Which, since the Record Rental Amendment of 1984, requires one to have bought the CDs, LPs, and tapes in question
The Record Rental Amendment of 1984 and the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990 both amended Section 109 to prevent all owners of phonorecords, and of certain types of computer programs, from distributing them through the acts of rental, lease, or lending, or by any other act or practice in the nature of rental, lease, or lending unless authorized by the owners of the copyright, with an exemption for non-profit educational institutions and non-profit libraries.
The acts specifically excluded:
A computer program which is embodied in a machine or product and which cannot be copied during the ordinary operation or use of the machine or product; or A computer program embodied in or used in conjunction with a limited purpose computer that is designed for playing video games and may be designed for other purposes.
From wikipedia's description I don't see how it applies to end-users. It says nothing about recording off the air. However, time-shifting was specifically legalized back in the VCR and cassette days. As to discovering new music, time shifting (and legal, free downloads from independant artists, who have no radio and WANT you to hear them).
It doesn't strictly require two computers unless uses some sort of DRM that tries to detect analog reconversion, but again, MSM wins at convenience. How many people are willing to hook line-out into line-in and leave a computer turned on overnight just to be able to listen to indie music in the car?
I guess you kids are lazy these days. Back in my day we'd record all of our LPs to tape, preventing degradation, and tape the radio, make mix tapes, etc. It's particularly galling to someone who's done this legally all their life for the labels to try to say that all of a sudden it's wrong. Screw 'em. I have the right to record any sound you choose to transmit into my home -- that's MY air you're vibrating.
Not everybody has the money to invest in a legal defense.
If you have a good case (and with a copyright holder trying to sue you for a parody, you can't lose), you won't need any up-front money. The lawyer will take 1/3 of a settlement or 1/2 of a judgement.
They were playing what was on the pop charts back then,
No, in fact they were playing synthesized 1960s schmaltz (Muzak) in groceries then. Things have changed a lot in the last quarter century.
There are entire web sites devoted to nitpicking films.
There are web sites devoted to belly button lint, too. It doesn't mean anybody pays attention to them.
Publically financed elections? Any idea how to get that to happen after the Supreme Court's decision
Alcohol is far from a "soft drug", and in fact is one of, if not the, hardest. It's deadly -- more people die of alcohol overdose than overdose of all other drugs combined. It's so addictive that withdrawal can be and very often is fatal, unlike cocaine or amphetamines. I've seen Amy (a friend in the grip of alcoholism) go through DTs, and believe me, you don't even want to watch someone withdraw from alcohol, it's horrible (she's in rehab right now. Again.)
It temporarily lowers both IQ and inhibition, leading to such dangerous things as driving drunk or even worse.
It is not by any measure begnign, it is deadly dangerous. That said, I do love my beer!
True, but I also have known officers attacked by meth heads
Cops get attacked by drunks, too. Should we outlaw beer again? If a drug makes you violent, you should be arrested for violence. If you steal to support your habit, you should go to jail for theft.
By "MP3s" I assume that you're referring to buying the MP3s at home and loading them onto a portable music player at roughly 1 USD per track.
No, I'm referring to the MP3s you rip from CD, sample from LPs and tapes, and sample from the radio -- even internet radio. Have two computers? You can log in to kshe95.com on Sunday night and sample seven full rock albums, free and legal. You can sample a top 40 station for two hours and have every recent hit.
If so, then for one thing, one would need to confine his discover-new-music hours to those few times when he can sit at a home PC with headphones on so that he will know what to buy to listen to in the car.
No, just sample the stream when you're out. Cutting individual songs from the stream takes but minutes, takes less time than a download.
You need permission in order to skip the expense of a copyright+trademark+libel triple-play trial if the owner of copyright in the work that you are parodying disagrees that your work is a covered parody.
It's an investment -- you will win (there has been enough case law litigated), and your countersuit for abuse of copyright could be quite lucrative.
And if a scene takes place in a grocery store in the United States in the 1980s, the viewer expects to hear what would be heard in a grocery store in the United States in the 1980s.
Nobody in their twenties has a clue what was playing in grocery stoires in the 1980s. Hell, I barely remember, come to think of it. Nobody's going to notice what background music is playing as long as it doesn't sound out of place.
I know, the MSM did. It's called path dependence: incumbents entrench themselves. How is one to work around this other than always making period pieces?
