This reply is going to be painfully off topic for some of you, but I believe that it illustrates a common problem. Qweqwe321, I have no disagreement with the point you made, however, the way you phrased it made me want to beat my head against the desk. (I'm sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you. It's not just you!)
The term bleeding-edge has started popping up in recent years as a more 'hip' synonym to cutting-edge, (which apparently wasn't cutting it anymore). However, the way you used it: '....significantly more bleeding-edge....', made me stop and think about how two things could both be bleeding-edge, yet one be significantly more-so than the other? In order resolve this literary dissonance and enable myself to continue reading, I had to force myself to accepted that even a set so small as bleeding-edge could still be arranged as more and less-so. Unfortunately, I then finished your sentence.
Finding a traditional 'free market' is a difficult thing to do, because of conditions necessary for a market to be free. I still remember my 1st year business professor. She said: "really, the only people who have created a free market are the farmers. There are thousands of them, all selling an identical product, and the only real way to differentiate between that product is by price." At that point, I decided that I was never going back to the farm.
It seems to me that most market systems (like US style healthcare) are like a continuum, with corporate interests at one end and consumer interests on the other. The way you structure a system, and the rules you impose set the balance between the two.
Your quite right. Companies with little or no competition have no reason to charge 'less that the market will bear' nor are they even allowed, lest the shareholders sue. Further, the patients best interests are not served by the existence of a profit-taking middle-man acting as a gateway between themselves and the care they require.
The other problem with the 'free market in health care' is that people can't realistically op-out. If you hate paying car insurance, don't buy a car. If you hate banks, keep your money in a sock. But if you or your family gets sick, you need to see the doctor. They have you by the balls, and worse, they already have your money.
Sorry, the old car analogy has been tried many times in the past but it simply doesn't work here. Copy write infringement and theft are two different things that are being deliberately confused by those who want you to stop. Here's why: In order to steal something one must take it away from it's owner so they don't have it any more! At the car dealership you are stealing if you head into the lot, take a test drive, and when you're finished you drive off leaving the salesman in a cloud of dust shaking his fist at you. Downloading music is like going into that same dealership and after you take a test drive you photocopy the owners manual then go home and making an exact replica of the car you just test drove. Ya, I'm sure the salesman doesn't like it but in many countries around the world that's perfectly legal, providing you don't go into the business of selling them.
As for this argument that people will stop making music if everyone downloads it for free, I laugh. Philosophically speaking, I would wager music has been around longer than money, certainly longer than than the RIAA and the big producers have been, why then do some people feel that if they disappear so will music? Many artists do what they do because it's a labour of love. The big record producers know this, as evidenced by the pitiful contracts they try to sign new acts to. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the music industry will be able to continue on as it has been. Those performers who rely on a massive marketing machine for popularity, the Britney's and the 50dy's if you will, may not be around forever. Frankly, I don't care. Adam Smith called it the Invisible hand of the Market and right now it's giving some record companies a bi%@h slap for all the sh!t they've pulled in the past. If anyone out there cares so much about the record companies, head down to the RIAA and write them a fat check. Me, I'll support the acts I like by going to their show, at which time, I'll buy their album and I'll probably even buy a T-shirt.
Ya it's kind of strange isn't it? You wander down almost any street and you can find somebody to say black is white, yet only on Slashdot are these types paid any heed. It's like people who purport learning and intelligence have forgotten the most important lesson any school can teach: filter out the BS!
Hello,
I couldn't help but spot this argument and decided to throw my two cents in.
Firstly you are correct when you say that the world before modern medicine was a pretty shi**y place. Almost anything could kill you, like, say a broken leg which could leads to loss of blood or infection. Brain trauma, giving birth was a particularly dangerous undertaking, and a chariot accident was no picnic either. Anything like that happens to me and or someone I care about and you'll see me taking them to the hospital without delay. Western Medicine simply has no equal at this kind of thing.
