Absolutely. Their unceasing quest to defeat Google and Apple has only hurt them in the long run. I remember a Slashdot poster a long time ago that said they'd be better off to give up and focus on their software, and they were correct. The new versions of their flagship software seem as if they completely ignored user input, and I have to think that they've got a great deal of their HCI focus on the Internet game. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel as a sphere, they should be focusing on fixing those squeaky axles and making the car run smarter and faster. If MS came out with a new version of Windows that used up LESS memory, that ran faster but utilized new features and the latest in design techniques, they would have no troubles reasserting their place at the forefront of the industry. They'd sell tons of copies simply because they're already on the top of the game and it would be a serious improvement. But while trying to beat Apple at the interface game (which they can't win, because Apple is passionately devoted to just that), they're losing the war. Microsoft would do better to listen to Kanye West: "Harder, Better, Faster, STRONGER!"
What's wrong with redaction? You save all the documents, then "redact" the ones that aren't suitable for consumption by whatever level will be seeing it. There's no reason that presidential records should not be kept at LEAST for a few years after the term is over. If I remember correctly, Mr. Thompson, you were very much for record-keeping when it came to the 1996 Presidential campaign.
Actually, South Park Studios is not part of the WGA. Very few of the animation writers are. Only FOX animation writers are in the guild because they lobbied for it a few years back.
Nobody wants to do experiments on babies. Well, some do, but that's not the issue here. But if you have the choice between discarding those embryos as human waste or using them in the hopes that you can improve the quality of life for humans everywhere, including babies, why would you possibly object to that on moral grounds? Do you object to someone donating organs after they have passed on? There is a certain nobility to sacrificing oneself for the betterment of the group when it is clear that you are not going to survive. If you really do believe that an embryo is equivalent to a baby, I can't imagine why you would choose to let them die pointlessly instead of making their existence have at least some sort of purpose.
The only reason they've needed record companies is because something like the Internet didn't exist. We JUST got to the point where streaming full quality audio/video is a viable option for mass distribution less than five years ago. That's hardly enough time to claim that this system doesn't work. The fact that someone of Radiohead's caliber is trying it means that it DOES work.
Besides, as mentioned before, they don't need a record label as much as they need a promotional agency. Once such agencies exist that can get artists on the radio or in magazines, the game is OVER. But don't cry a tear for the big labels anyway. If they hadn't turned their organization into a machine that shoves all the real talent onto independent labels, they might still be surviving.
Look, I'm deeply, deeply disappointed with the performance of this Congress. We need ways to get these corrupt individuals out of office and new ones in.
But I think refusing to pay taxes won't really affect them nearly as much as finding ways to eliminate their job security. We came close to pushing one of the bad ones out with Lieberman. If we'd succeeded, we would have scared a great deal of people into paying attention. Notice what happens there? We need more participation in the system, not less. Gandhi didn't live in a representative government. We do. In the best case scenario, what you are advocating would be meaningless. Most likely, though, the kind of crisis you want to bring about would lead to a dictatorship.
Oh, and thinking that people would actually invest the money from taxes instead of feeding it back to the corporations is the most dangerously naive thing I've ever heard. All that would happen would be that the public services that are already woefully underfunded would continue deteriorating, and I'm sure that there are plenty of companies that would be quite happy to sponsor highway maintenance, public education and more. They'd just want a little bit of advertising is all.
So support candidates who push for true campaign finance reform, term limits, or whatever else could clean up Washington. It's been done before and it can be done again, but the first step is to stop thinking that not caring and not supporting the government will do anything except bring the worst kind of people into power. WHether you believe it or not, there ARE other people in the world who want change, and some of them actually run for office instead of just bitching and campaigning for stupid causes that will never work.
Take a look at the last eight years and take a look at Al Gore and try telling me again that it doesn't matter who gets into office. Refusing to pay taxes assumes that the people in office aren't too corrupted by the system to accept change, and that's a false assumption. When people stop supporting the good candidates, all that's left are the people who support the bad candidates.
That's completely ludicrous. You don't solve anything by not paying the federal government, you just really, really risk jail time and completely obliterate funding for anything worthwhile. The government is not some mystical entity, it is us. Treating it as if it is some kind of outside force that we have no way to influence is not only inaccurate, it is the very thought process that these people feed upon. As long as people think that it's impossible to fix what's wrong with this country, they can do whatever they want.
You can't dream of being the next Rolling Stones YET. Just because the system isn't in place yet doesn't mean it's implausible. If more bands keep developing from the ground up, radio stations will eventually play them no matter what label they're on. Beyond that, why couldn't hiring a good marketing firm accomplish the same thing? Why is it necessary to sign away your copyright?
