This comment represents a popular theme among conservatives at the moment - "EVERYONE's biased, so let's wear our bias on our sleeves!"
The thing is, it's not true. Mainstream, "liberal" media sources like the New York Times and NPR still strive for objectivity. The parent's example is typical: why didn't they say "illegal" immigrants? OMG bias!...OR, could it be that some of the people marching ARE legal immigrants? Or that they're concerned about the rights of legal immigrants, like these potential "guest workers," as much as they're concerned about the rights of illegal immigrants?
Yeah, you can read this type of thing as a sign of subtle bias, if you're so inclined. But none of the linked articles are anywhere NEAR that subtle. Putting this kind of claptrap in the same category as real news and saying they're just opposite ends of a spectrum is intellectually dishonest.
Google is right to kick them out of their "news" feed, just like they'd be right to eschew the equivalent left-wing nonsense ("Zionist Amerikkka Enriches Jew Bankers!") But of course, they already DO filter out the left-wing wackos, while the right-wing wackos get their own contingent of defenders who have suddenly discovered the rhetorical utility of "open-mindedness."
The "monoculture bomb" analogy only goes so far before failing. When we're talking about corn or something like that, obviously a specific engineered disease could cause widespread devastation. But in the computer world, viruses can do far more insidious things than just shut down a network, and a polyculture might actually make that easier.
Let's say you've got a hacker who wants access to a file on your network that a bunch of users have access to. In this case, the hacker isn't trying to infect ALL the computers; any one of them will do. In this case, a polyculture actually HURTS security, becuase the hacker only has to find one flaw in any of the many different applications people are running. Can't hack his way into Word? That's okay, some nerd in the office is running StarOffice and he can find a backdoor for that. Or whatever.
Not to mention, in a monoculture it's easier to standardize training and security. The security guys in an all-Windows place only need to keep up with the (legion) Windows vulnerabilities out there. In a polyculture environment, they have to know about Windows vulnerabilities PLUS Linux, Mac, and all sorts of other vulnerabilities, because one compromised computer can mean a whole lot of lost information.
A lot of people taking Sony's side on this one - including Next Gen - seem to me to be missing the point. "The price will eventually go down," they say, "and this allows Sony to profit off the early-adopting suckers in the meantime!" Everyone predicts that in a year or so PS3 will be competitively priced and widely available, and Sony hegemony shall be restored.
But... isn't this kind of a competition for third-party developers? A year from now, if Xbox has 10 million installed users and Sony a fraction of that because not many people are willing to pay $600 for a console, won't developers migrate to Xbox? Won't GAMERS migrate to Xbox, because that's what their friends play? And if everyone's on Xbox, who the heck is going to spur this widespread late adoption of PS3?
Well, you have to bear in mind that Slashdot has a tendency to filter for that kind of sensationalism.
I'm sure there are plenty of minor breakthroughs in all sorts of fields that get reported responsibly, or not at all. But nobody pays attention to those stories enough to submit them to Slashdot. And if they DO, no doubt Zonk or whoever passes over them as small beans compared to the big stories Slashdot has to tell, like "Linux text editor you've never heard of may fork, says analyst!" The only stuff that makes the grade is the stuff with nice, attention-grabbing headlines.
SO all we see on Slashdot is the sensational stuff, which leads to lots of complaints like yours.
There is nothing "sacred cow" about Columbine. It's a touchy issue because real, specific people were killed in the incident, which makes it more serious.
GTA is different because all the characters are fictional. You're playing a mob movie. In a Columbine game, you're playing a real-life tragedy.
What about the WW2 and Vietnam games? Frankly, I think they're almost as bad, and I don't play them. But I imagine those wars are far enough back that most players are able to abstract them. I'm not playing a *real* WW2 grunt, I'm playing Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan and every other war-movie stereotype.
And yes, I reserve my right to hate someone because of an idea they express. If we can't judge people based on what they say and do, what CAN we judge them on?
Decided I'd browse over to Dell and see how big the "Apple premium" is sitting right now.
Dell Inspiron E1405: 14.1" screen (1280x800) Core Duo 1.83 1 GB RAM (can't get 512) 80 GB HD Total cost: $1540
MacBook: 13.3" screen (1280x800) Core Duo 1.83 512 MB RAM 80 GB HD built-in Webcam Total cost: $1100...So the Apple premium now stands at -$340, close as I can figure.
