the document format. Sure, it works great on their own computer, and even takes up less space. However, I was phoned at one o'clock in the morning from a Kinko's because someone had to print up a report and the computers there didn't have OO.o.
.sxw format be the default will help OO.o get into the mainstream. However, this is faulty logic. The person I talked about above ended switching back to MS Office because she just wanted things to work all the time. Even though she had no previous problems with OO.o, and I explained to her that you _could_ save in .doc format, she switched anyway. Her words: "I just can't stand being stranded."
The problem (IMO) with OO.o is that it saves the documents in its own format by default. Sure, you can select to save it to any number of formats, but most people just type it a name and check "OK." This leads to many, many problems when it comes time to interact with other computers.
Some might say that having the
I think that the open source community should really take those words to heart. If OS wants to grow, developers are going to have to step away from their niche market of people who really care about software being free and all that jazz. People just want things to work.