Besides, many of the bands that actually get airplay these days are developed by the record companies themselves. One of my favorite bands was simply dropped from their label. Not because of slow album sales or because they weren't marketable, because they refused to do a cover of "All You Need is Love" for a Chase credit card commercial. So I guess I just don't see the labels really doing that much anymore for the wide majority of their artists.
That said, I would absolutely LOVE to see artists on the level of The Rolling Stones start stabbing their labels in the back by getting rid of them and marketing their own material once they got some measure of notoriety.
I don't want to intrude, but how many EPs do you normally sell? And when you do, how much of that do you actually keep? I'd just be interested in further statistics, because I am one of the people who think this would actually work for smaller bands.
Those bands are already being downloaded. That's how approximately 50% of new fans at their concerts found them, I'd wager. At least if they offered a donation system, they'd let their hardcore fans support them directly. To say that this wouldn't work for smaller bands just seems crazy to me, because smaller bands don't sell nearly as many albums anyway. But the fans that they have tend to be a lot more hardcore, so you'd likely see a greater percentage of people who download paying for it. Everyone knows Radiohead is successful, that's why a lot of people felt comfortable taking it for free. But how many people would pay a premium to support an unknown band that they really liked?
More than likely, much of the public simply doesn't watch news on cable networks at all. Network news regularly gets quadruple the ratings Bill O'Reilly wishes he got. And most, if not all, liberal news junkies do their reading online. Or watch the Daily Show, which gets relatively comparable (but lower) ratings.
The only way to measure bias in the news media is how much they talk about liberals and how much they talk about conservatives. But the primary bias in cable news isn't really partisan so much as it is sensationalized. It eschews what is and focuses on what could be. It also lets the people on their shows say just about anything they want without questioning whether or not there's truth to it. That's the primary reason I don't watch cable news. I want to seek out truth, and they want to seek out little girls in trouble and celebrities doing stupid crap.
That's a faulty analogy unless you're talking about someone who doesn't have money to buy their own car. You didn't start out with all the tools you needed to succeed, you acquired them over time. There are plenty of awfully intelligent people that didn't have access to the resources you did or else they'd be in your position as well. It's easy enough to say now that you didn't want an education, road crews, fire departments, etc. You still knew you could fall back upon these services if you needed them, and that safety allowed you to feel comfortable enough to focus on working instead of living. Just because you don't seek these services out doesn't mean you don't use them. If you grew up in another country, I'd say you had a legitimate complaint. Otherwise, it's just an attempt to morally justify greed.
I absolutely agree with the liberty part of libertarian, particularly when it comes to personal freedoms. The problem I have with it is the logic that you (not you specifically) don't owe society anything because your life reached its only natural conclusion, and that in any other circumstance, you would have still pulled through. Hogwash. Did you use anything created by society? Doctors? Public schools? Roads? If so, you have an obligation to provide for that society when you succeed. Capitalism is not an equal philosophy by definition, it relies on some people rising to the top so that others at the bottom can aspire to one day get there. But once you're at the top, you'd best humble yourself and realize that no matter how much work you did, no matter how smart you are, you depend on others in our society to achieve your goals. More specifically, you rely on others in society to keep that society going.
Anyone who participates in a capitalist society and is rewarded should recognize that without the millions of people who can't reach that peak continuing to follow the rules of society, nobody would be able to at all. If you want to live like Thoreau, you have to stop accumulating wealth and give it all away. Otherwise, you're just cheating the system.
Well, maybe, maybe not. The price of gas always goes down in an election year, then goes back up. If they had control over a massive supply of oil, they could hold onto it and do whatever they damn well please. If anything, it's a way to lower gasoline temporarily when they want to. If a Democrat gets elected, doesn't matter whether they have control or not, those prices are going up unless Congress grows a damn pair and starts making them stop.
Someone hasn't read which country's oil companies are getting most if not all of the contracts. Not counting the one that has now relocated to Dubai.
I was skeptical at first, too, it seemed insane that someone could be so thoughtless to start a war to take control of oil fields. I won't be so naive twice.
Democrats DID try. Republicans failed the public interest. Pick a poll, any poll. Betcha they all say the same thing. Republicans are on the wrong side.
You're trying to frame the debate in terms of both Democrats and Republicans being equally bad, and even if the number of offenses was the same on both sides (it is not), there is a reason that murder does not carry the same sentence as jaywalking. Some offenses are worse than others. And obstruction of justice, illegal surveillance, refusal to testify under oath, and just generally lying and manipulating the public is far worse than what anyone on the left has done. God, and I'm only naming stuff from the last few months. When I think about going into a full list, it makes my brain hurt. Suffice to say, you can make whatever accusations you want about the left, I can top them.
