I know NASA (and inherently the USA) has put more money than all the other nations involved (possibly combined) into the ISS.
Nonetheless, I think this is an example of a political maneuver to get those in charge of the money to wake up and realize that NASA has two huge projects on it's hands that need funding. Between ISS and Constellation, the NASA budget needs a bump or both of these will end up in the doldrums because of underfunding.
Remember at the end of Apollo when missions 18, 19, and 20 transitioned to Project Skylab? I think resolving what to do with ISS will be a matter of figuring out a new function for it to serve in the 20's and 30's. Hell... I'd like to see them tether it to a geosynchronous orbit and convert the thing into a space elevator to reduce the cost of energy needed to send 1 kg of material into space to less than $10k.
I can think of one approach that might work: build a really good analytics library that would measure various usability aspects.
A simple "Suggestion Box" would probably suffice. Firefox screws up a number of tasks that I give it from time-to-time. The single most beneficial feature they've ever added is that it recovers my open tabs after any crash, though. So in effect, I typically don't have to deal with the problems when they occur.
However, for weird stuff (e.g. plug-ins failing and then disabling themselves) it'd be nice to have an easy to find "Suggestion Box". I'd even accept an invitation to right click the toolbar area and choose "Customize Toolbar" to add "Suggestion Box" to replace the little "Home" button that I don't have a real use for.
More user-friendly to have 20 icons in the quick launch bar, apparently? whatever.
yes... the quick launch bar is for easy access to programs I run because Microsoft breaks the Start Menu by (a) taking 5 seconds to load it, (b) taking another 4 seconds to mouseover the "show all program folders" button, (c) not sorting the resulting list in any logical order, and (d) making it hard on Vista to click the "Run" execution button.
and the Desktop is for all files I'm working on before I've had a chance to categorize them into more appropriate folders.
When I sell things, I prefer to use Craigslist and keep it local. No shipping hassles, and the transaction happens face to face, in cash, so you're not worrying about electronic payment mishaps.
Incidentally... the state doesn't have much recourse for attempting to collect taxes from this transaction either. But you're such a small fish that they probably don't care either.
The affiliates that he's referring to are the seller's who do sell their wares on Amazon.com and ship the products themselves. Oftentimes this is seen in the Books section through the "Buy Used" link but just like on ebay.com there are Amazon.com "stores" that sell through the Amazon portal to increase their customer visibility over the internet.
Now, imagine if a conglomerate named SuperCorp teamed up with all the Walmart's and gave these customers a very easy way to buy things through the SuperCorp website and then get delivered from the local Walmart within one hour of clicking "Finish" in the online transaction. According to the "affiliate tax laws", SuperCorp or it's customers wouldn't be liable to pay taxes because of the "buying online" clause and the pretend "partnership agreements" that Amazon is exploiting by leveraging their own "affiliates".
In the end... states that have citizens who buy online to escape sales taxation are just going to end up with higher income tax... so the whole issue will eventually balance. On the other hand... my state of MA just voted to increase the sales tax 25% from $0.06 to $0.075 because the government is poor. I suppose people shopping at Amazon are laughing at those of us who still go to local markets.
This is exactly what happen in the mid-late 1700s and the reason the US is it's own country rather than part of the United Kingdom.
Two thoughts come to mind.
(a) you're oversimplifying a complex set of circumstances and opportunities which presented America with an opportunity to seek independence in the 1770's - for more information, I'd urge you to read Common Sense by Thomas Payne to clarify you've prospective of the time period preceding the war
(b) taxation WITH representation isn't so hot either
This ridiculous campaign is just here to piss me off.
If this was their main reason for running this campaign, I expect to see a follow-up article tomorrow proclaiming the grand success of the "IE8: Get the Facts" campaign.
I myself followed up the "CSS 2.1" claim and ended up on the Acid2 wikipedia page that states, "In December 2007, Microsoft announced that all the changes required to pass Acid2 would be made available in Internet Explorer 8, but that the changes would not be turned on by default, meaning that IE8 would not actually pass the test."
Implemented but turned off by default? Sounds like they STILL don't give a shit about standards.
Why do all articles that express certain ideas that haven't been implemented yet get the tag "goodluckwiththat" and articles that ideas that have just been implemented get "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense".
Does it speak to the pessimism of the community to influence technology towards the mass market or is the/. crowd just a bunch of crabby whiners?
