Free Republic

As I understand it most musicians say they do not make much money off CD sales, nor concert tickets. In fact most do not make any money that way. The place they say they make their money is on sales of shirts and other memorabilia at the shows, which the music companies have not yet found a way to get their fingers into.

The record companies say royalties do not make it to the musicians because the money is spent on promotion.

So if I understand this correctly stealing music by downloading songs free does not rob the musicians of anything and if I am to believe the record companies it doesn’t rob them either, but only the promoters.

My point is these statements by the musicians and record companies when put together do not make a good argument that downloading music is theft but rather a clever way of eliminating offensive adds.

First Extreme Sports, now Extreme Science.
I guess Science felt it needed to catch up to Extreme Religion, them having had a long rivalry.

I eagerly await the “Science Gone Wild” video series. Or, on second thought maybe not.

Well in one case reporters are as you say *defending* a criminal and in the other they are *exposing* criminals.

Big difference.

Oh I get it: Protesting North Korean human rights violations is as bad as reporting the protesting of North Korean human rights violations. It's all a liberal plot.

Guess we should just pull out and go home then?

Certainly would not be any noticeable problem if we didn't hear about it, and if we didn't hear about it, no need for foolish protesting or even more foolish wars to combat problems that don't seem to exist.

No trouble with North Korea, move right along.

Ok. Good start. But wait!

Guess we should pull out of Iraq then too? After all our military action there is the ultimate form of protest against the ultimate human rights violator.

And since good and bad news reporting is the mainstay of FreeRepublic by eliminating reporting "poof" FR becomes blank web page.

In one fell swoop, you've solved the North Korean problem, the Iraq problem and eliminated one of the main mechanisms we use to be here.

Your approach is certainly innovative.

Thank you, this has been very enlightening indeed.

Look, I'm not really trying to upset you, just trying to say you might want to be a little more careful when making blanket, knee-jerk statements, especially when attacking freedom of the press, freedom to express dissent or to expose and protest tyranny.

A guy who chooses the tag “LiveFreeOr…” thinks these things are very important, but perhaps is a little over sensitive.

Are you being sarcastic or are you implying protesting against a brutal communist dictatorship is wrong?

It appears from the article the North Koreans initiated the attack against peaceful protesters.

I don't understand your position.

Care to enlighten us?

I've written driver software for RFID tags used by the Semiconductor industry.

RFID tags stands for Radio Frequency IDentification.

They're comprised of an Antenna, a radio transceiver and a small amount of memory. The latter two are part of a tiny semiconductor chip.

The memory can be read/write so the device can be written to and read from. Sometimes it’s read only. Depends on the application. The more memory, the more power the device would need. The devices I use had less than 1000 bytes of memory. Since the memory is a flash type, power is only needed during read or write operations.

The device is powered by rectifying the radio frequency signal sent by the scanner device. It’s not much power (micro watts or less) but it’s enough for the task. The scanner must obviously be very close as power drops off at one over the square of the distance between the sender and receiver and the device only gets a very small portion of that transmitted signal. For the ones I used the scanning head and what we called the 'pill' had to be less than an inch away.

These devices are very small, smaller than a pill, but larger than a pinhead. The largest part is the Antenna, which is a small coil of wire, though in principal it could be circular traces on the chip. The ones I used had small coils of wire wrapped around the chip assembly then enclosed in a plastic form; the same shape as but slightly smaller than a cylindrical pill. Using a coil of wire allowed the device to pick up more power from the scanner.

Some people fear these devices could be used to monitor you. I have my doubts for general applications. The problem is in order to be small, it would have to be self powered as I describe. The power of the transmitter would have to be phenomenally high to send over great distances, power the device and then have enough power to transmit back to the remote scanner. Mostly, it would probably be used at the checkout counter where the device and the scanner are in close proximity and possibly for inventory operations at night where someone could just walk down the isle with a small but powerful scanner.

They could and probably will be imbedded in credit cards or passports things like that.

Lets see, it's now bad to give jobs to women from the third world countries so they can feed their starving families.

I guess she would rather them starve on their own in order to keep the family together.

I’d worry far more about deleterious effects of infant mortality than mothers working overseas.

Feed family first. Enjoy family second.