Posts by slave138

Lightsaber voted top movie weapon

No railguns with x-ray vision?!

I'm kind of partial to the railgun from Eraser with the X-Ray Spex scope...

Analysts warn of US broadband meltdown

In the US...

... Our broadband providers are doing little to improve capacity because it feeds into their excuses to push for anti-net neutrality legislation.

Drunk US man asks drunk son to take the wheel

Naiveté masquerading as righteousness

"i'm 19 (.au legal drinking age 18) and i've never been drunk. Ever.

Quite frankly i don't much see the point."

As with most things if you've never done it you probably won't see the point. I, on the other hand, have been drunk a few times so I feel pretty qualified to say there isn't much point.

Just like there isn't much point in playing videogames or sports, going to a movie or a concert, skydiving, base jumping or any of the millions of other things people do for entertainment.

Driving when you're drunk is comepletely different because at that point you are endangering others.

Gene Simmons blames college kids for ruining music biz

Bad analogy

As is typical for "Big Music", Gene has made a piss-poor analogy between a brick-and-mortar store and electronic distribution.

Yes, it would be retail suicide to open a store and let people pay (or not) whatever they wanted for your products because the wholesale costs of the products plus overhead (lease, utilities, employees, etc...) would require a certain level of income just to break even.

For electronic distribution there is no material cost and minimal overhead (server space, bandwidth and maybe a couple trained monkeys to bounce the server if something goes wrong). I'm sure there are production costs involved, but does a REAL musician need to spend more than a couple thousand to record? No-talent hacks might need a lot more to polish their turd, but many artists are building their own affordable studios to cut out another middleman.

It's almost all pure profit when distributing music online so artists stand to make a lot more than they would through the old business model even if only half of their 'customers' pay.

Gene's just another dinosaur in a crowd full of dinosaurs who are unwilling and/or incapable of changing. If he was half the business man he claims to be, he could have come up with a new model. Instead he ridicules those with more business sense, courage and creativity than he has seen in over a decade.

Blank media levy breaches should be criminal, say authors

ASCAP (and I assume BMI and others)...

... Supposedly collect on behalf of the writers and performers. It was part of the ASCAP application. I'm expecting my 3 cents any time now...

Apple hit with another class action

Seems about as valid...

... as the monopoly suits against Microsoft for bundling Media Player and Internet Explorer with its OS. Did it stop people from playing video/audio or viewing webpages with other software? Nope.

Compared to those precedents, the "you can burn it to a CD" defense is feeble at best.