Responding to the topic at hand... I don't think they should make the internet a regulated utility until such a time when the nation's government is capable of using it as a mechanism to broadcast emergency information/communication. For the time being, television for 1-way communication and telephone for 2-way communication are the standard and they should stay that way.
"Therefore, this article will not tell you to compile anything from source code, and no sentence begins with 'bring up the terminal' or any other UNIX techno-babble."
Thank you. There is no reason to bring up the terminal today on a modern Ubuntu installation. If there is, someone isn't doing their job right.
This discussion seems to be saying "Windows Power Users" are the wrong audience, and your post about "not needing a terminal" highlights this.
And I'd agree... Ubuntu is for brand-new computer users as well as Ph.D's in computer science, but is NOT for those people who learned "Windows" as a means to get their job done and earn a living. Those people (call them "Power Users" or PHB's or PFY's for what it's worth) are happy with whatever they are comfortable with.
As for the aspect of using a terminal in Ubuntu... I drop down to it when I want to do something productive that doesn't involve graphics. I do video editing, web design, and software installs in Ubuntu through the GUI... but programming, compiling, and debugging is still (at least for me) best suited for a Bash shell.
Re:Why is this review on /. ?
on
Space Vulture
·
· Score: 1
Mind control? And you didn't get your cut? That's a drag. Next time your friend tries to do that to you, at least make sure he's willing to buy a few rounds at the local bar so you can at least get some payback.
To be honest, I wish/. would feature more SF. I am much more likely to pick up some fiction than the lately Ruby of Rails rag.
Though to be really honest, I wish/. would feature a review of my SF book, 2076. I've still got a couple more edits to do before the publication date latest this year, but if the complaint about lifeless characters is the worst part of Space Vulture than I think I've at least got that problem taken care of. And it's free.
Would it be that hard for a WYSIWYG editor to implement a usable plain-text based editor to act as a fail-safe for users who actually know what's going on?
More than a decade ago I used to run Dreamweaver to create webpages, but most of my edits were done in the "html view". I could see Microsoft targeting a future where documents have a separate view which lets you see all the formatting mumbo-jumbo. Non-WYSIWYG isn't too hard to envision for a traditional Word Processor...
It just seems to act as a huge dumping ground, where anyone can put anything.
And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Fiction will be written by the well-off or well-patronized or hobbyists.
And as a reader, that's the way I like it. I *want* my authors to lead secure lives so they can distance their writing from their professional interests. To put it another way, I want authors who are passionate about their stories... not ones who are writing stories to put food on the table.
I can tell based on the attitude of your post that you've never attempted to write a book.
I'm curious what you do... but your opinion on writing meshes with different realities. Comparing writing to building a chair or selling video games is flawed. Good writing, like a good chair, is timeless. Games are almost never timeless. A best selling video game that comes out tomorrow will be replaced with 4 other alternatives with similar production quality before the end of the year. And unlike building a chair, in order to write a good book you need to produce something that's unique. For chairs, there is a certain amount of craftsmanship that you need to attain, but once you've spent 2 or 3 years studying the techniques you can produce magnificent chairs with a couple of days of labor. Using over-simplified math, a chair manufacturer might be able to create 100 chairs per year and sell then for $500 each to earn his $50k per year. This manufacturer will need 30-50 customers to sell her wares. An exceptional author might be able to create 2 books per year. At $20 a piece, the author needs to sell 1,250 copies of each book. This is 100x as many customers.
For unknown authors... these types of sales are astronomical. That's why authors can sell their books to publishers and get paid their "advance" which I've read is $10k for new authors. Even then, finding a publisher to do business with requires a large "sales" effort that costs the author time.
The other option... one that's quite attractive in the current technological climate... is publishing under-the-radar without a "major publisher" and then building a fanbase organically. This sort of effort takes years. And do you know why? Well, your other comparison was to the movie industry. These guys deliver a small bowl of entertainment goodness to their audience. For a moderately small investment of 2 hours, somebody in a theater can enjoy a movie. For books that take 10-30 hours to read, the audience is forced to be more discriminatory with their own valuable time. That is to say, books are like troughs and customers at Barnes and Nobles must browse through a football field full of troughs to find the one that they want to eat from for the next month. If you follow my analogy, it should quickly become apparent why guarding an authors copyright for 10-20 years is important. One year isn't enough. But I'll agree with you, seventy years after death is way too much.