"Blu-ray is the next generation format for watch-at-home movies. So is HD-DVD, as some would argue. There's only one catch-- MILLIONS of blu-ray readers will already be in the clutches of PS3 owners."
To summarize: Many people will buy the PS3 because they will want Blu-Ray. People will want Blu-Ray because it will beat out HD-DVD. It will beat out HD-DVD because many people will buy the PS3.
I'm not sure if this technically counts as a logical fallacy or just a vicious cycle. But in either case, I don't buy the timing. People won't buy PS3s en masse UNTIL Blu-Ray catches on, so you can't count on PS3 sales to give Blu-Ray the edge over HD-DVD.
"Q14: Do you think that the MegaTexture technology will be accessible to mod teams? I'm making the connection there in terms of thinking of some of the smaller teams out there.
Answer: It doesn't help them. In general, all the technology progress has been essentially reducing the ability of a mod team to do something significant and competitive. We've certainly seen this over the last 10 years, where, in the early days of somebody messing with DOOM or QUAKE, you could take essentially a pure concept idea, put it in, and see how the game play evolved there. But doing a mod now, if you're making new models, new animation, you essentially need to be a game studio doing something for free to do something that's going to be the significant equivalent. And almost nobody even considers doing a total conversion anymore. Anything like this that allows more media effort to be spent, probably does not help the mods."
A pretty honest and insightful answer, if you ask me. This is a feature that'll allow the big boys to make ever-more realistic environments, but it'll mean indie developers and mod developers will have to work that much harder to make anything comparable.
FYI, this story was a followup to a longer story about laptop and identity theft. The original story did indeed focus a lot on data encryption.
From the original article: "This is Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He says he's not surprised that all of this information is walking around on portable computers. People want to be productive on the run, he says. But he says there are pretty sure-fire ways to protect sensitive information. Like, encrypting it, or leaving the data on the main server and remotely tunneling through the Internet to work with it."
Way to declare this the "worst article ever" in the same post you brazenly declare you didn't read it, by the way. A bold move, even by Slashdot standards.
The whole advantage of AJAX is that it's available from pretty much any computer with internet access, due to the ubiquity of browser software. If I have to download a special "application browser" to run these apps, I might as well just download a real, compiled executable and get better speed out of it.
According to the NYT interview, Jeff Kaplan thinks that about 25% of WoW players with level 60 characters have killed Ragnaros, and 15% have killed Nefarion.
I can sort of buy the first statistic... sort of. Ragnaros is regularly downed by pickup groups now, so I can see a fair amount of people getting a shot at him.
But Nefarion? 15%? To propogate a meme, ORLY?
For those with actual social lives, Nefarion is the last boss of Blackwing Lair, currently the second-hardest dungeon in the game. You have to kill seven bosses before you get to Nef, and each of them can take weeks for a new guild to learn to defeat for the first time. And since the dungeon resets every Tuesday, you have to clear your way through all of them EVERY WEEK to even get a shot at learning how to kill Nef - a process that takes months for some guilds.
In other words, Kaplan is estimating, from his "gut feeling," that 15% of the people who've gotten to level 60 will ALSO have spent 15+ hours a week for several months in BWL. Either the WoW playerbase (of 5-6 million) is even more fanatical than I would have guessed, or this is a big overestimate, and possibly an attempt to justify the fact that for about a year now the WoW development team has focused almost exclusively on new content for the high-end raiders who make up a small proportion of the fan base. (I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since I'm a raider myself, but hey.)
"The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor."
Um... the fact that this is coming from a university suggests to ME that it might be highly impractical, but of some academic interest.
I mean, "university" may rank above "wacky fly-by-night startup looking to fleece investors" on the ol' Trust-o-meter, but the fact that a few academics are studying something certainly doesn't mean it's even potentially viable as a commercial product.
"The controller sucks. Well, I'd be very surprised if Penguin or MadCatz doesn't make a controller with Rumble to satisfy your needs."
Umm, rumble support doesn't just happen by magic. It has to be built into the games, and I seriously doubt very many game-makers are going to waste precious resources adding in rumble effects for the tiny portion of the market using third-party controllers that support rumble.
