Say - that wouldn't be FILE SHARING, would it? Dammit all, you know the gov'ment hates it when people share stuff with each other, they think it's criminal.
They'll probably blame Britney Spears' "meltdown" on file sharing. I Wish Lars Ulrich had melted down, the nasty little elfish, rich kid, cokehead sodomite...by "sodomite", I mean he fucks goats, and I've seen the pictures.
Fuck yeah! the only thing im willing to pay for is good music! and i couldn't agree MORE regarding Lars... artists (except metallica) make far more money off touring. File sharing has done nothing BUT help artists, old and new, gain a wider audience... touring and live shows have actually improved since file sharing began, Cuz the live scene was getting grim. I think it's helped the music industry it's just taken a little money away from a small group of people who can go fuck themselves for all i care.
You nailed it. Bands are having to play to get paid, and a lot of musicians are finding they make a hell of a lot more money selling CD's at shows and on the internet than they could by signing to a label. They don't have to pay the sleazy A+R guy with the coke habit, the goons in "marketing"...basically, all the record label whores who don't know shit about music but get paid for...hell, I don't really know.
yep yep believe it or not i went to college for music biz (not doing shit w/ the degree but thats fine lol) and learned all That. These were during the pre-historic er pre-internet days so it wasn't even an issue. But the net has definitely helped musicians and given listeners a hell of a lot more good music to choose from,. stuff we may never otherwise have had the opportunity to hear. Thats the sad thing, something as awesome and unifying as music is corrupted by Greed, as is everything it seems. 
And yet communication seems to be the common denominator in terms of resolving problems related to concentrated power. Programs can't survive without control over communication. Nor can dictators (secret police)... or abusers(i don't want you talking to them)... or Lon Woodbury(let's keep this a "safe" place for parents), or Sue Scheff (I'll SUE) Politicians thrive in their tightly controlled enviornments from which to give an illusion of universal approval (from photo-ops to staged Q&A). One wonders if abuse of power is possible where communication cannot be controlled.
A lot of people fear the internet. They fear the internet will one day be controlled or monitored... That it will become a trap. I can't foresee that being a possibility. Government clones who learned their "skill" in a classroom from a textbook (trust me on this, i used to work with them) will always be both far behind and hopelessly outnumbered by the more technical folk who populate the internet.
This is what happens, to give you an example: Where I used to work, my bosses' boss instructed all of us to shred the mailing labels for all packages that came in. He explained to us that the enemy was everywhere, that we lived in a new age of terror and bla bla bla.... My immediate boss, who was in Vietnam and was constantly harping on about the good ol' days of killin commies, immediately accepted what he was taught without questioning the motivation. His belief structure requires a villain so that he can justify his actions without having to think too much. Me, on the other hand... The first thing I was thinking is "aha. so he sells to himself and doesn't want the inspectors to notice". I looked at the addresses, and sure enough, although the company name changed, the address was still the same.
The people who had worked for the government were so hopelessly fried. Many of them had pigeonholed themselves into doing the same exact repetitive thing for decades at a time, believing that they were "protecting America" from the scarecrow-du-jour. They had the worst aesthetic sense I have ever seen. They didn't care how things looked as long as they were done with proper procedure. Changing a font, or making the excel table/database frontend/powerpoint presentation just a little bit provoked a surprising amount of negative response. They needed everything aligned at right angles. Their thinking, everything about them, was so rigid. They lived on it. So? What did I do? I ignored them. I had been there and done that. I was a bit naugty. I re-organized things, or would re-design something during my free time (so they could not say "bla bla bla, i told you to keep counting the beans". The trick was to make what I presented so appealing that it was undeniably "better" than what they had been doing before. It was an affront to their traditional manner of thinking, but they were tempted... And eventually, they gave in. I demonstrated, for example, that alternating lines on a spreadsheet with light yellow, for example, not only made it look better, but also increased the accuracy and speed of the bean counting process. All in all, there was only so much I could do... Quite a few people left before I did. Lockheed bought them out eventually and had no interest whatsoever in improving efficiency (They get a cut out of the hourly pay it takes to complete a job... And they intend on collecting every single penny of the funds allotted to manpower. So why don't they just simply get things done quickly and get more contracts? Jobs. Jobs in key districts are political power (holds reps hostage... could you imagine "I lost my job because Joe Politician cut our defense budget... he's heping the terrists..." It's a PR nightmare and could threaten incumbency). Political power ensures funding for more projects, and when you are dealing with government defense spending, you simply expand (and with it influence) rather than become more efficient. Now, we have a country addicted to war (Defense contractors are the pushers). We have to have an enemy to justify our defense spending which contributes directly or indirectly to a sizable portion of our economy.
Why doesn't the DoD say something? Because military men, as I've alluded to, have limited use for their skillset outside of the field of defense. When a person retires from the army, a career at Lockheed, or pretty much any private contractor is practically guaranteed. The higher up you are in the DoD, the more lucrative your retirement can be. You still have friends back in the pentagon you can call to get a deal (often this is justified as "trust".... ie. Well. I contract to him becuase I know I can trust him and this is sensitive). Why would a DoD member want to raise a red-flag and not only destroy his retirement, but also become known as a traitor to the "good ol boys club"? This isn't even mentioning the "top secret" aspect of many projects, where you can very well be hanged as a traitor for exposing corruption (you are supposed to trust that your superiors know more than you do) Most of the work is so compartmentalized so as to prevent anybody to know whaty they are working on anyway, so that is unlikely to happen. The whole bunch needs a good flush down the toilet.. and until that happens, it's exactly where they will be putting our tax dollars.
In short: Why a 10000 toilet seat? Because when you are in the government, it's not your money your spending, and you might as well buy from a friend for a "good" price... after all, one day you will be selling the toilet seat.
Sorry for the rant. Sleep deprivation. Astronomy project last night. Still awake becuase of massive amounts of caffeine ingested prior to the presentation i gave to the class (it went really well). For some reason, I do some things better when I am sleep deprived. I should probably shut up now.
:em: :silly:
