I have a hunch that the FunnyJunk owner is not really all that interested any more, and that Carreon picked this fight as a way to gain a reputation. Now his ego won't let him back down, and in his world the Oatmeal is now the Moby Dick to his Ahab, with FunnyJunk tricked into being his Pequod.
Well, from what we know of this guy, it seems he really is the internet version of an ambulance chaser. He got a lucky break in the sex.com brouhaha, and now like a gambler that won a lottery jackpot he's scratching every card he can buy, desperate for the next big win. After all, look at this line from the Comic Riffs blog report:
Carreon tells Comic Riffs one of his goals is to become the go-to attorney for people who feel they have been cyber-vandalized or similarly wronged on the Internet.
We can only hope that his hubris will soon make him the disgraced pariah that he needs to be.
Thank you, this. I was referring to the perceived efficiency, and one of those factors is the ratio of budget spent on actual purpose of the charity as opposed to fundraising and management. SJK is a celebrity case where other charities like the Red Cross and Unicef have also drawn fire, and can be compared to PP. The irony is that donating to SJK is in a way an indirect donation to PP.
If only it were true, but it ends up going into the bank accounts of the traders, who use it not to purchase goods and services but hoard it as a way of keeping score. A lot of the financial industry is only interested in competition on who can collect the most dollars.
Ah, more evidence that the financial industry has been overtaken by the gamblers and card sharps. Only instead of counting cards at the blackjack table, they are gambling that milliseconds of latency will give them an edge over the rubes.
Well, "poorly managed" is an unproven claim. Some are, it is true, but those that I have dealt with have less overhead than most businesses. Take women's health care: The Susan J. Komen turned out to be a vanity charity, but Planned Parenthood actually delivers a surprisingly efficient operation with much less going into bureaucratic and fundraising efforts.
So relax, just consider it giving Matt the money to blow on bears and cancer cures. You're just giving it to him to do with as he pleases, and it pleases him to give it to a couple of charities.
Let's be totally honest here, there has never been a time when musicians could expect to make a decent living making music. Being able to make a comfortable living as a musician was always akin to winning the lottery.
What the post-media conglomerate era does promise, though, is that there will be more chances again for good musicians to become moderate successes, as live performances become more important and music studios lose their power as gatekeepers. So instead of just one superstar act out of a thousand, we now have ten star acts out of a thousand.
You do recognise that recordings are becoming more of a promotional tool rather than something sold for profit, though I would add that what is important is the quality of the recording also plays a role. Those recordings that are swapped and shared tend to be lower or questionable quality, but people still buy music from Apple and Amazon, are willing to pay for high quality and reliability. This is an important nuance, and I feel that in the end streaming and sharing of low-fi files will take the role that radio and hit compilations used to fill, with hi-fi recordings replacing the purchased singles and albums.
But music, like any other art, will remain a difficult medium to become successful in. The only real difference now is that we can see the number of artists that couldn't even make it into the gatekeeper's stables.
I was thinking more of a combination Spanish Prisoner and Emperor's New Clothes scenario: keep promising vaporware and delivering nothing as long as the vain and greedy pay. But you could also be right, that the Russian developers have tricked Microsoft into letting them eventually take Windows itself hostage against a price...
Ah, but there was a lot of "pirating" from vinyl and CD to cassette tape, VHS recording off of pay TV and things like that. Also a slew of "sneakernet" copying of floppy discs, so that game publishers made malformatted discs on purpose, sometimes to the detriment of the disc drive heads (hint: they didn't prevent copying).
Later, CD publishers tried to add copy protection to their music CD's, mainly by breaking the Red Book standard and rendering the CD unplayable on some players, incurring a backlash from Philips, denying those discs that weren't Red Book conform the license for the Compact Disc logo.
Nowadays? Kids don't torrent music as much as rip it from YouTube-videos or mail the songs to each other. Torrents aren't really trusted, and the kids I know think that half the torrents are put out by the big studios as a trap. I'm sure they share music as much as we did when I was a teenager, the main difference is that they now share with friends that they know through the net. They still don't care about quality, they aren't audiophiles. They just want the song now, and have the same youthful disregard for Right and Wrong that we had when we were their age.
You're right, it's anecdotal. And really, is it any different from when I was in the university in the 1980's and we copied to cassette tape? Or how I listen to the radio rather than buy the newest hit single? I kinda sorta doubt you would have purchased the albums. And considering that you posted as an anonymous coward, I also kinda sorta doubt that you are interested in seeing my reply in the first place. Er.
That looks to me as if they were incredulous at first. After the shock wore off, they probably made their opening number almost as a joke, almost in the "we're not really interested" range. Once they figured out that the money offered was real, they had to absorb the shock before saying yes, and rebuild their poker faces.
And that is how three days can pass.
Let me rephrase this case so that you can understand why the administration was wrong in its actions, and why your suspicions are also wrong, with my Clever Analogy (sorry, no cars involved):
"Ms. Hester, we have heard from a mother that she saw a photo album in your home that had a picture of someone half dressed. We need you to hand over the keys to your apartment so that we can search it and see just how damaging that photo is. You refuse? Then we must assume the worst. You're fired."
Note in the article that the photo in question was taken before employment at the school, and that the state where this occurred is already considering legislation to make this sort of request illegal.
Still irrelevant. If a parent reported the TA, then the parent should provide the screen shot. It is poor thinking to believe that this is just cause for demanding the Facebook password. If said parent complained that the TA had that picture in a photo album in her home and showed it to guests, does the school district have a right to demand the keys to the TA's private residence to search for said photo album?
Agreed, it seems to be a lot of astroturfing going on here by people afraid to risk their karma. I also would bet that a lot of the AC's are from the MPAA or its client states.
"When it comes to humility, I'm the greatest." -- Bullwinkle Moose