"The base unit doesn't do Wi-Fi. Well, how many of you who own an original XBox or PS2 don't already have some kind of Wi-Fi adapter around the house, if that's your thing?"
Huh? You assume I just have standalone WiFi adapters sitting around the house that are compatible with a game system that hasn't been made yet? Why would I, so that I can play the plethora of online PS2 games out there?
"...while production ramps up and and prices can start to drop."
Yeah, but see, prices will drop on the OTHER systems too. I doubt Sony will be able to close that $200 price gap with Xbox360 a whole lot. The situation's even worse for Sony if Wii comes in at or below $200, as a lot of people are predicting. I know *I'm* not about to pay triple price for some high-def support I'll never use...
Re:Let's try it out
on
Vim 7 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You jest, but VI made me hate all coding for about a day.
I was trying to contribute to a project using Mercurial, when lo and behold! It dumped me into VIM.
Apparently, all I *really* was supposed to do here was enter a line of text describing my patch, save, and quit. But damned if I couldn't find a single menu to do that. The mouse was useless, and the menus were unnavigable.
By the time I figured out:wq, I'd messed up my entire Mercurial depository and had to reinstall and manually patch the whole damn project because I'd botched it. Frigging:wq...
I WANT to call this guy an idiot (which he is) and say that there's NO WAY that the publisher should be held responsible for a user-made mod. But last time I did that, it turned out Rockstar actual HAD included the "offending" content, and HAD lied about it. All us gamer types were calling Jack a moron for confusing "official" content with user mods, but he turned out to be right.
So thanks, Rockstar, for being idiots and forgetting to delete the mini-game you had to disable at the last minute to keep your "M" rating. And thanks even MORE for lying about it, making US look like jerks for defending you.
Ask ANY segment of the general populace about Linux or BSD (except maybe programmers and network guys), and they won't get very far.
For that matter, ask any segment of the general populace about OSX or Windows, and they'll probably tell you a few things they learned by rote - where the Word icon is, how to save a document, etc.
One difference I guess you can point to is that Mac users all must care about computers to SOME degree, otherwise they'd be buying cheaper Dell boxes. But I certainly wouldn't attribute to Mac users any special competence in the field of network security. If anything, we Mac guys are LESS knowledgeable, because many of us have never had that enriching experience of reinstalling our entire system because we caught some inexpungible virus.
Anyway, Apple is concerned enough about security and the "completeness" of their systems that I'm sure they will at least TRY to build in antivirus measures good enough to keep Mac users from having to pay for McAfee.
Aww, and the teeming masses were just hanging on your every word, hoping to jump ship to whatever secret and superior browsing software the great Joebert uses...
I'm guessing this is more like the original Xbox - they don't want to include the DVD player licensing fee as part of the base system cost, so instead you have to pay $20 for some kind of dongle (like the Xbox remote) that enables DVD playback.
"who would really prefer dual/triple booting over virtualization, especially given the excellent benefits Intel VT [intel.com] now offers for virtual machines?"
Me, for one.
I don't know the ins and outs of virtualization, but it seems to me that if I'm running Windows apps side-by-side with native Mac apps, I expose myself to the same spyware, viruses, and other annoyances inherent to Windows. I'd MUCH rather have Windows restricted to its own little disk partition, which I could nuke any time I need to. And since (1) the only Windows apps I'd want to run are games, and (2) it supposedly takes only about 15 seconds to boot these things, I'd just as soon boot into Windows when I absolutely need to and keep my MacOS main partition "pristine."
This is actually incorrect. The idea is that for a while (1980s-now), CDs were actually the big source of revenue for artists. They'd have cheap concerts because getting more people to come meant more buzz, which meant better CD sales. Live concerts were basically advertising for the CDs.
Now, this guy claims, the CD revenue stream is "broken," so artists are trying to make money from the live concerts instead. Personally, I don't think this is such a horrible thing - it worked in the 70s for bands like Led Zeppelin. But I also don't think it's *true* that piracy is causing CD sales to drop precipitously. The whole thing reeks of FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
This comment represents a popular theme among conservatives at the moment - "EVERYONE's biased, so let's wear our bias on our sleeves!"