This was one of my first thoughts as well. Unless companies can track the real value that consumers spend on products and services, the opportunity for companies to lie about profits is much to high.
When the IRS can't even figure out how to stop US Corporations from getting tax shelters to avoid paying their legal taxes, I'll never believe that organizations are going to honestly pay the suggested "percentage of income" that Doctorow is suggesting.
2. They already don't respect your license. Why would they respect this.
I have to disagree. Software pirates respect Creative Commons licenses. CC is a "free distribution" license. There isn't any way to distribute CC licensed material so that the person you give it to can't give it to all their friends for free.
The argument here, if I understand it correctly, is bridging the gap between the Non-commercial license and the No-derivatives license.
The fact is that MOST creative types that have an interest in profiting from their creations tend to distribute Non-Commercial AND No-derivatives to protect their investment.
A while back I had a plan to distribute my novel as NC-ND up until I was able to draw some pre-determined sum on money through monetary donations collected on my site. I have since abandoned that because $0 came in over the course of over a year.
But for the reader who isn't interested in reselling it or creating derivative works, as long as it is CC, then they don't care about the other terms of the license. Right?
Anybody remember stone soup? In this scenario, it appears that the CC license is the stone.
Yes! I remember stone soup! It's a great story. So that means Music is the carrots, Video is the potatoes, Writing is the chicken, and the Performers are all the herbs and spices that make the end dish taste fabulous.
Only trouble is... stone soup is meant to take input from an entire village, while the artistic creations of the world are only contributed from a reasonably modest percent of the population. The fact that *everybody* can enjoy them creates sort of an imbalance (though, I guess that's where the "percentage of revenue" comes into play).
If we don't, things might come to a point where we can't stand up anymore because we're just taken outside and shot. And nobody is allowed to say your name again under the same penalty.
Being Orwellian and way out there on purpose to drive the point home, of course.
You clearly never made it all the way through 1984, and while I can't speak for Animal Farm (because I haven't read it) I am going to have to call bullshit on this.
In the year-based-novel there are fake-public executions and then there is torture until you admit that anything the government says must be true. This is where 2+2=5 comes from. At no point do they pull you aside and shoot you for no apparent reason.
With "Safe Search" turned on, however... the most detailed picture that shows up is that of a kitten who was apparently trapped inside an ATM by one of these rent-a-cop security officers.
Yes, this certainly seems like an attempt to implement "The Evil Bit" for online advertisements, and that makes it a idea doomed to failure.
At the moment, the only site that's actually worthy of my whitelist is Slashdot. All other sites that I frequent have ads turned off because they've annoyed me. And sites that I don't go to frequently... well obviously they don't have good enough content to draw me back regularly. If they improve their content, then surely they'd become eligible for consideration on my advertisement white-list.
No... SiriusXM is just like AM/FM Radio that you have to pay for and you don't get commercials (on 97% of the music channels). You need their specialized equipment to receive/convert the signal... but as long as you have a clear view of the sky you can listen to any of their 180+ varied channels. They also offer an internet streaming service which is handy if you've got a Wifi hotspot that doesn't have a clear view of the sky (for instance, while you're sitting inside your home or office). This is the *only* non-live music I've paid for since the 90's.
All of my other music listening is either AM/FM radio or stuff on my iPod. The iPod is good... it's chuck full of Creative Commons licensed mp3s and bands from before the RIAA lawsuits. As far as I'm concerned, any type of pretending to "own" post-lawsuit music from any RIAA affiliated band is evil. And while I think the commercials on the radio are annoying... they aren't evil. And while paying for my Sirius radio is a burden on my pocketbook, it's also not evil. So, as far as I can tell... provided there is an option to isolate lala from the rest of my music connection, I am commiserate with anybody who gives them money for a service which seems to be comparable to internet radio if they offer it for cheap enough.
I've not saying that I don't think their business plan is intelligent... and I feel bad for any customers they get... but their "evilness" is not new. They seem to be copying evil music marketing techniques from others to see what works. Hell... doesn't Windows Media Player have a wizard for "Search entire hard drive and convert to Window Media Format" the first time you run it?
Slashdot Mirror
I know NASA (and inherently the USA) has put more money than all the other nations involved (possibly combined) into the ISS.