And furthermore, talking about right and left is misleading. We're talking about individuals, and the individuals in the White House are the criminals, not the entire Republican party.
The choices are not as you would like us to believe.
What we currently have is a corporate environment filled with anti-American sentiment. They avoid paying taxes at all cost, sidestep environmental regulation, avoid paying fair wages or proper benefits (if they decide to give Americans jobs at all), and do it all without a trace of thought as to the state of the country.
And that is NORMAL. Corporations are sharks, they only exist to make money, and to ask them to fight on behalf of the people is preposterous, because it is simply not feasible or logical.
Government, on the other hand, is responsible for its citizens. They are responsible for the common welfare. And when they start making decisions that are not in the best interest of the people who elected them, they have made themselves obsolete.
Pick one. Either corporations are responsible for helping citizens take care of themselves, or the government is. And I, for one, don't think this is a burden that business should have to bear.
But the question is whether Amazon prices those CDs at that level because they have to or because they would suffer a lot of problems with their RIAA clients if they priced them less. I'm sure indie CDs surely cost more per physical disc, but RIAA discs suffer through all the added costs and arrangements with other companies to cut them in on a piece of the pie, and I'm sure their cost is more bloated. Again, though, like you said, bloated in a way that could be fixed were they actually serious about cutting their costs and lowering prices. What they really want is to keep the pockets of their corporate partners lined with cash and not have to cut any costs whatsoever. They'd rather chop off the meat than trim the fat.
No, her philosophy was that every person was only responsible to make themselves happy, and that trying to make other people happy is morally wrong. Altruism seriously was viewed by her as evil.
Well, I can't speak to your personal experience, but I think more people are in a situation where they're perpetually broke than are able to climb out. I'm not arguing that it's impossible to pull yourself up through hard work, just that there's a lot of really hard-working people who don't ever get to that point. I don't think most people would argue that everyone who has wealth earned it through strong character and hard work, so how can anyone argue that people who are poor were too lazy to earn any more? It needs to be plausible for anyone to be able to provide for a family if they are willing and able to work hard. That was the American Dream.
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And if you're manic-depressive, you shouldn't be taking Prozac anyway. When you go back into mania, it will make things so much worse.
Thank you. I was curious as to why anyone involved in porn would be interested in making it impossible for people to find it.
Absolutely. Their unceasing quest to defeat Google and Apple has only hurt them in the long run. I remember a Slashdot poster a long time ago that said they'd be better off to give up and focus on their software, and they were correct. The new versions of their flagship software seem as if they completely ignored user input, and I have to think that they've got a great deal of their HCI focus on the Internet game. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel as a sphere, they should be focusing on fixing those squeaky axles and making the car run smarter and faster. If MS came out with a new version of Windows that used up LESS memory, that ran faster but utilized new features and the latest in design techniques, they would have no troubles reasserting their place at the forefront of the industry. They'd sell tons of copies simply because they're already on the top of the game and it would be a serious improvement. But while trying to beat Apple at the interface game (which they can't win, because Apple is passionately devoted to just that), they're losing the war. Microsoft would do better to listen to Kanye West: "Harder, Better, Faster, STRONGER!"
What's wrong with redaction? You save all the documents, then "redact" the ones that aren't suitable for consumption by whatever level will be seeing it. There's no reason that presidential records should not be kept at LEAST for a few years after the term is over. If I remember correctly, Mr. Thompson, you were very much for record-keeping when it came to the 1996 Presidential campaign.
Actually, South Park Studios is not part of the WGA. Very few of the animation writers are. Only FOX animation writers are in the guild because they lobbied for it a few years back.
Nobody wants to do experiments on babies. Well, some do, but that's not the issue here. But if you have the choice between discarding those embryos as human waste or using them in the hopes that you can improve the quality of life for humans everywhere, including babies, why would you possibly object to that on moral grounds? Do you object to someone donating organs after they have passed on? There is a certain nobility to sacrificing oneself for the betterment of the group when it is clear that you are not going to survive. If you really do believe that an embryo is equivalent to a baby, I can't imagine why you would choose to let them die pointlessly instead of making their existence have at least some sort of purpose.
The only reason they've needed record companies is because something like the Internet didn't exist. We JUST got to the point where streaming full quality audio/video is a viable option for mass distribution less than five years ago. That's hardly enough time to claim that this system doesn't work. The fact that someone of Radiohead's caliber is trying it means that it DOES work.