...OR, could it be that some of the people marching ARE legal immigrants? Or that they're concerned about the rights of legal immigrants, like these potential "guest workers," as much as they're concerned about the rights of illegal immigrants?
The thing is, it's not true. Mainstream, "liberal" media sources like the New York Times and NPR still strive for objectivity. The parent's example is typical: why didn't they say "illegal" immigrants? OMG bias!
Yeah, you can read this type of thing as a sign of subtle bias, if you're so inclined. But none of the linked articles are anywhere NEAR that subtle. Putting this kind of claptrap in the same category as real news and saying they're just opposite ends of a spectrum is intellectually dishonest.
Google is right to kick them out of their "news" feed, just like they'd be right to eschew the equivalent left-wing nonsense ("Zionist Amerikkka Enriches Jew Bankers!") But of course, they already DO filter out the left-wing wackos, while the right-wing wackos get their own contingent of defenders who have suddenly discovered the rhetorical utility of "open-mindedness."
The "monoculture bomb" analogy only goes so far before failing. When we're talking about corn or something like that, obviously a specific engineered disease could cause widespread devastation. But in the computer world, viruses can do far more insidious things than just shut down a network, and a polyculture might actually make that easier.
Let's say you've got a hacker who wants access to a file on your network that a bunch of users have access to. In this case, the hacker isn't trying to infect ALL the computers; any one of them will do. In this case, a polyculture actually HURTS security, becuase the hacker only has to find one flaw in any of the many different applications people are running. Can't hack his way into Word? That's okay, some nerd in the office is running StarOffice and he can find a backdoor for that. Or whatever.
Not to mention, in a monoculture it's easier to standardize training and security. The security guys in an all-Windows place only need to keep up with the (legion) Windows vulnerabilities out there. In a polyculture environment, they have to know about Windows vulnerabilities PLUS Linux, Mac, and all sorts of other vulnerabilities, because one compromised computer can mean a whole lot of lost information.
A lot of people taking Sony's side on this one - including Next Gen - seem to me to be missing the point. "The price will eventually go down," they say, "and this allows Sony to profit off the early-adopting suckers in the meantime!" Everyone predicts that in a year or so PS3 will be competitively priced and widely available, and Sony hegemony shall be restored.
But... isn't this kind of a competition for third-party developers? A year from now, if Xbox has 10 million installed users and Sony a fraction of that because not many people are willing to pay $600 for a console, won't developers migrate to Xbox? Won't GAMERS migrate to Xbox, because that's what their friends play? And if everyone's on Xbox, who the heck is going to spur this widespread late adoption of PS3?
Cranky editorials about the cranky editorials about video games!
Well, you have to bear in mind that Slashdot has a tendency to filter for that kind of sensationalism.
I'm sure there are plenty of minor breakthroughs in all sorts of fields that get reported responsibly, or not at all. But nobody pays attention to those stories enough to submit them to Slashdot. And if they DO, no doubt Zonk or whoever passes over them as small beans compared to the big stories Slashdot has to tell, like "Linux text editor you've never heard of may fork, says analyst!" The only stuff that makes the grade is the stuff with nice, attention-grabbing headlines.
SO all we see on Slashdot is the sensational stuff, which leads to lots of complaints like yours.
There is nothing "sacred cow" about Columbine. It's a touchy issue because real, specific people were killed in the incident, which makes it more serious.
GTA is different because all the characters are fictional. You're playing a mob movie. In a Columbine game, you're playing a real-life tragedy.
What about the WW2 and Vietnam games? Frankly, I think they're almost as bad, and I don't play them. But I imagine those wars are far enough back that most players are able to abstract them. I'm not playing a *real* WW2 grunt, I'm playing Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan and every other war-movie stereotype.
And yes, I reserve my right to hate someone because of an idea they express. If we can't judge people based on what they say and do, what CAN we judge them on?
So yeah, I wasn't a math major.
Decided I'd browse over to Dell and see how big the "Apple premium" is sitting right now.
...So the Apple premium now stands at -$340, close as I can figure.
Dell Inspiron E1405:
14.1" screen (1280x800)
Core Duo 1.83
1 GB RAM (can't get 512)
80 GB HD
Total cost: $1540
MacBook:
13.3" screen (1280x800)
Core Duo 1.83
512 MB RAM
80 GB HD
built-in Webcam
Total cost: $1100
"Blu-ray is the next generation format for watch-at-home movies. So is HD-DVD, as some would argue. There's only one catch-- MILLIONS of blu-ray readers will already be in the clutches of PS3 owners."
