Phaedrus

Ladies and Gentlemen... the breakfast machine.

You guys have been busy with the utterly obscure connections :) Here's another ballad, about a guy who did take his gun to town Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Stagger Lee

So when Morgan Freeman dies, who will narrate the documentary about his life? While you think about that, here is a Lego Saturn V rocket.

I'm a spectacular nerd.

Thanks for all the entertainment, OD! And congratulations on the landmark :)

(continued from previous post) As I said above, most people are turning out to be right; and no matter what any of us thinks about this, it won't change. The world has changed. Yes, I appreciate that that sounds hyperbolic; it is, nevertheless, true. To address SPs specifically: AFAIK most of them aren't selling their pics We come to see *you*, and spend time with you; and if there's a way to pirate that experience, it hasn't been invented yet. Yes, maybe one day the artificial authentic-in-every-way FortunateOne-bot will be created... but we aren't there yet. And although people may steal your pics... how much do they benefit, in the long run? I can't imagine that SPs who steal pics get a lot of repeat business when their clients show up and discover that the person standing in front of them isn't the one they saw. And word gets around (thanks, CK!) and so many of us won't even get that far. In the long run, anyone who wants to succeed will require a basic, minimum level of honesty. Um, no. The reason that you won't find much pro-SOPA stuff online is that most people who post online have rather more of a clue about what the Internet is and how it works than the lobbyists that wrote SOPA, and understand why it's a very bad idea indeed (I should emphasize that this is far more about the lack of due process than the idea of protecting copyright). There is no nefarious plot to deny anyone information about SOPA, or to silence its proponents. Wrong. Anyone can make a complaint. I could claim copyright on your pics, despite the fact that I'm pretty sure I don't look much like you. And many website owners would rather take down something in response to a complaint, regardless of the legitimacy of it, than risk being shut down entirely. That's just good business sense. Yes. Really. To be fair, it's not so much the musicians that are the problem here; it's the record companies with their obsolete business model, their battalions of lawyers and their obliviousness to likely PR disasters that tend to pull stunts like this. I hope the arguments I've made above address your criticism on the examples. I haven't addressed everything by any means (in particular, derivative works are a whole other can of worms). And I've never asserted that random folks own copyrighted material; my point is that poorly-written laws make it too easy for them to claim falsely that they do. That's a problem with getting sensible folks to make the argument. The fact that someone runs a website doesn't imply that they can string two sentences together in an interview. I think (hope) that I've addressed this above. As I said, the root of the problem is that the world has fundamentally changed over the last decade or so. Nobody said this would be easy. You've got cause and effect backwards... Godwin's Law states that by accusing your opponent of being a Nazi or comparing them to Hitler, you automatically lose the argument (Actually, that's not what it originally said, but that's how it's often used now). I'm well aware of this, hence the inherent irony in posting a Downfall vid. But the fact remains that whoever created that particular parody actually understands the issue quite well. Finally, to everyone who got this far... thanks for getting through that attack of verbal diarrhea!

Here's why she matters.

I suspect this was probably inevitable...