Pollution knows no boundaries nor respects private property. Dump your garbage on your own property and it will wind up in the groundwater for me to drink, PERIOD. Burn toxins on your own property and the wind carries it to mine. You have no right to pollute.
And again, you think people who own no property should have no rights? That's pretty telling, Mr. 1%er. I find classism as disgusting as racism.
I know what the "tragedy of the commons" is, but it doesn't seem like you understand it. The true tragedy of the commons happened before envoronmental regs, when industry polluted the whole damned continent. Your tragedy of the commons was solved with those regs, noit instigated by them.
The only tragedy is in the minds of polluters, who are no longer free to poison my air and water as they formerly were.
And I know what a straw man argument is, too. You seem not to, because I'm making no straw man arguments whatever.
Sorry, son, tell your masters in the Monsanto board room you failed to oursmart an old nerd. Your arguments are irrational, and anyone wioth half a brain can see that.
In all of those jobs, I was (and am) subject to dismissal if signs of use are found, regardless of whether I used said substances at work or at home, and regardless of whether the substances were legal in the jurisdiction where I would have used them.
And you're ok with never having a beer after work? You're ok with being fired if your doctor prescribes a mind altering substance (say, paroxidine?) You need a union.
Well, that may be a bit misleading, as it probably covers both farners and farm workers. Farming always was dangerous. But still, I'm of the opinion that dangerous jobs should pay better than safe ones. The 1%ers whine that capital gains taxes should be low because of the risk, all they risk is money. The farmer risks his money and life.
IMO the capital gains tax should be doubled... at least. There should be no such thing as "day traders", they do nothing to help the economy and much to harm it. We shouldn't be rewarding gamblers.
Reading comprehension fail. You continue to insist that water is dry and fire is cold. Are you going to start smoking crack when they legalize it? Well, neither willanybody else. Just go back and read previous comments again. The facts are not on your side.
I have no opinion on the war on drugs nor the prohibition of alcohol in the 20's, as to this point, neither has a direct effect on my life
But it does. You're funding it, and all those cops and prisons and jails and judges are damned expensive. You're part of society, and society is harmed by these laws. Not to mention the erosion of your rights they excuse.
I'd like to see your source for that. Most studies say that consumption went down 20%-30%
You can't measure the use of an illegal product. From your own link: "After prohibition was implemented alcohol continued to be consumed. However, how much compared to pre-Prohibition levels remains unclear." All you can look at is the difference in consumption from before it was outlawed and after it was legalized. Twice as much alcohol was consumed after prohibition than before.
My grandmother, who was born in 1903, had an explanation for the increased consumption. Before prohibition, Saloons were a men's place. Women (at least, respectable ones) stayed out of them. The few women who drank did so in secret.
Prohibition changed that by closing the saloons. Speakeasies weren't all-male, and the increase in consumption was mostly women beginning to drink.
Grandma didn't drink, but Grandpa had a beer making kit in his barn during prohibition, and my great aunts were flappers. Did you know tattoos on women were fashionable then? The parallels between the prohibition era and now is eerie.
Unless one of these is a laptop with mobile broadband service, you still can't listen to Internet radio in a car or bus.
There are these things called MP3s.
the film is in Finnish with English subtitles. Notwithstanding The Passion of the Christ, a lot of the market demands a dub as at least an option.
I think if it were dubbed, that would detract from the movie, much like "Passion". Having "light balls" spoken in English wouldn't be nearly as funny.
And what would they have done had CBS not licensed Star Trek to them?
It's a parody. You don't need permission to parody a work, even if Wierd Al asks.
Say a film is set in year 19XX, and the script calls for a scene in a public place with music playing in the background over the public place's speaker system. It's expensive to set the scene with familiar popular music that was likely to have been heard in such a place.
Using non-diegetic music didn't hurt "The Terminator". You don't have to play music that's actually popular, it only has to fit the scene and set. And if copyright lengths were sabe that problem wouldn't exist (and guess who bought the insane copyright lengths?)
Others have already pointed out the fallacy in your argument, so I'll zero in on this:
it will be very, very difficult to implement any sort of drug testing for employment. You really can't test for and ban employment because of a legal substance. For example, it is not legal to exclude someone from a job based on alchohol use, although you can fire them later for being drunk on the job.
That's a GOOD thing. If the bus driver isn't getting high on the job then there's no reason she shouldn't be driving a bus, any more than she should be fired for having a beer after work. Sorry, but your argument is just stupid.