To summarize:
Many people will buy the PS3 because they will want Blu-Ray.
People will want Blu-Ray because it will beat out HD-DVD.
It will beat out HD-DVD because many people will buy the PS3.
I'm not sure if this technically counts as a logical fallacy or just a vicious cycle. But in either case, I don't buy the timing. People won't buy PS3s en masse UNTIL Blu-Ray catches on, so you can't count on PS3 sales to give Blu-Ray the edge over HD-DVD.
"Q14: Do you think that the MegaTexture technology will be accessible to mod teams? I'm making the connection there in terms of thinking of some of the smaller teams out there.
Answer: It doesn't help them. In general, all the technology progress has been essentially reducing the ability of a mod team to do something significant and competitive. We've certainly seen this over the last 10 years, where, in the early days of somebody messing with DOOM or QUAKE, you could take essentially a pure concept idea, put it in, and see how the game play evolved there. But doing a mod now, if you're making new models, new animation, you essentially need to be a game studio doing something for free to do something that's going to be the significant equivalent. And almost nobody even considers doing a total conversion anymore. Anything like this that allows more media effort to be spent, probably does not help the mods."
A pretty honest and insightful answer, if you ask me. This is a feature that'll allow the big boys to make ever-more realistic environments, but it'll mean indie developers and mod developers will have to work that much harder to make anything comparable.
FYI, this story was a followup to a longer story about laptop and identity theft. The original story did indeed focus a lot on data encryption.
From the original article:
"This is Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He says he's not surprised that all of this information is walking around on portable computers. People want to be productive on the run, he says. But he says there are pretty sure-fire ways to protect sensitive information. Like, encrypting it, or leaving the data on the main server and remotely tunneling through the Internet to work with it."
Way to declare this the "worst article ever" in the same post you brazenly declare you didn't read it, by the way. A bold move, even by Slashdot standards.
The whole advantage of AJAX is that it's available from pretty much any computer with internet access, due to the ubiquity of browser software. If I have to download a special "application browser" to run these apps, I might as well just download a real, compiled executable and get better speed out of it.
According to the NYT interview, Jeff Kaplan thinks that about 25% of WoW players with level 60 characters have killed Ragnaros, and 15% have killed Nefarion.
I can sort of buy the first statistic... sort of. Ragnaros is regularly downed by pickup groups now, so I can see a fair amount of people getting a shot at him.
But Nefarion? 15%? To propogate a meme, ORLY?
For those with actual social lives, Nefarion is the last boss of Blackwing Lair, currently the second-hardest dungeon in the game. You have to kill seven bosses before you get to Nef, and each of them can take weeks for a new guild to learn to defeat for the first time. And since the dungeon resets every Tuesday, you have to clear your way through all of them EVERY WEEK to even get a shot at learning how to kill Nef - a process that takes months for some guilds.
In other words, Kaplan is estimating, from his "gut feeling," that 15% of the people who've gotten to level 60 will ALSO have spent 15+ hours a week for several months in BWL. Either the WoW playerbase (of 5-6 million) is even more fanatical than I would have guessed, or this is a big overestimate, and possibly an attempt to justify the fact that for about a year now the WoW development team has focused almost exclusively on new content for the high-end raiders who make up a small proportion of the fan base. (I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since I'm a raider myself, but hey.)
"The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapor."
Um... the fact that this is coming from a university suggests to ME that it might be highly impractical, but of some academic interest.
I mean, "university" may rank above "wacky fly-by-night startup looking to fleece investors" on the ol' Trust-o-meter, but the fact that a few academics are studying something certainly doesn't mean it's even potentially viable as a commercial product.
"The controller sucks. Well, I'd be very surprised if Penguin or MadCatz doesn't make a controller with Rumble to satisfy your needs."
Umm, rumble support doesn't just happen by magic. It has to be built into the games, and I seriously doubt very many game-makers are going to waste precious resources adding in rumble effects for the tiny portion of the market using third-party controllers that support rumble.