On the other side of the coin, we are living FAR longer than we ever did in the past (due mainly to proper nutrition and sanitation!) and Western Medicine has a far poorer track-record dealing with the new diseases of the affluent world; Cancers, arthritis, diabetes, joint deterioration and so on (you're getting old!). So our society is re-examining what it means to be healthy. Back in the day, the absence of disease or obvious injury was enough, now health is something that can be achieved to a greater or lesser degree. This means that no matter how healthy you are now, you can always strive to better your condition. (Stop eating all those fatty foods!) The UN now defines health something like this: The complete physical, mental, social, spiritual and (something-else-I-can't-pull-off-the-top-of-my-hea d-this-instant, Google it if you actually care) state of well being. This is where the more 'traditional' medicines are making a strong comeback along with new ideas of how to live healthy.
Cheers,
Socguy.
John Stewart is a very smart man and he knows free publicity when he sees it. When a particularly funny bit comes along why not post it? Really, what are they protecting? Who is going to pay for episode of TDS from a week ago or even last year? It's comedy that's very time sensitive, making past episodes of limited value on resale, however it can still be great advertising!
OK, so I'm not the most knowledgeable guy when it comes to all things computer, so perhaps someone could help me out here.
From the articles I've been reading it seems that these compromised computers formed into herds are becoming a huge problem, (SPAM, DOS attacks and so on). In this article it says that they communicate with each other to pass instructions through their own P2P network. Now, the security researchers are intelligent folks, more intelligent that the herders I would hope, so why don't they start going for the source of this problem as opposed to simply reporting about it? Why can't they try to interfere with, or try to wrest control of the herd? If they could gain control of the network, even for a brief period, they could order all the bots to Windows Update to patch themselves, then disassemble.
Obviously, I'm making sound easier than it would be, but could something like this not work?
Not at all. I'm sure a few are, but there *are* a growing number of scientists coming out and saying 'Whoa...we haven't studied this enough' and there *is* credible evidence that the Sun has far more to do with the recent warming than our contributions. No there isn't, what we do have is an increasingly organized skeptical community giving the impression of such.
Attacking the messenger is valid when no one can think of three successes in 25 years. I mean, it seems to be that betting AGAINST the UN would be a safer bet because the odds are heavily skewed against the UN! Past performance is an indicator of the future. The list of UN successes is as long as your arm, which you may find if you google UN successes. Just because you choose to remain ignorant of them is not an argument against the success of the organization. In terms of peacekeeping Cyprus and Namibia continue to stand out as successes but are scantly reported in the global press precisely because headlines like "peace reigns in Cyprus and Namibia" are hardly eye-catching. Politically, they held a successful general election in Kosovo. Now I could go on but what's the point really?
Fact is that the climate changes all the time. We have global cooling and enter ice ages and then we have global warming to get us out. Sometimes we cool form within an ice age and warm we are not in one. It's 100% natural. The earth *can* gradually warm and cool on it's own but we have reems of scientific data showing us that WE are primarily responsible this time. Further, we know that by allowing this change to continue, there will be significant economic and quality of life issues arising.
...show their true agenda (the end of capitalism) Capitalism thrives on opportunity and there is no better opportunity than a large scale disruption. If you're a true capitalist you should be salivating at the opportunities presented by a long term disruption/replacement of the energy market. Factory owners profited from the industrial revolution (a new class was born), Rockefeller got rich off Oil (whalers went bankrupt), IBM and Microsoft profited mightily from the computer revolution (office building full of accountants emptied and typewriter companies vanished; Xerox saw it coming and adapted, now it's more profitable than ever). If you think that by fearing change and opposing investment in technology because it's 'expensive' or 'I hate environmentalists' is the way to run an economy then you have already killed capitalism in your country and I look forward to selling you technology at a premium.
Why does spreading democracy require a global democratic body? Because there are some problems that which require global attention, hence a global body to make decisions. What would the point of making each nation democratic if we allow a large multinational body to be autocratic?
Firstly, she's not a lawyer but a paralegal and this offends some people who seem to believe that only those who've passed the bar have the necessary mental acuity required to effectively navigate the morass of legalese found in the courtroom.