Nonetheless, I think this is an example of a political maneuver to get those in charge of the money to wake up and realize that NASA has two huge projects on it's hands that need funding. Between ISS and Constellation, the NASA budget needs a bump or both of these will end up in the doldrums because of underfunding.
Remember at the end of Apollo when missions 18, 19, and 20 transitioned to Project Skylab? I think resolving what to do with ISS will be a matter of figuring out a new function for it to serve in the 20's and 30's. Hell... I'd like to see them tether it to a geosynchronous orbit and convert the thing into a space elevator to reduce the cost of energy needed to send 1 kg of material into space to less than $10k.
So now the MSFT has embraced a Flash-like technology, does this count as "extending" it?
I trust Adobe slightly less than I trust Microsoft, but it seems like there is an "extinguish" in store for the near future.
Are there any Open Source vector-based web-development tools that could replace or compete with either of these formats/tools?
I can think of one approach that might work: build a really good analytics library that would measure various usability aspects.
A simple "Suggestion Box" would probably suffice. Firefox screws up a number of tasks that I give it from time-to-time. The single most beneficial feature they've ever added is that it recovers my open tabs after any crash, though. So in effect, I typically don't have to deal with the problems when they occur.
However, for weird stuff (e.g. plug-ins failing and then disabling themselves) it'd be nice to have an easy to find "Suggestion Box". I'd even accept an invitation to right click the toolbar area and choose "Customize Toolbar" to add "Suggestion Box" to replace the little "Home" button that I don't have a real use for.
More user-friendly to have 20 icons in the quick launch bar, apparently? whatever.
yes... the quick launch bar is for easy access to programs I run because Microsoft breaks the Start Menu by (a) taking 5 seconds to load it, (b) taking another 4 seconds to mouseover the "show all program folders" button, (c) not sorting the resulting list in any logical order, and (d) making it hard on Vista to click the "Run" execution button.
and the Desktop is for all files I'm working on before I've had a chance to categorize them into more appropriate folders.
When I sell things, I prefer to use Craigslist and keep it local. No shipping hassles, and the transaction happens face to face, in cash, so you're not worrying about electronic payment mishaps.
Incidentally... the state doesn't have much recourse for attempting to collect taxes from this transaction either. But you're such a small fish that they probably don't care either.
The affiliates that he's referring to are the seller's who do sell their wares on Amazon.com and ship the products themselves. Oftentimes this is seen in the Books section through the "Buy Used" link but just like on ebay.com there are Amazon.com "stores" that sell through the Amazon portal to increase their customer visibility over the internet.
Now, imagine if a conglomerate named SuperCorp teamed up with all the Walmart's and gave these customers a very easy way to buy things through the SuperCorp website and then get delivered from the local Walmart within one hour of clicking "Finish" in the online transaction. According to the "affiliate tax laws", SuperCorp or it's customers wouldn't be liable to pay taxes because of the "buying online" clause and the pretend "partnership agreements" that Amazon is exploiting by leveraging their own "affiliates".
In the end... states that have citizens who buy online to escape sales taxation are just going to end up with higher income tax... so the whole issue will eventually balance. On the other hand... my state of MA just voted to increase the sales tax 25% from $0.06 to $0.075 because the government is poor. I suppose people shopping at Amazon are laughing at those of us who still go to local markets.
This is exactly what happen in the mid-late 1700s and the reason the US is it's own country rather than part of the United Kingdom.
Two thoughts come to mind.
(a) you're oversimplifying a complex set of circumstances and opportunities which presented America with an opportunity to seek independence in the 1770's - for more information, I'd urge you to read Common Sense by Thomas Payne to clarify you've prospective of the time period preceding the war
(b) taxation WITH representation isn't so hot either
Camels with Wifi!
You joke, but Wifi Enabled Cows was one of my best drunken epiphanies for setting up ubiquitous broadband in Vermont.
Solar (or bio) power + access point = statewide coverage!
This ridiculous campaign is just here to piss me off.
If this was their main reason for running this campaign, I expect to see a follow-up article tomorrow proclaiming the grand success of the "IE8: Get the Facts" campaign.
I myself followed up the "CSS 2.1" claim and ended up on the Acid2 wikipedia page that states, "In December 2007, Microsoft announced that all the changes required to pass Acid2 would be made available in Internet Explorer 8, but that the changes would not be turned on by default, meaning that IE8 would not actually pass the test."
Implemented but turned off by default? Sounds like they STILL don't give a shit about standards.