"The base unit doesn't do Wi-Fi. Well, how many of you who own an original XBox or PS2 don't already have some kind of Wi-Fi adapter around the house, if that's your thing?"
Huh? You assume I just have standalone WiFi adapters sitting around the house that are compatible with a game system that hasn't been made yet? Why would I, so that I can play the plethora of online PS2 games out there?
"...while production ramps up and and prices can start to drop."
Yeah, but see, prices will drop on the OTHER systems too. I doubt Sony will be able to close that $200 price gap with Xbox360 a whole lot. The situation's even worse for Sony if Wii comes in at or below $200, as a lot of people are predicting. I know *I'm* not about to pay triple price for some high-def support I'll never use...
You jest, but VI made me hate all coding for about a day.
:wq, I'd messed up my entire Mercurial depository and had to reinstall and manually patch the whole damn project because I'd botched it. Frigging :wq...
I was trying to contribute to a project using Mercurial, when lo and behold! It dumped me into VIM.
Apparently, all I *really* was supposed to do here was enter a line of text describing my patch, save, and quit. But damned if I couldn't find a single menu to do that. The mouse was useless, and the menus were unnavigable.
By the time I figured out
Kinda dumb to link a Gamespot article about the Time article, rather than the Time article itself, if you ask me.
1 191861,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,
How much Rockstar screwed us over.
I WANT to call this guy an idiot (which he is) and say that there's NO WAY that the publisher should be held responsible for a user-made mod. But last time I did that, it turned out Rockstar actual HAD included the "offending" content, and HAD lied about it. All us gamer types were calling Jack a moron for confusing "official" content with user mods, but he turned out to be right.
So thanks, Rockstar, for being idiots and forgetting to delete the mini-game you had to disable at the last minute to keep your "M" rating. And thanks even MORE for lying about it, making US look like jerks for defending you.
...I got nothing.
Ask ANY segment of the general populace about Linux or BSD (except maybe programmers and network guys), and they won't get very far.
For that matter, ask any segment of the general populace about OSX or Windows, and they'll probably tell you a few things they learned by rote - where the Word icon is, how to save a document, etc.
One difference I guess you can point to is that Mac users all must care about computers to SOME degree, otherwise they'd be buying cheaper Dell boxes. But I certainly wouldn't attribute to Mac users any special competence in the field of network security. If anything, we Mac guys are LESS knowledgeable, because many of us have never had that enriching experience of reinstalling our entire system because we caught some inexpungible virus.
Anyway, Apple is concerned enough about security and the "completeness" of their systems that I'm sure they will at least TRY to build in antivirus measures good enough to keep Mac users from having to pay for McAfee.
Aww, and the teeming masses were just hanging on your every word, hoping to jump ship to whatever secret and superior browsing software the great Joebert uses...
I'm guessing this is more like the original Xbox - they don't want to include the DVD player licensing fee as part of the base system cost, so instead you have to pay $20 for some kind of dongle (like the Xbox remote) that enables DVD playback.
...even the best 360 game will look "inferior" next to the kind of innovative games the Revolution will make possible.
Spin it how you want it.
"who would really prefer dual/triple booting over virtualization, especially given the excellent benefits Intel VT [intel.com] now offers for virtual machines?"
Me, for one.
I don't know the ins and outs of virtualization, but it seems to me that if I'm running Windows apps side-by-side with native Mac apps, I expose myself to the same spyware, viruses, and other annoyances inherent to Windows. I'd MUCH rather have Windows restricted to its own little disk partition, which I could nuke any time I need to. And since (1) the only Windows apps I'd want to run are games, and (2) it supposedly takes only about 15 seconds to boot these things, I'd just as soon boot into Windows when I absolutely need to and keep my MacOS main partition "pristine."
This is actually incorrect. The idea is that for a while (1980s-now), CDs were actually the big source of revenue for artists. They'd have cheap concerts because getting more people to come meant more buzz, which meant better CD sales. Live concerts were basically advertising for the CDs.
Now, this guy claims, the CD revenue stream is "broken," so artists are trying to make money from the live concerts instead. Personally, I don't think this is such a horrible thing - it worked in the 70s for bands like Led Zeppelin. But I also don't think it's *true* that piracy is causing CD sales to drop precipitously. The whole thing reeks of FUD.