Besides, as mentioned before, they don't need a record label as much as they need a promotional agency. Once such agencies exist that can get artists on the radio or in magazines, the game is OVER. But don't cry a tear for the big labels anyway. If they hadn't turned their organization into a machine that shoves all the real talent onto independent labels, they might still be surviving.
Look, I'm deeply, deeply disappointed with the performance of this Congress. We need ways to get these corrupt individuals out of office and new ones in. But I think refusing to pay taxes won't really affect them nearly as much as finding ways to eliminate their job security. We came close to pushing one of the bad ones out with Lieberman. If we'd succeeded, we would have scared a great deal of people into paying attention. Notice what happens there? We need more participation in the system, not less. Gandhi didn't live in a representative government. We do. In the best case scenario, what you are advocating would be meaningless. Most likely, though, the kind of crisis you want to bring about would lead to a dictatorship. Oh, and thinking that people would actually invest the money from taxes instead of feeding it back to the corporations is the most dangerously naive thing I've ever heard. All that would happen would be that the public services that are already woefully underfunded would continue deteriorating, and I'm sure that there are plenty of companies that would be quite happy to sponsor highway maintenance, public education and more. They'd just want a little bit of advertising is all.
So support candidates who push for true campaign finance reform, term limits, or whatever else could clean up Washington. It's been done before and it can be done again, but the first step is to stop thinking that not caring and not supporting the government will do anything except bring the worst kind of people into power. WHether you believe it or not, there ARE other people in the world who want change, and some of them actually run for office instead of just bitching and campaigning for stupid causes that will never work. Take a look at the last eight years and take a look at Al Gore and try telling me again that it doesn't matter who gets into office. Refusing to pay taxes assumes that the people in office aren't too corrupted by the system to accept change, and that's a false assumption. When people stop supporting the good candidates, all that's left are the people who support the bad candidates.
That's completely ludicrous. You don't solve anything by not paying the federal government, you just really, really risk jail time and completely obliterate funding for anything worthwhile. The government is not some mystical entity, it is us. Treating it as if it is some kind of outside force that we have no way to influence is not only inaccurate, it is the very thought process that these people feed upon. As long as people think that it's impossible to fix what's wrong with this country, they can do whatever they want.
You can't dream of being the next Rolling Stones YET. Just because the system isn't in place yet doesn't mean it's implausible. If more bands keep developing from the ground up, radio stations will eventually play them no matter what label they're on. Beyond that, why couldn't hiring a good marketing firm accomplish the same thing? Why is it necessary to sign away your copyright? Besides, many of the bands that actually get airplay these days are developed by the record companies themselves. One of my favorite bands was simply dropped from their label. Not because of slow album sales or because they weren't marketable, because they refused to do a cover of "All You Need is Love" for a Chase credit card commercial. So I guess I just don't see the labels really doing that much anymore for the wide majority of their artists. That said, I would absolutely LOVE to see artists on the level of The Rolling Stones start stabbing their labels in the back by getting rid of them and marketing their own material once they got some measure of notoriety.
I don't want to intrude, but how many EPs do you normally sell? And when you do, how much of that do you actually keep? I'd just be interested in further statistics, because I am one of the people who think this would actually work for smaller bands.
Those bands are already being downloaded. That's how approximately 50% of new fans at their concerts found them, I'd wager. At least if they offered a donation system, they'd let their hardcore fans support them directly. To say that this wouldn't work for smaller bands just seems crazy to me, because smaller bands don't sell nearly as many albums anyway. But the fans that they have tend to be a lot more hardcore, so you'd likely see a greater percentage of people who download paying for it. Everyone knows Radiohead is successful, that's why a lot of people felt comfortable taking it for free. But how many people would pay a premium to support an unknown band that they really liked?
More than likely, much of the public simply doesn't watch news on cable networks at all. Network news regularly gets quadruple the ratings Bill O'Reilly wishes he got. And most, if not all, liberal news junkies do their reading online. Or watch the Daily Show, which gets relatively comparable (but lower) ratings. The only way to measure bias in the news media is how much they talk about liberals and how much they talk about conservatives. But the primary bias in cable news isn't really partisan so much as it is sensationalized. It eschews what is and focuses on what could be. It also lets the people on their shows say just about anything they want without questioning whether or not there's truth to it. That's the primary reason I don't watch cable news. I want to seek out truth, and they want to seek out little girls in trouble and celebrities doing stupid crap.
That's a faulty analogy unless you're talking about someone who doesn't have money to buy their own car. You didn't start out with all the tools you needed to succeed, you acquired them over time. There are plenty of awfully intelligent people that didn't have access to the resources you did or else they'd be in your position as well. It's easy enough to say now that you didn't want an education, road crews, fire departments, etc. You still knew you could fall back upon these services if you needed them, and that safety allowed you to feel comfortable enough to focus on working instead of living. Just because you don't seek these services out doesn't mean you don't use them. If you grew up in another country, I'd say you had a legitimate complaint. Otherwise, it's just an attempt to morally justify greed.