Secondly, lot's of people don't believe that PJ would devote so much time to supposed 'hobby' unless she is getting some kind of compensation. Well, I believe it. If someone is enjoying whatever they do, then that is often the reward in itself. How many hours do people spend on their cars, or building model ships-in-a-bottle? Why is it so hard to believe that someone may spend a couple hours a day on a subject they obviously enjoy?
I agree but it's not just suburbia that is wasteful. We in North America, (and other parts of the world) have based our prosperity off the exploitation of cheap natural resources, while utterly failing to take into account the true cost that the exploitation. We developed all aspects of our society on the assumption that we will always be able to continue with an endlessly escalating usage of all our resources. Simply substituting one fuel for another, may buy us some time but it will ultimately fail to address the root of the problem, which is unsustainable consumption. In order to finally tackle the greenhouse gas problem (frankly ALL environmental problems!) we are going to have to use less (of everything). How we accomplish this is going to be interesting, we may finally have to account (and pay) a full replacement value for that which nature provides us, or (more likely) some people are simply going to have less access to resources that we once took for granted, as those who can pay will increasingly have preferential access.
Porn as a product is an interesting one. As a commodity, it's marketplace is almost unsaturateable. So the only real downside for a porn company having paying subscribers reposting material is the potential loss of an individual subscription. I say potential because there is no guarantee that they would have paid you in the first place, and like the other guy said, if they like what they see they might drop by and actually sign up ('probly not but a few will). But, by actually cancelling a subscription they ARE losing a paying customer. In a marketplace that can't be saturated, all you need to do is spit as much product out as possible because the market will always be there. Your customers will not pay for something they have previously viewed anyway, so your inventory is not really worth as much as one might imagine. In this light, there is absolutely no upside to cancelling a subscription, it can only cost money; either in tech investment, or employee time to actually remove the client.
My favorite bug-as-a-feature occurred in the original Mario bros. game for the NES. I suppose it wasn't so much a feature as simply a bug in the game Since it was only availible at one point in the game. Somewhere, I thing in the third world, as you were climbing the end pyramid you could jump on a descending koopa and, provided you did it just right, Mario would keep bouncing off the koopa shell as it would ricochet back and forth off the step. Soon, you would begin receiving credit for your continued bouncing in the form of extra lives. After a time your number of lives would climb so high that the game began representing them as various other graphical elements from the game; bricks, pipes etc. Unfortunately, if you left it too long (20 mins. +) the game would simply kill Mario. I suspect that the console simply ran out of memory to hold your fantastic number of lives and this was a safeguard to prevent the console from locking up.
The only time I've ever been able to exploit this was on the original NES. Even the Super Mario all-stars SNES version will not reproduce this.
As a much younger individual, this nearly unlimited lives 'feature' was the only way I could beat Bowser and it led to some interesting conversations with my school friends at the time.
I believe that the article says that they keep records for one month. Enough time? I don't know, but it must be for them. In any regard, I doubt they tell students about this policy.
Would you care to guess what percentage of the live venues in this country are controlled by media conglomerates like Clear Channel? I don't have exact numbers, myself, but the number is high. Companies like Clear Channel have been spending massive amounts of money for years buying up live venues, from the big stadiums all the way down to the local dive bars that have been the traditional homes of independent music. Worrying indeed.
Here's an exercise for the reader. Go start or join a band that plays live original music. Go try to make money at it. Then, and only then, can you spout off on the Internet about how wonderful the world will be when no one can make money off selling recordings anymore. Then, and only then, do you have the experience to talk about how wonderful a life of slogging through gigs will be. ... And starting an independent business is a walk in the park, what with all the late night payroll and accounting work, bank loans, advertising etc. If you don't like it don't do it. No one ever said that working for a living was easy.
Sorry man,
IF it ever get to the point that the entire music industry as we know it crumbles I won't be losing any sleep; it's not like the richness of my life will be sacrificed if I'm denied the next manufactured bubblegum pop song that rockets to the top of TRL. But either way, as long as there are some people willing to pay for such trash, (people like you perhaps?) someone out there will be filling that market.
Music has been around a lot longer than the recording industry, so why would you assume that if the recording industry goes belly up it will take music with it?
