Well put. Similarly the Supreme Court can strike down a law passed by the House Of Commons or provincial Legislative Assemblies on the grounds that it violates the Constitution, Charter Of Rights & Freedoms, or provincial jurisdictions etc, however the Supreme Court can't introduce new law, only alter existing ones to suit evolving judicial interests and the Constitution and Charter. That's gotta feel pretty good, the "I know better, nyah nyah" part. That's why they don't wear pants under the robes.

Insurance companies insure cars, not drivers. If you lend your car to someone else, and they run over an old lady, you can be sued just as rightly as the driver. You are responsible for your vehicle unless it is stolen. How RelayRides insurance fits into that I don't know, but definitely some fine print worth reading.

"Real religion" wins oxymoron of the aeon

Pop scientology alt.support.ex-cult into Google groups search for some good creepy laughs. It's a shame it only goes back 4 years, the early 2000's saw many a scientology recruiter trolling that group.

WOW. I am fucking stunned. How is the systematic distribution of copyrighted data not the "carrying away" the "personal goods" of artists?! If you break into an artist's home and steal the master CD he sent away to be legally marketed, that's theft, but to distribute the EXACT SAME DATA you ripped off without license is what, a fundamental human right? Yeah sure, we still have our copy, but IT'S FUCKING WORTHLESS BECAUSE ANY IDIOT CAN NOW DOWNLOAD IT. Ice to eskimos? Hello?

And since I am an artist and you're too dense to figure that out, let's pretend I'm smart enough to figure out that you're not an artist. Let's run down a list of possibilities of what maybe you might be:

Plumber: suppose any idiot could take a magic X-ray picture of a house you worked on, and magically project it onto another house, so that they got paid for your work, and didn't pay you a damn thing. Since it's magic, you can't sue them. How long would you continue to be an unpaid plumber?

Cook: suppose any idiot could take a magic X-ray picture of a meal you cooked, and magically project it onto another plate, so that they got paid for your work, and didn't pay you a damn thing. Since it's magic, you can't sue them. How long would you continue to be an unpaid cook?

Taxi Driver: suppose any idiot could teleport via Google Street View? How long would you continue to be an unpaid taxi driver?

Politician: ok, bad example...

My point is that you don't seem to understand the DIGESTIVE TRACT of an artist. We need to EAT. Live gigs pay the exact same as they did in the 70's. We can't sell recordings to save our lives without coughing up HUGE percentages to labels (iTunes takes 85%). I'm doing fine because I'm diversified and established in many facets of the music industry, but it was a BITCH to get here, and I'm very lucky to have SURVIVED to this point, because I seriously would have killed myself trying if things didn't work out the way they did.

But go ahead and keep being the pirating armchair quarterback for artists. It won't make a dent in my need to create, it just causes suffering among the people you claim to respect. Might wanna ease back on the generalizing from the specific though, because it may take both hands to count all the artists you know that are happy to starve for the sake of their art, but it takes Facebook's $60B IPO to tally up all the depraved whores like yourself who have the crust to steal from artists and then tell them how they lack commitment.

Whatever he replies, please mod this fuckhead insightful again. It's part of my training to become a "true artist".

I don't even know how to "look at your mod points". I'm saddened that people who frequent /. give a shit about that.

Seriously, let's bicker about even more trivial shit than what we're paid for, in our spare time. What the fuck do you people come here for if not the opposite of that. If you're trying to prove that /.'ers have no lives, spouses, or kids, mission accomplished.

I use Firefox and AdBlock Plus on my desktop, the instant my cel carrier lets an ad through to my phone I'm switching and daring them to sue me for any "termination fees". I've already notified them of this. I do not allow advertising in my home, circumventing my reasonable efforts to prevent ads in my residence constitutes trespassing by law. I consider my phone to be equally protected wherever I go, and I'm confident the courts would agree.

Clearly, you do not live in Canada, maybe you did a while back or know someone who did. The 2011 national census was processed by Lockheed Martin. Don't get me started. Canada is for sale. Harper isn't our prime minister, he's our liquidator, elected by fraud.

Watch out for RIM, they're really sharp cats with equity to ride out the storm. Mark my words, they don't want to be bought out. Now that Apple has given up their crown as user-oriented developers in favour of content delivery, RIM stands alone. They're entrenching as opposed to making waves. They'll be my entire stock portfolio when I get word to buy.

Police car mounted infra-red LED's have been photographed in Montreal during the current student uprising. The LED's blast out infra-red, which while invisible to the human eye will overload digital camera sensors if they're not equipped with an IR filter (virtually all inexpensive cameras are not). The picture I saw was taken on a bus, the view out the sides of the bus were unaffected, but the windshield was completely white. The person taking the camera said the screen went white whenever the cop car was in its field of view.

Long story short, in Montreal at least, cops are clearly under orders to abuse and harass protesters. RIP Canada.

The 2011 Canadian census was processed by Lockheed Martin. Under the Patriot Act, Homeland Security can compel any US company to surrender any data, and can also compel them to withhold all information about the surrender of data. So if Homeland Security wanted the 2011 Canadian census data, they could get it, and nobody would hear about it.

This represents a definitive intelligence test. If you think they don't already have it, you're incredibly stupid.

Wow. Seriously? Piracy = private ownership? I hope you're not advocating against the piracy = theft argument, because obtaining private ownership of pirated works is the definition of theft.

Haven't any of you ever created anything unique? Did you try to make more unique things, or say to yourself "nobody will ever appreciate this shit" and give up? It's that exact deterrent that piracy causes in would-be artists.

+5 'insightful' to the PA... not sure I can stomach that.

Allow me to elaborate. Yes there is a lot of shitty music out there that is produced with the firm intent of cashing in solely on a trendy marketing campaign. And the chump the PA is referring to defends pirating that crap, most likely so he can seem trendy too without paying to impress whatever idiots he thinks he needs to.

But piracy has irrefutably devalued proper musical works. It used to be you could only have hard copy of music by paying for it. Now, everyone's iPod or whatever has a fixed amount of memory, and everyone's going to fill it, either with pirated crap, paid good music, or pirated good music. Look through your "digital library", determine what percentage was paid for, and the remainder is how much us musicians are losing in selling our proper music. If you had to pay to fill your iPod you'd still fill it. Guaranteed. Nobody stops short and says "this is all the music I need", they fill it and get a bigger iPod at the first opportunity.

So labels are shitheads. What's new? Us musicians have been getting fucked by labels since Elvis. Now we're getting fucked by you, and in turn labels are fucking us worse. Labels were fucking you the whole time, you're just figuring out how stupid you've always been. It's not our fault you didn't check out cool bands that toured through your town over and over, what else could they do to teach you what proper music is? And thanks to DJ's, the going rate for a musician playing a local gig is the same it was in the 70's.

So welcome to how big a moron musicians think you are when you say "piracy isn't theft".
(it isn't theft, it's tortuous interference, but for arguments sake it's the same as theft)

Piracy isn't theft, it's tortuous interference. Whether or not you think a copyrighted work is valuable, if you usurp the copyright holder's means of profiting from it, it's the same thing as going back in time and selling framed prints of the Mona Lisa to those that would have paid for the real deal. If there's no motivation to spend the time learning and producing great art, then all you get is trash. So let me fix this for you:

I dropped Protools for Reaper as well, way more solid, versatile, and way more advanced than Protools will ever get. I'm noticing features all the time that I didn't know it had, like recently I found an ultra low latency setting that does under-the-hood stuff like run it on only one processor core. I never would have thought of that.