I absolutely agree with the liberty part of libertarian, particularly when it comes to personal freedoms. The problem I have with it is the logic that you (not you specifically) don't owe society anything because your life reached its only natural conclusion, and that in any other circumstance, you would have still pulled through. Hogwash. Did you use anything created by society? Doctors? Public schools? Roads? If so, you have an obligation to provide for that society when you succeed. Capitalism is not an equal philosophy by definition, it relies on some people rising to the top so that others at the bottom can aspire to one day get there. But once you're at the top, you'd best humble yourself and realize that no matter how much work you did, no matter how smart you are, you depend on others in our society to achieve your goals. More specifically, you rely on others in society to keep that society going. Anyone who participates in a capitalist society and is rewarded should recognize that without the millions of people who can't reach that peak continuing to follow the rules of society, nobody would be able to at all. If you want to live like Thoreau, you have to stop accumulating wealth and give it all away. Otherwise, you're just cheating the system.
Well, maybe, maybe not. The price of gas always goes down in an election year, then goes back up. If they had control over a massive supply of oil, they could hold onto it and do whatever they damn well please. If anything, it's a way to lower gasoline temporarily when they want to. If a Democrat gets elected, doesn't matter whether they have control or not, those prices are going up unless Congress grows a damn pair and starts making them stop.
Someone hasn't read which country's oil companies are getting most if not all of the contracts. Not counting the one that has now relocated to Dubai.
I was skeptical at first, too, it seemed insane that someone could be so thoughtless to start a war to take control of oil fields. I won't be so naive twice.
Democrats DID try. Republicans failed the public interest. Pick a poll, any poll. Betcha they all say the same thing. Republicans are on the wrong side. You're trying to frame the debate in terms of both Democrats and Republicans being equally bad, and even if the number of offenses was the same on both sides (it is not), there is a reason that murder does not carry the same sentence as jaywalking. Some offenses are worse than others. And obstruction of justice, illegal surveillance, refusal to testify under oath, and just generally lying and manipulating the public is far worse than what anyone on the left has done. God, and I'm only naming stuff from the last few months. When I think about going into a full list, it makes my brain hurt. Suffice to say, you can make whatever accusations you want about the left, I can top them. And furthermore, talking about right and left is misleading. We're talking about individuals, and the individuals in the White House are the criminals, not the entire Republican party.
The choices are not as you would like us to believe.
What we currently have is a corporate environment filled with anti-American sentiment. They avoid paying taxes at all cost, sidestep environmental regulation, avoid paying fair wages or proper benefits (if they decide to give Americans jobs at all), and do it all without a trace of thought as to the state of the country.
And that is NORMAL. Corporations are sharks, they only exist to make money, and to ask them to fight on behalf of the people is preposterous, because it is simply not feasible or logical.
Government, on the other hand, is responsible for its citizens. They are responsible for the common welfare. And when they start making decisions that are not in the best interest of the people who elected them, they have made themselves obsolete.
Pick one. Either corporations are responsible for helping citizens take care of themselves, or the government is. And I, for one, don't think this is a burden that business should have to bear.
How I wish I had points to mod that up.
But the question is whether Amazon prices those CDs at that level because they have to or because they would suffer a lot of problems with their RIAA clients if they priced them less. I'm sure indie CDs surely cost more per physical disc, but RIAA discs suffer through all the added costs and arrangements with other companies to cut them in on a piece of the pie, and I'm sure their cost is more bloated. Again, though, like you said, bloated in a way that could be fixed were they actually serious about cutting their costs and lowering prices. What they really want is to keep the pockets of their corporate partners lined with cash and not have to cut any costs whatsoever. They'd rather chop off the meat than trim the fat.
No, her philosophy was that every person was only responsible to make themselves happy, and that trying to make other people happy is morally wrong. Altruism seriously was viewed by her as evil.
Well, I can't speak to your personal experience, but I think more people are in a situation where they're perpetually broke than are able to climb out. I'm not arguing that it's impossible to pull yourself up through hard work, just that there's a lot of really hard-working people who don't ever get to that point. I don't think most people would argue that everyone who has wealth earned it through strong character and hard work, so how can anyone argue that people who are poor were too lazy to earn any more? It needs to be plausible for anyone to be able to provide for a family if they are willing and able to work hard. That was the American Dream.
Bah. I mean isn't attainable for anyone who doesn't come from a positive background.