If some of the "harder" more addictive substances were legalized and made cheaper we would see a huge increase in abuse.
That's a fallacy. Alcohol use and abuse soared during prohibition. Tobacco use has been falling for decades, while marijuana use has increased. Cocaine was still illegal in the eighties when crack was invented.
Crack use has declined because people see what it does. Anybody who would smoke crack under any circumstances at all is already smoking it. Would you smoke it if it were legal? All of the illegal substances are easily obtained on the black market. The laws aren't stopping anyone.
Although, weed is a completely different story than cocaine.
Cocaine is God's way of telling you you have too damned much money. If it were legal it would be cheaper and maybe the crackheads would stop burglarizing my house.
Has nobody noticed that although it's legal, tobacco use has steadily fallen in the last 40 years, while use of the illegal weed has increased?
I love the way people blame the War on Drugs for all of the related problems.
It is responsible for all the related problems.
If people would, you know, just stop buying the damn stuff then the cartel's main income would dry up within a month
Yeah, and if the cat would stop puking on the floor I wouldn't have to clean it up. The same was said about alcohol in the 1920s, but guess what? Alcohol consumption doubled during prohibition. People have been intoxicating themselves since before they were people, and they're not going to stop just because some idiot writes a law against it.
The only way you're going to stop the violence, graft, corruption, and all the other ills caused by the drug laws is how we stopped it in 1933 -- legalize, tax, and regulate. You'd have far fewer heroin overdoses if purity was standardized.
If crack was legal and crackheads could buy the stuff for a dollat an ounce they wouldn't have to break into my house to support their habits. The drug laws are counterproductive and insane.
As a Christian, I have to agree with the athiests there. There should be no such thing as forced prayer or a forced pledge. Forcing people to recite the Lord's Prayer or the Pledge of Aleigance is just plain wrong; this is the sort of thing you have in dictatorships. Don't bash Christians, bash idiots who want everyone to think and act like them. This includes all religions and all non-religions.
For one thing, notable record labels provide promotion on commercial FM radio to reach people without smartphones capable of using Internet radio.
I don't have a smartphone, but I have two computers, each capable of listening to any internet station out there. My 80 year old dad is one of a very few people I know without a computer. I don't know anyone who has a smartphone and no computer.
Not every town has a college radio station that plays all genres.
No, but almost all of those stations stream over the internet. My favorite is WQNA, you can have either an AAC or MP3 stream from them. Jazz, rock, blues, ska, raggae, punk, hardcore, even belly dancing music (Wednesday nights).
Even with the price of HDTV cameras plummeting, I don't see the price of competent writing, directing, acting, sets, and the like plummeting.
Have you seen Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning? funny as hell, far better acting, writing, and directing than any Hollywood B movie, and it cost them a couple thousand bucks for a feature length movie.
Furthermore, a movie needs a soundtrack, and licensing diegetic music for use in movies set after 1922 can exceed and has exceeded (e.g. Clerks) the rest of the cost of the film put together.
All it takes is one talented musician with a synthesizer to produce a sound track; writing music isn't hard. There are thousands upon thousands of such talented people mostly playing in bars. There is no shortage of people with any talent you need.
What you don't need is multi-million dollar actors and directors and musicians. Actors, directors, and musicians are a dime a dozen these days.
Indeed. There's no agenda to put out crappy media, but the vast consolidation gives them an oligopoly. With only five competetitors, and all of them producing dreck, there's no need to produce anything BUT dreck.
In the end it'll bite them in the ass; the RIAA companies are already obsolete, and as the price of video equipment comes down and the quality goes up, the same will happen to the movie/TV industry.
Meanwhile, has anybody noticed how more pervasive advertising is than it was before all the consolidation? Three minutes of content followed by four minutes of commercials. It's insane and obscene. I've never seen as much advertising in my whole life as I have in the last ten years. And these people complain they can't make any money? Gomme a break!
How many astronauts have died on the job? Apollo7, Challenger, Columbia, and a couple of Russian crashes in fifty years of spaceflight! I'd say their safety record is pretty darned good.
If a war breaks out between North and South, it will be the bloodiest and worse catastrophe in human history!
You haven't studied much history, have you? Ever hear of a little tussle called WWII, where millions of civilians were bombed, gassed, tortured, irradiated, and shot, where a a guy tried to exterminate an entire race of people?