In North America public opinion has finally begun to seriously consider taking action on climate change. I see a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, people are now starting to see the effects of climate change on the world around them. Through the late 60s and 70s science told us what might happen. Then in the 80s and 90s the science established itself and the public heard that this is what is going to happen. Now in the 00s people are really starting to see more and more of the dramatic local effects of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, through things like melting ice caps, new invasive species and diseases, multiple storms of unusual intensity, changes in local precipitation and so on - basically what was predicted in the 80s/90s.
If you take history into account, people are not so good at acting preemptively. With acid rain, we didn't do much till the fish started dying and the trees turned yellow. With the Ozone hole, NASA had pretty pictures of a huge hole over the Antarctic. Now that we are starting to feel the effects of climate change people are a little more serious about dealing with it.
Secondly, I think a lot of it has to do with the boomers. Demographers know that they are the most powerful demographic by their shear size; consequently they tend to control public policy. Currently, the baby boomers are getting older and they are exiting the workforce. They have had their fun and are now getting ready for retirement so more and more they are thinking about their legacy. What are future generations are going to think of them and what are they leaving behind? If their parents were know as the greatest generation, do they really want to be known as the generation who squandered the world?
Remember the hysteria from the 1980's? Weren't we all supposed to be dead from AIDS by now? Unless of course, it actually turned out to be a disease almost exclusively associated with risky behavior, that is. Actually AIDS throughout the 80s was stigmatized as a homosexual disease. Due to this, education about the disease and how it could be transmitted was very hard to come by leading to it's contraction by many people that need not have contracted it if they had exercised an ounce of prevention.
And speaking of behavior, homosexuality is a one-hundred-percent behavior-evidenced phenomenon. Tell me which part of the brain was identified as causing homosexuality? Or which sequence of DNA? Which hormone? That's right. Homosexuality, much like stealing or race-car driving, is only proven through behavior. Unlike, say, race or sex, which are quite clearly immutable genetic characteristics. What business is it of yours whom your fellow Americans sleep with?
Why is it that the solution for global warming is the same as it was for global cooling? Why is it that all of these supposed disasters share this feature alone: that the solution is always a wish-list of leftist political, social, or economic theory imposed by force of law upon as much of the world as possible? Meanwhile, there is a real war going on which gets less coverage than dead white women, when there are dead white women to be had, anyway. The solution for global warming is controlling sulfates, aerosols and other particulate air pollution that reflects sunlight? But seriously, as a foreigner who is currently being enriched by the US's dependence on foreign oil, by all means keep it up. FYI, I think your 'eggs in one basket' approach to all your energy needs is great national security policy and I look forward to selling you alternate technology one day as the price of oil slowly outstrips your economic ability to pay for it.
As for the rest of the nonsense you post: The earth's atmosphere is in a rough equilibrium with amount of CO2 released by natural resperation and absorbed by processes such as photosynthesis. However, our reliance on fossil fuels has tipped the balance by introducing another massive source of CO2 that was previously sequestered.
Also, you're forgetting one important little fact: transference of energy. The earth does not perpetually warm. It loses heat through the various layers of the atmosphere into outter space... ... and by introducing a gas known to trap heat, CO2, we can insulate the earth causing the transference of energy to slow down thereby resulting in a warming of the surface of the earth.
...further contributing to the heat death of the universe. WTF are you smoking, WTF does this have to do with anything?!?
Slashdot Mirror
This reply is going to be painfully off topic for some of you, but I believe that it illustrates a common problem. Qweqwe321, I have no disagreement with the point you made, however, the way you phrased it made me want to beat my head against the desk. (I'm sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you. It's not just you!)
The term bleeding-edge has started popping up in recent years as a more 'hip' synonym to cutting-edge, (which apparently wasn't cutting it anymore). However, the way you used it: '....significantly more bleeding-edge....', made me stop and think about how two things could both be bleeding-edge, yet one be significantly more-so than the other? In order resolve this literary dissonance and enable myself to continue reading, I had to force myself to accepted that even a set so small as bleeding-edge could still be arranged as more and less-so. Unfortunately, I then finished your sentence.