Why do all articles that express certain ideas that haven't been implemented yet get the tag "goodluckwiththat" and articles that ideas that have just been implemented get "suddenoutbreakofcommonsense".
Does it speak to the pessimism of the community to influence technology towards the mass market or is the /. crowd just a bunch of crabby whiners?
Responding to the topic at hand... I don't think they should make the internet a regulated utility until such a time when the nation's government is capable of using it as a mechanism to broadcast emergency information/communication. For the time being, television for 1-way communication and telephone for 2-way communication are the standard and they should stay that way.
"Therefore, this article will not tell you to compile anything from source code, and no sentence begins with 'bring up the terminal' or any other UNIX techno-babble."
Thank you. There is no reason to bring up the terminal today on a modern Ubuntu installation. If there is, someone isn't doing their job right.
This discussion seems to be saying "Windows Power Users" are the wrong audience, and your post about "not needing a terminal" highlights this.
And I'd agree... Ubuntu is for brand-new computer users as well as Ph.D's in computer science, but is NOT for those people who learned "Windows" as a means to get their job done and earn a living. Those people (call them "Power Users" or PHB's or PFY's for what it's worth) are happy with whatever they are comfortable with.
As for the aspect of using a terminal in Ubuntu... I drop down to it when I want to do something productive that doesn't involve graphics. I do video editing, web design, and software installs in Ubuntu through the GUI... but programming, compiling, and debugging is still (at least for me) best suited for a Bash shell.
Mind control? And you didn't get your cut? That's a drag. Next time your friend tries to do that to you, at least make sure he's willing to buy a few rounds at the local bar so you can at least get some payback.
To be honest, I wish /. would feature more SF. I am much more likely to pick up some fiction than the lately Ruby of Rails rag.
Though to be really honest, I wish /. would feature a review of my SF book, 2076. I've still got a couple more edits to do before the publication date latest this year, but if the complaint about lifeless characters is the worst part of Space Vulture than I think I've at least got that problem taken care of. And it's free.
Would it be that hard for a WYSIWYG editor to implement a usable plain-text based editor to act as a fail-safe for users who actually know what's going on?
More than a decade ago I used to run Dreamweaver to create webpages, but most of my edits were done in the "html view". I could see Microsoft targeting a future where documents have a separate view which lets you see all the formatting mumbo-jumbo. Non-WYSIWYG isn't too hard to envision for a traditional Word Processor...
It just seems to act as a huge dumping ground, where anyone can put anything.
And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Fiction will be written by the well-off or well-patronized or hobbyists.
And as a reader, that's the way I like it. I *want* my authors to lead secure lives so they can distance their writing from their professional interests. To put it another way, I want authors who are passionate about their stories... not ones who are writing stories to put food on the table.
I can tell based on the attitude of your post that you've never attempted to write a book.
I'm curious what you do... but your opinion on writing meshes with different realities. Comparing writing to building a chair or selling video games is flawed. Good writing, like a good chair, is timeless. Games are almost never timeless. A best selling video game that comes out tomorrow will be replaced with 4 other alternatives with similar production quality before the end of the year. And unlike building a chair, in order to write a good book you need to produce something that's unique. For chairs, there is a certain amount of craftsmanship that you need to attain, but once you've spent 2 or 3 years studying the techniques you can produce magnificent chairs with a couple of days of labor. Using over-simplified math, a chair manufacturer might be able to create 100 chairs per year and sell then for $500 each to earn his $50k per year. This manufacturer will need 30-50 customers to sell her wares. An exceptional author might be able to create 2 books per year. At $20 a piece, the author needs to sell 1,250 copies of each book. This is 100x as many customers.
For unknown authors... these types of sales are astronomical. That's why authors can sell their books to publishers and get paid their "advance" which I've read is $10k for new authors. Even then, finding a publisher to do business with requires a large "sales" effort that costs the author time.
The other option... one that's quite attractive in the current technological climate... is publishing under-the-radar without a "major publisher" and then building a fanbase organically. This sort of effort takes years. And do you know why? Well, your other comparison was to the movie industry. These guys deliver a small bowl of entertainment goodness to their audience. For a moderately small investment of 2 hours, somebody in a theater can enjoy a movie. For books that take 10-30 hours to read, the audience is forced to be more discriminatory with their own valuable time. That is to say, books are like troughs and customers at Barnes and Nobles must browse through a football field full of troughs to find the one that they want to eat from for the next month. If you follow my analogy, it should quickly become apparent why guarding an authors copyright for 10-20 years is important. One year isn't enough. But I'll agree with you, seventy years after death is way too much.