Thanks for replying, FO. Some more thoughts from me. (Warning for everyone: this post contains some digressions into more general intellectual property and state-of-the-universe discussions, and there is no tldr version...) Or borrow someone else's and read it, or pick up one that was left on the bus. I'm not trying to nitpick here; the point is that the buy/steal dichotomy is a false one. There are entirely legal ways of accessing content that you don't own. If I came to see you and you put some nice background music on, should I make sure you've acquired broadcast rights for it? I shall come back to this in more detail in a bit, but there's a fundamental problem here: it's no longer possible to profit by selling easily-replicable content. This is a fundamental change in the world; nobody said it was going to be easy to manage. What we're seeing with SOPA et al is an effort by Big Content to prevent their entire reason for existence from complete extinction; alas, that's the way the world has gone (not "is going"; it's gone). To address newspapers specifically, most now have free websites that make money by selling advertizing. I can think of one very notable exception; one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers has decided they can make more money off a small number of paid subscribers than off the usual ads + eyeballs model. It will be *very* interesting to see how that experiment works out; my prediction is they'll fail. Laws do not exist to serve the entertainment industry. Laws exist to serve society as a whole, of which the entertainment industry is but a small part (despite what certain media moguls would have you believe). A law that benefits a very small segment of society to the detriment of everyone else is not a good law. I think you're wrong, on both counts. Firstly, the existing laws are sufficient (as an example, consider the exquisitely-timed takedown of megaupload.com, which has been done under existing laws); as I said in my first post, the problem from Big Content's point of view is not that there's no laws defending intellectual property and copyright, it's that they want to be able to bypass the judicial system and shut down websites on their own say-so (which is what SOPA's really about). Secondly, as a general point, those with power will almost always seek to entrench the power they have and acquire more; same goes for those with money. To digress for a moment, look at the way governments and large corporations (in particular, Wall Street) inter-operate, and cross-pollinate by exchanging people on a regular basis; this is resulting in a system that's increasingly run by the few, for the few, and this is what the Occupy movement is about, at its heart. Yes - but I completely disagree with you :) This really gets to the root of the problem :) The fundamental problem is that the world has fundamentally changed. The Internet, at its core, is about the free and global exchange of data; that is its purpose. And 'data' means a great many things; it means knowledge, speech, ideas, concepts; it also includes many things that have traditionally been harder to exchange, such as books and music and movies and images. There are several consequences to this. The first is the 'global' bit. The Internet is truly international; it transcends all traditional legislative boundaries. In the absence of a World Government, who then gets to control it? No national government can legitimately claim jurisdiction. They can claim jurisdiction over a subset of people and companies, but it's quite easy for people and very easy for companies to simply move into another jurisdiction. This makes legislating anything online well-nigh impossible; you need pretty much every online country in the world to pass similar legislation if you're going to do it and, except in a minority of cases, that's not going to happen. Kiddie porn and child prostitution is the only thing I can think of that's been effectively shut down on a global basis, and even that's far from perfect. Secondly, the sheer ease of transferring data has convinced a generation that this is okay. There are many people today who simply don't see copying a song or a movie or a picture as a crime. It may be theft according to the statute books, but they don't see that; and love this or hate it, I think it's necessary to acknowledge that this is how things are today. Please note that I don't intend this as approval or disapproval of that; simply as a statement of how things are. Thirdly, the creation of the Internet has rendered content-delivery trivial, and this has completely destroyed some industries. It used to be that a band could play local gigs, and maybe get a local reputation, but in order to become big they'd need to sign up with a record company. They'd make an album, and the record company would market and distribute it. But that's entirely unnecessary these days; a band can publish their own stuff online, and build a huge fanbase without the involvement of any of the traditional music distributors. The same goes for photographers, cartoonists, movie producers, and all other creative types. Naturally, the Content Distributors are terrified by this; they used to be a necessary conduit between the artist and the audience and they have, at a stroke, become entirely unnecessary. And so they do what they can to preserve their turf; that's where SOPA et al come from. It's the final gasp of a dying dinosaur. There's an obvious problem for the artist (I'm using the word to include all creative type), too: now that they can't realistically make money by selling content, how *do* they make money? That's not a question with an easy answer in all cases; and besides, there may be as many answers as there are artists. But the answer probably lies in the performance; it's trivial to download the latest album from that band I like, but if they're good I'll still pay to go and see them. If the show's good, I'll buy a shirt. People will still pay to see movies in a theater. People will still pay to buy books (can you imagine trying to read War and Peace through a browser?). But at the end of the day, the artist's problem is soluble; the distributor's problem is not. And that's why you see things like SOPA being driven by record companies rather than musicians. That actually ended up at the wrong end of my post, away from the related stuff - sorry! Hopefully the stuff above will have addressed your first point. The point I was trying to make with this was to illustrate the inherent danger of poorly written and ill-conceived laws, of which SOPA is a good example. Sure, the stated intent may be to protect copyright holders; but since the law as written allows any complainant to shut down someone else's website on no more than their own say-so, you may rest assured that the unscrupulous will make full use of this awesome new weapon in their armory to remove *any* content that they don't like. I'm sure you're well aware that there are those who object to the existence of SPs and would love to see their lives made as difficult as possible; SOPA or something like it would be a very useful tool for that, because it's written in such a way as to positively encourage abuse. Those who are vulnerable to such abuse would, therefore, perhaps be better off opposing laws that would enable it. [more to come on this; original post too long, dammit!]

If you're doing one for me... just put yourself in it :)

Anthrax - Only http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW0HeE9ymYU The connection? Their singer at the time was John Bush :)

An offering from the self-styled Worst Band In The World... Eat Static - Implant

Well, I'm late to this thread, so: +1 on what everyone else said. These time-wasters are not ever going to be good clients. There's a reason why you have buttons labelled 'delete' and 'end call'. Use them, put the addresses and numbers on your blacklist, and move on. I must admit, I've never seen the point in haggling with anyone in the service industry. Paying cut-price rates will get you a cut-price job done, whether you're dealing with a mechanic or a plumber or a builder or an accountant or pretty much anything else under the sun; they'll all cut corners if you give them cause to, and do a good job to the best of their ability if you pay them what they deserve. And in the end, you want good service, don't you? One final thing: Some people will do this anyway, just because they're assholes; I fear it's something most, if not all ladies have to deal with sooner or later. If you've never seen them, however, it's harder for them to get away with this. "I thought the session was OK" is nothing like as powerful a counter-argument as "He's lying; we've never met, because I refused to see him, which is probably why he's bitter."

Be careful what you wish for... New Model Army - Green and Grey Because I'm a bastard, that's why :)

Hope you had a great birthday, OD!

Congratulations, Angela! Awesome!

Well, he looks like he's having fun.

OMG! It's... almost... Johnny Cash - A Boy Named Sue (sorry :) )