I beg you all, stop F@#king with my head.
S.
Finding a traditional 'free market' is a difficult thing to do, because of conditions necessary for a market to be free. I still remember my 1st year business professor. She said: "really, the only people who have created a free market are the farmers. There are thousands of them, all selling an identical product, and the only real way to differentiate between that product is by price." At that point, I decided that I was never going back to the farm.
It seems to me that most market systems (like US style healthcare) are like a continuum, with corporate interests at one end and consumer interests on the other. The way you structure a system, and the rules you impose set the balance between the two.
Your quite right. Companies with little or no competition have no reason to charge 'less that the market will bear' nor are they even allowed, lest the shareholders sue. Further, the patients best interests are not served by the existence of a profit-taking middle-man acting as a gateway between themselves and the care they require.
The other problem with the 'free market in health care' is that people can't realistically op-out. If you hate paying car insurance, don't buy a car. If you hate banks, keep your money in a sock. But if you or your family gets sick, you need to see the doctor. They have you by the balls, and worse, they already have your money.
....except the environment, GHG, and uninsured human lives.
Sorry, the old car analogy has been tried many times in the past but it simply doesn't work here. Copy write infringement and theft are two different things that are being deliberately confused by those who want you to stop. Here's why: In order to steal something one must take it away from it's owner so they don't have it any more! At the car dealership you are stealing if you head into the lot, take a test drive, and when you're finished you drive off leaving the salesman in a cloud of dust shaking his fist at you. Downloading music is like going into that same dealership and after you take a test drive you photocopy the owners manual then go home and making an exact replica of the car you just test drove. Ya, I'm sure the salesman doesn't like it but in many countries around the world that's perfectly legal, providing you don't go into the business of selling them.
As for this argument that people will stop making music if everyone downloads it for free, I laugh. Philosophically speaking, I would wager music has been around longer than money, certainly longer than than the RIAA and the big producers have been, why then do some people feel that if they disappear so will music? Many artists do what they do because it's a labour of love. The big record producers know this, as evidenced by the pitiful contracts they try to sign new acts to. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the music industry will be able to continue on as it has been. Those performers who rely on a massive marketing machine for popularity, the Britney's and the 50dy's if you will, may not be around forever. Frankly, I don't care. Adam Smith called it the Invisible hand of the Market and right now it's giving some record companies a bi%@h slap for all the sh!t they've pulled in the past. If anyone out there cares so much about the record companies, head down to the RIAA and write them a fat check. Me, I'll support the acts I like by going to their show, at which time, I'll buy their album and I'll probably even buy a T-shirt.
Ya it's kind of strange isn't it? You wander down almost any street and you can find somebody to say black is white, yet only on Slashdot are these types paid any heed. It's like people who purport learning and intelligence have forgotten the most important lesson any school can teach: filter out the BS!
Thanks, good to know I didn't waste all that money in school for nothing ;)
Hello, I couldn't help but spot this argument and decided to throw my two cents in.
a d-this-instant, Google it if you actually care) state of well being. This is where the more 'traditional' medicines are making a strong comeback along with new ideas of how to live healthy.
Cheers,
Socguy.
Firstly you are correct when you say that the world before modern medicine was a pretty shi**y place. Almost anything could kill you, like, say a broken leg which could leads to loss of blood or infection. Brain trauma, giving birth was a particularly dangerous undertaking, and a chariot accident was no picnic either. Anything like that happens to me and or someone I care about and you'll see me taking them to the hospital without delay. Western Medicine simply has no equal at this kind of thing.
On the other side of the coin, we are living FAR longer than we ever did in the past (due mainly to proper nutrition and sanitation!) and Western Medicine has a far poorer track-record dealing with the new diseases of the affluent world; Cancers, arthritis, diabetes, joint deterioration and so on (you're getting old!). So our society is re-examining what it means to be healthy. Back in the day, the absence of disease or obvious injury was enough, now health is something that can be achieved to a greater or lesser degree. This means that no matter how healthy you are now, you can always strive to better your condition. (Stop eating all those fatty foods!) The UN now defines health something like this: The complete physical, mental, social, spiritual and (something-else-I-can't-pull-off-the-top-of-my-he
John Stewart is a very smart man and he knows free publicity when he sees it. When a particularly funny bit comes along why not post it? Really, what are they protecting? Who is going to pay for episode of TDS from a week ago or even last year? It's comedy that's very time sensitive, making past episodes of limited value on resale, however it can still be great advertising!
OK, so I'm not the most knowledgeable guy when it comes to all things computer, so perhaps someone could help me out here.
From the articles I've been reading it seems that these compromised computers formed into herds are becoming a huge problem, (SPAM, DOS attacks and so on). In this article it says that they communicate with each other to pass instructions through their own P2P network. Now, the security researchers are intelligent folks, more intelligent that the herders I would hope, so why don't they start going for the source of this problem as opposed to simply reporting about it? Why can't they try to interfere with, or try to wrest control of the herd? If they could gain control of the network, even for a brief period, they could order all the bots to Windows Update to patch themselves, then disassemble.
Obviously, I'm making sound easier than it would be, but could something like this not work?
If by ITU you mean International Telecommunication Union, it's been a United Nations agency since 1947.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/I/ITU.html
...show their true agenda (the end of capitalism) Capitalism thrives on opportunity and there is no better opportunity than a large scale disruption. If you're a true capitalist you should be salivating at the opportunities presented by a long term disruption/replacement of the energy market. Factory owners profited from the industrial revolution (a new class was born), Rockefeller got rich off Oil (whalers went bankrupt), IBM and Microsoft profited mightily from the computer revolution (office building full of accountants emptied and typewriter companies vanished; Xerox saw it coming and adapted, now it's more profitable than ever). If you think that by fearing change and opposing investment in technology because it's 'expensive' or 'I hate environmentalists' is the way to run an economy then you have already killed capitalism in your country and I look forward to selling you technology at a premium.PJ has ruffled lots of feathers.
Firstly, she's not a lawyer but a paralegal and this offends some people who seem to believe that only those who've passed the bar have the necessary mental acuity required to effectively navigate the morass of legalese found in the courtroom.
Secondly, lot's of people don't believe that PJ would devote so much time to supposed 'hobby' unless she is getting some kind of compensation. Well, I believe it. If someone is enjoying whatever they do, then that is often the reward in itself. How many hours do people spend on their cars, or building model ships-in-a-bottle? Why is it so hard to believe that someone may spend a couple hours a day on a subject they obviously enjoy?
Me and my mod points are going to maintain a distance of no less than 3 articles from this inevitable flame-fest.
I agree but it's not just suburbia that is wasteful. We in North America, (and other parts of the world) have based our prosperity off the exploitation of cheap natural resources, while utterly failing to take into account the true cost that the exploitation. We developed all aspects of our society on the assumption that we will always be able to continue with an endlessly escalating usage of all our resources. Simply substituting one fuel for another, may buy us some time but it will ultimately fail to address the root of the problem, which is unsustainable consumption. In order to finally tackle the greenhouse gas problem (frankly ALL environmental problems!) we are going to have to use less (of everything). How we accomplish this is going to be interesting, we may finally have to account (and pay) a full replacement value for that which nature provides us, or (more likely) some people are simply going to have less access to resources that we once took for granted, as those who can pay will increasingly have preferential access.
Porn as a product is an interesting one. As a commodity, it's marketplace is almost unsaturateable. So the only real downside for a porn company having paying subscribers reposting material is the potential loss of an individual subscription. I say potential because there is no guarantee that they would have paid you in the first place, and like the other guy said, if they like what they see they might drop by and actually sign up ('probly not but a few will). But, by actually cancelling a subscription they ARE losing a paying customer. In a marketplace that can't be saturated, all you need to do is spit as much product out as possible because the market will always be there. Your customers will not pay for something they have previously viewed anyway, so your inventory is not really worth as much as one might imagine. In this light, there is absolutely no upside to cancelling a subscription, it can only cost money; either in tech investment, or employee time to actually remove the client.