The Korean war was a snowball fight between two five year olds in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
Which, since the Record Rental Amendment of 1984, requires one to have bought the CDs, LPs, and tapes in question
From wikipedia's description I don't see how it applies to end-users. It says nothing about recording off the air. However, time-shifting was specifically legalized back in the VCR and cassette days. As to discovering new music, time shifting (and legal, free downloads from independant artists, who have no radio and WANT you to hear them).
It doesn't strictly require two computers unless uses some sort of DRM that tries to detect analog reconversion, but again, MSM wins at convenience. How many people are willing to hook line-out into line-in and leave a computer turned on overnight just to be able to listen to indie music in the car?
I guess you kids are lazy these days. Back in my day we'd record all of our LPs to tape, preventing degradation, and tape the radio, make mix tapes, etc. It's particularly galling to someone who's done this legally all their life for the labels to try to say that all of a sudden it's wrong. Screw 'em. I have the right to record any sound you choose to transmit into my home -- that's MY air you're vibrating.
Not everybody has the money to invest in a legal defense.
If you have a good case (and with a copyright holder trying to sue you for a parody, you can't lose), you won't need any up-front money. The lawyer will take 1/3 of a settlement or 1/2 of a judgement.
They were playing what was on the pop charts back then,
No, in fact they were playing synthesized 1960s schmaltz (Muzak) in groceries then. Things have changed a lot in the last quarter century.
There are entire web sites devoted to nitpicking films.
There are web sites devoted to belly button lint, too. It doesn't mean anybody pays attention to them.
Publically financed elections? Any idea how to get that to happen after the Supreme Court's decision
Constitutional amendmant. Barring that, bloody revolution.
Soft drugs should be treated like alcohol
Alcohol is far from a "soft drug", and in fact is one of, if not the, hardest. It's deadly -- more people die of alcohol overdose than overdose of all other drugs combined. It's so addictive that withdrawal can be and very often is fatal, unlike cocaine or amphetamines. I've seen Amy (a friend in the grip of alcoholism) go through DTs, and believe me, you don't even want to watch someone withdraw from alcohol, it's horrible (she's in rehab right now. Again.)
It temporarily lowers both IQ and inhibition, leading to such dangerous things as driving drunk or even worse.
It is not by any measure begnign, it is deadly dangerous. That said, I do love my beer!
True, but I also have known officers attacked by meth heads
Cops get attacked by drunks, too. Should we outlaw beer again? If a drug makes you violent, you should be arrested for violence. If you steal to support your habit, you should go to jail for theft.
They've had ads on the busses here since before I moved here in 1986.
Back in the seventies you could get meth from legit pharm companies. Meth isn't a new thing, although making it from drano and fertilizer is.
By "MP3s" I assume that you're referring to buying the MP3s at home and loading them onto a portable music player at roughly 1 USD per track.
No, I'm referring to the MP3s you rip from CD, sample from LPs and tapes, and sample from the radio -- even internet radio. Have two computers? You can log in to kshe95.com on Sunday night and sample seven full rock albums, free and legal. You can sample a top 40 station for two hours and have every recent hit.
If so, then for one thing, one would need to confine his discover-new-music hours to those few times when he can sit at a home PC with headphones on so that he will know what to buy to listen to in the car.
No, just sample the stream when you're out. Cutting individual songs from the stream takes but minutes, takes less time than a download.
You need permission in order to skip the expense of a copyright+trademark+libel triple-play trial if the owner of copyright in the work that you are parodying disagrees that your work is a covered parody.
It's an investment -- you will win (there has been enough case law litigated), and your countersuit for abuse of copyright could be quite lucrative.
And if a scene takes place in a grocery store in the United States in the 1980s, the viewer expects to hear what would be heard in a grocery store in the United States in the 1980s.
Nobody in their twenties has a clue what was playing in grocery stoires in the 1980s. Hell, I barely remember, come to think of it. Nobody's going to notice what background music is playing as long as it doesn't sound out of place.
I know, the MSM did. It's called path dependence: incumbents entrench themselves. How is one to work around this other than always making period pieces?
Publically financed elections?
Pollution knows no boundaries nor respects private property. Dump your garbage on your own property and it will wind up in the groundwater for me to drink, PERIOD. Burn toxins on your own property and the wind carries it to mine. You have no right to pollute.
And again, you think people who own no property should have no rights? That's pretty telling, Mr. 1%er. I find classism as disgusting as racism.
