It all comes down to the ‘Elites’, in this case the record companies, trying to keep their former total control over content and sales of music and movies. It’s the same with the news media and political ‘elites’. Each see their domination of the content, IE: ‘message’ being diluted and/or being ignored by the new information technologies that are coming of age.
What will be interesting, (from an historical point of view), is how far they will go to keep their domination and whether or not the consumers of that content will let them continue to do so.
As far as the RIAA goes, its biggest mistake was to get too greedy with MTV. MTV had been the best advertising medium for new music ever created, but it deeply upset the RIAA because somebody other than them was making some money, and the RIAA wanted ALL the money, from everything.
So out of the blue they started to demand huge royalties from MTV, for *advertising* their music, free of charge. How stupid can you get?
It is as if Apple computer got free advertising time during the Superbowl, then demanded huge royalties from the NFL because the NFL made money “off of” Apple’s advertisement.
In any event, MTV had no choice but to say, “To Hell with you!”, and started running its own cheap production crap reality shows for morons.
Shortly thereafter, the RIAA’s profit line took a nosedive, and in an amazing example of short-sightedness, they decided to blame music piracy on the Internet. Probably their second best advertising medium after MTV.
That is, on the Internet, “pirate” listeners suddenly discovered dozens of artists they had never heard before, because they aren’t played on top 40 radio, and bought their CDs, thus making huge sums of money for the RIAA.
To quote some dialogue from Plan 9 From Outer space: “You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!”
Most people simply don’t have the money for entertainment and shouldn’t be indulging in it. The economy is going to get far worse very soon, too.
sorry, even if i were the ‘digital boogeyman’ and could download movies for free...
the VAST majority of progressive propaganda crap hollywood is cranking out isn’t worth the bandwidth to download it or the diskspace to store it.
i even dropped my cable tv 6 months ago, mainly because i realized i hadn’t turned it on in months. these days, i spend my free time reading, coding, gaming, or writing code for games (and of course, freep’ing ;)
Pirates are no threat.....can’t hit a bull in the butt with a banjo.
Pirates are no threat.....can’t hit a bull in the butt with a banjo.
The new discussion quickly became, "what applications will run on Tomcat or JBoss?" Our shop didn't have any expertise in Websphere at the time, so that wasn't really a migration option. How could that possibly be good for Oracle? Oracle didn't seem to give a rat's ass one way or another. They've been the 800lb gorilla in database space so long they aren't used to having customers with real choices and options.
I really hate dealing with Oracle. From what I've seen my feelings are widely shared.
I N D E E D!
If you can't appreciate the pure beauty of the violin after hearing this, something's wrong with your ears.
Or you can get raw with these strings.
How about this gamechanger from America's Got Talent (which they SHOULD have won).
And finally, this, dedicated to the one and only rdb2, whose eyes are growing dim.
Either way, the violin is sweet yet LETHAL.
Do it!