My favorite bug-as-a-feature occurred in the original Mario bros. game for the NES. I suppose it wasn't so much a feature as simply a bug in the game Since it was only availible at one point in the game. Somewhere, I thing in the third world, as you were climbing the end pyramid you could jump on a descending koopa and, provided you did it just right, Mario would keep bouncing off the koopa shell as it would ricochet back and forth off the step. Soon, you would begin receiving credit for your continued bouncing in the form of extra lives. After a time your number of lives would climb so high that the game began representing them as various other graphical elements from the game; bricks, pipes etc. Unfortunately, if you left it too long (20 mins. +) the game would simply kill Mario. I suspect that the console simply ran out of memory to hold your fantastic number of lives and this was a safeguard to prevent the console from locking up.
The only time I've ever been able to exploit this was on the original NES. Even the Super Mario all-stars SNES version will not reproduce this.
As a much younger individual, this nearly unlimited lives 'feature' was the only way I could beat Bowser and it led to some interesting conversations with my school friends at the time.
Me: So I beat Bowser last night!
Friend: Cool! How many lives were you down to?
Me: Uhhh, pipe?
Friend: Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
I believe that the article says that they keep records for one month. Enough time? I don't know, but it must be for them. In any regard, I doubt they tell students about this policy.
Here's an exercise for the reader. Go start or join a band that plays live original music. Go try to make money at it. Then, and only then, can you spout off on the Internet about how wonderful the world will be when no one can make money off selling recordings anymore. Then, and only then, do you have the experience to talk about how wonderful a life of slogging through gigs will be. ... And starting an independent business is a walk in the park, what with all the late night payroll and accounting work, bank loans, advertising etc. If you don't like it don't do it. No one ever said that working for a living was easy.
Sorry man, IF it ever get to the point that the entire music industry as we know it crumbles I won't be losing any sleep; it's not like the richness of my life will be sacrificed if I'm denied the next manufactured bubblegum pop song that rockets to the top of TRL. But either way, as long as there are some people willing to pay for such trash, (people like you perhaps?) someone out there will be filling that market.
Music has been around a lot longer than the recording industry, so why would you assume that if the recording industry goes belly up it will take music with it?
In North America public opinion has finally begun to seriously consider taking action on climate change. I see a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, people are now starting to see the effects of climate change on the world around them. Through the late 60s and 70s science told us what might happen. Then in the 80s and 90s the science established itself and the public heard that this is what is going to happen. Now in the 00s people are really starting to see more and more of the dramatic local effects of increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere, through things like melting ice caps, new invasive species and diseases, multiple storms of unusual intensity, changes in local precipitation and so on - basically what was predicted in the 80s/90s.
If you take history into account, people are not so good at acting preemptively. With acid rain, we didn't do much till the fish started dying and the trees turned yellow. With the Ozone hole, NASA had pretty pictures of a huge hole over the Antarctic. Now that we are starting to feel the effects of climate change people are a little more serious about dealing with it.
Secondly, I think a lot of it has to do with the boomers. Demographers know that they are the most powerful demographic by their shear size; consequently they tend to control public policy. Currently, the baby boomers are getting older and they are exiting the workforce. They have had their fun and are now getting ready for retirement so more and more they are thinking about their legacy. What are future generations are going to think of them and what are they leaving behind? If their parents were know as the greatest generation, do they really want to be known as the generation who squandered the world?
As for the rest of the nonsense you post: The earth's atmosphere is in a rough equilibrium with amount of CO2 released by natural resperation and absorbed by processes such as photosynthesis. However, our reliance on fossil fuels has tipped the balance by introducing another massive source of CO2 that was previously sequestered.
Also, you're forgetting one important little fact: transference of energy. The earth does not perpetually warm. It loses heat through the various layers of the atmosphere into outter space... ... and by introducing a gas known to trap heat, CO2, we can insulate the earth causing the transference of energy to slow down thereby resulting in a warming of the surface of the earth.
...further contributing to the heat death of the universe. WTF are you smoking, WTF does this have to do with anything?!?