I know what the "tragedy of the commons" is, but it doesn't seem like you understand it. The true tragedy of the commons happened before envoronmental regs, when industry polluted the whole damned continent. Your tragedy of the commons was solved with those regs, noit instigated by them.
The only tragedy is in the minds of polluters, who are no longer free to poison my air and water as they formerly were.
And I know what a straw man argument is, too. You seem not to, because I'm making no straw man arguments whatever.
Sorry, son, tell your masters in the Monsanto board room you failed to oursmart an old nerd. Your arguments are irrational, and anyone wioth half a brain can see that.
In all of those jobs, I was (and am) subject to dismissal if signs of use are found, regardless of whether I used said substances at work or at home, and regardless of whether the substances were legal in the jurisdiction where I would have used them.
And you're ok with never having a beer after work? You're ok with being fired if your doctor prescribes a mind altering substance (say, paroxidine?) You need a union.
Well, that may be a bit misleading, as it probably covers both farners and farm workers. Farming always was dangerous. But still, I'm of the opinion that dangerous jobs should pay better than safe ones. The 1%ers whine that capital gains taxes should be low because of the risk, all they risk is money. The farmer risks his money and life.
IMO the capital gains tax should be doubled... at least. There should be no such thing as "day traders", they do nothing to help the economy and much to harm it. We shouldn't be rewarding gamblers.
Reading comprehension fail. You continue to insist that water is dry and fire is cold. Are you going to start smoking crack when they legalize it? Well, neither willanybody else. Just go back and read previous comments again. The facts are not on your side.
But something of quality that works takes some actual talent
That is correct, but again, there are lots out there with both talent and training.
I have no opinion on the war on drugs nor the prohibition of alcohol in the 20's, as to this point, neither has a direct effect on my life
But it does. You're funding it, and all those cops and prisons and jails and judges are damned expensive. You're part of society, and society is harmed by these laws. Not to mention the erosion of your rights they excuse.
I'd like to see your source for that. Most studies say that consumption went down 20%-30%
You can't measure the use of an illegal product. From your own link: "After prohibition was implemented alcohol continued to be consumed. However, how much compared to pre-Prohibition levels remains unclear." All you can look at is the difference in consumption from before it was outlawed and after it was legalized. Twice as much alcohol was consumed after prohibition than before.
My grandmother, who was born in 1903, had an explanation for the increased consumption. Before prohibition, Saloons were a men's place. Women (at least, respectable ones) stayed out of them. The few women who drank did so in secret.
Prohibition changed that by closing the saloons. Speakeasies weren't all-male, and the increase in consumption was mostly women beginning to drink.
Grandma didn't drink, but Grandpa had a beer making kit in his barn during prohibition, and my great aunts were flappers. Did you know tattoos on women were fashionable then? The parallels between the prohibition era and now is eerie.
Unless one of these is a laptop with mobile broadband service, you still can't listen to Internet radio in a car or bus.
There are these things called MP3s.
the film is in Finnish with English subtitles. Notwithstanding The Passion of the Christ, a lot of the market demands a dub as at least an option.
I think if it were dubbed, that would detract from the movie, much like "Passion". Having "light balls" spoken in English wouldn't be nearly as funny.
And what would they have done had CBS not licensed Star Trek to them?
It's a parody. You don't need permission to parody a work, even if Wierd Al asks.
Say a film is set in year 19XX, and the script calls for a scene in a public place with music playing in the background over the public place's speaker system. It's expensive to set the scene with familiar popular music that was likely to have been heard in such a place.
Using non-diegetic music didn't hurt "The Terminator". You don't have to play music that's actually popular, it only has to fit the scene and set. And if copyright lengths were sabe that problem wouldn't exist (and guess who bought the insane copyright lengths?)
Others have already pointed out the fallacy in your argument, so I'll zero in on this:
it will be very, very difficult to implement any sort of drug testing for employment. You really can't test for and ban employment because of a legal substance. For example, it is not legal to exclude someone from a job based on alchohol use, although you can fire them later for being drunk on the job.
That's a GOOD thing. If the bus driver isn't getting high on the job then there's no reason she shouldn't be driving a bus, any more than she should be fired for having a beer after work. Sorry, but your argument is just stupid.
If some of the "harder" more addictive substances were legalized and made cheaper we would see a huge increase in abuse.
That's a fallacy. Alcohol use and abuse soared during prohibition. Tobacco use has been falling for decades, while marijuana use has increased. Cocaine was still illegal in the eighties when crack was invented.