This was one of my first thoughts as well. Unless companies can track the real value that consumers spend on products and services, the opportunity for companies to lie about profits is much to high.
When the IRS can't even figure out how to stop US Corporations from getting tax shelters to avoid paying their legal taxes, I'll never believe that organizations are going to honestly pay the suggested "percentage of income" that Doctorow is suggesting.
2. They already don't respect your license. Why would they respect this.
I have to disagree. Software pirates respect Creative Commons licenses. CC is a "free distribution" license. There isn't any way to distribute CC licensed material so that the person you give it to can't give it to all their friends for free.
The argument here, if I understand it correctly, is bridging the gap between the Non-commercial license and the No-derivatives license.
The fact is that MOST creative types that have an interest in profiting from their creations tend to distribute Non-Commercial AND No-derivatives to protect their investment.
A while back I had a plan to distribute my novel as NC-ND up until I was able to draw some pre-determined sum on money through monetary donations collected on my site. I have since abandoned that because $0 came in over the course of over a year.
But for the reader who isn't interested in reselling it or creating derivative works, as long as it is CC, then they don't care about the other terms of the license. Right?
Anybody remember stone soup? In this scenario, it appears that the CC license is the stone.
Yes! I remember stone soup! It's a great story. So that means Music is the carrots, Video is the potatoes, Writing is the chicken, and the Performers are all the herbs and spices that make the end dish taste fabulous.
Only trouble is... stone soup is meant to take input from an entire village, while the artistic creations of the world are only contributed from a reasonably modest percent of the population. The fact that *everybody* can enjoy them creates sort of an imbalance (though, I guess that's where the "percentage of revenue" comes into play).
If we don't, things might come to a point where we can't stand up anymore because we're just taken outside and shot. And nobody is allowed to say your name again under the same penalty.
Being Orwellian and way out there on purpose to drive the point home, of course.
You clearly never made it all the way through 1984, and while I can't speak for Animal Farm (because I haven't read it) I am going to have to call bullshit on this.
In the year-based-novel there are fake-public executions and then there is torture until you admit that anything the government says must be true. This is where 2+2=5 comes from. At no point do they pull you aside and shoot you for no apparent reason.
With "Safe Search" turned on, however... the most detailed picture that shows up is that of a kitten who was apparently trapped inside an ATM by one of these rent-a-cop security officers.
Yes, this certainly seems like an attempt to implement "The Evil Bit" for online advertisements, and that makes it a idea doomed to failure.
At the moment, the only site that's actually worthy of my whitelist is Slashdot. All other sites that I frequent have ads turned off because they've annoyed me. And sites that I don't go to frequently... well obviously they don't have good enough content to draw me back regularly. If they improve their content, then surely they'd become eligible for consideration on my advertisement white-list.
I'm no stranger to Jamendo. I also like librivox.
No... SiriusXM is just like AM/FM Radio that you have to pay for and you don't get commercials (on 97% of the music channels). You need their specialized equipment to receive/convert the signal... but as long as you have a clear view of the sky you can listen to any of their 180+ varied channels. They also offer an internet streaming service which is handy if you've got a Wifi hotspot that doesn't have a clear view of the sky (for instance, while you're sitting inside your home or office). This is the *only* non-live music I've paid for since the 90's.
All of my other music listening is either AM/FM radio or stuff on my iPod. The iPod is good... it's chuck full of Creative Commons licensed mp3s and bands from before the RIAA lawsuits. As far as I'm concerned, any type of pretending to "own" post-lawsuit music from any RIAA affiliated band is evil. And while I think the commercials on the radio are annoying... they aren't evil. And while paying for my Sirius radio is a burden on my pocketbook, it's also not evil. So, as far as I can tell... provided there is an option to isolate lala from the rest of my music connection, I am commiserate with anybody who gives them money for a service which seems to be comparable to internet radio if they offer it for cheap enough.
I've not saying that I don't think their business plan is intelligent... and I feel bad for any customers they get... but their "evilness" is not new. They seem to be copying evil music marketing techniques from others to see what works. Hell... doesn't Windows Media Player have a wizard for "Search entire hard drive and convert to Window Media Format" the first time you run it?