Crack use has declined because people see what it does. Anybody who would smoke crack under any circumstances at all is already smoking it. Would you smoke it if it were legal? All of the illegal substances are easily obtained on the black market. The laws aren't stopping anyone.
Although, weed is a completely different story than cocaine.
Cocaine is God's way of telling you you have too damned much money. If it were legal it would be cheaper and maybe the crackheads would stop burglarizing my house.
Has nobody noticed that although it's legal, tobacco use has steadily fallen in the last 40 years, while use of the illegal weed has increased?
Hey, thanks for the link! Haven't heard of that one, will check it out (on the 42 inch screen the computer's plugged into) when I get home.
I love the way people blame the War on Drugs for all of the related problems.
It is responsible for all the related problems.
If people would, you know, just stop buying the damn stuff then the cartel's main income would dry up within a month
Yeah, and if the cat would stop puking on the floor I wouldn't have to clean it up. The same was said about alcohol in the 1920s, but guess what? Alcohol consumption doubled during prohibition. People have been intoxicating themselves since before they were people, and they're not going to stop just because some idiot writes a law against it.
The only way you're going to stop the violence, graft, corruption, and all the other ills caused by the drug laws is how we stopped it in 1933 -- legalize, tax, and regulate. You'd have far fewer heroin overdoses if purity was standardized.
If crack was legal and crackheads could buy the stuff for a dollat an ounce they wouldn't have to break into my house to support their habits. The drug laws are counterproductive and insane.
Hay! Knot owl off use half spill chuckers!
As a Christian, I have to agree with the athiests there. There should be no such thing as forced prayer or a forced pledge. Forcing people to recite the Lord's Prayer or the Pledge of Aleigance is just plain wrong; this is the sort of thing you have in dictatorships. Don't bash Christians, bash idiots who want everyone to think and act like them. This includes all religions and all non-religions.
For one thing, notable record labels provide promotion on commercial FM radio to reach people without smartphones capable of using Internet radio.
I don't have a smartphone, but I have two computers, each capable of listening to any internet station out there. My 80 year old dad is one of a very few people I know without a computer. I don't know anyone who has a smartphone and no computer.
Not every town has a college radio station that plays all genres.
No, but almost all of those stations stream over the internet. My favorite is WQNA, you can have either an AAC or MP3 stream from them. Jazz, rock, blues, ska, raggae, punk, hardcore, even belly dancing music (Wednesday nights).
Even with the price of HDTV cameras plummeting, I don't see the price of competent writing, directing, acting, sets, and the like plummeting.
Have you seen Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning? funny as hell, far better acting, writing, and directing than any Hollywood B movie, and it cost them a couple thousand bucks for a feature length movie.
Furthermore, a movie needs a soundtrack, and licensing diegetic music for use in movies set after 1922 can exceed and has exceeded (e.g. Clerks) the rest of the cost of the film put together.
All it takes is one talented musician with a synthesizer to produce a sound track; writing music isn't hard. There are thousands upon thousands of such talented people mostly playing in bars. There is no shortage of people with any talent you need.
What you don't need is multi-million dollar actors and directors and musicians. Actors, directors, and musicians are a dime a dozen these days.
Indeed. There's no agenda to put out crappy media, but the vast consolidation gives them an oligopoly. With only five competetitors, and all of them producing dreck, there's no need to produce anything BUT dreck.
In the end it'll bite them in the ass; the RIAA companies are already obsolete, and as the price of video equipment comes down and the quality goes up, the same will happen to the movie/TV industry.
Meanwhile, has anybody noticed how more pervasive advertising is than it was before all the consolidation? Three minutes of content followed by four minutes of commercials. It's insane and obscene. I've never seen as much advertising in my whole life as I have in the last ten years. And these people complain they can't make any money? Gomme a break!
However, "astronaut" is still a very dangerous profession.
It isn't in the top ten (although "pilot" is).
How many astronauts have died on the job? Apollo7, Challenger, Columbia, and a couple of Russian crashes in fifty years of spaceflight! I'd say their safety record is pretty darned good.
If a war breaks out between North and South, it will be the bloodiest and worse catastrophe in human history!
You haven't studied much history, have you? Ever hear of a little tussle called WWII, where millions of civilians were bombed, gassed, tortured, irradiated, and shot, where a a guy tried to exterminate an entire race of people?
The Korean war was a snowball fight between two five year olds in comparison.