It is a cycle really.

It started with the minstrel show (chances are Daniel Decatur Emmett didn't write Dixie, but he got to be the first "sell face" in American pop music), but Tin Pan Alley turned it an industry and they were in it 100% for the copyright.

Every time the music industry takes good music and turns it into cynical, cookie cutter, garbage, some listener-turned-musician turns it into something else. Then the cycle starts over again. So maybe we shouldn't think of it as cookie cutter garbage, perhaps it is just fertilizer.

Since when was knowing how to pick a lock not a part of a young nerd's rite of passage?

It is like taking clocks apart or building "spy gadgets".

That isn't so much a NASA problem as it is a Congress problem. Everything takes 15 years and costs 3 times what it should because Congress wants it that way. That is what happens when you have to please 535 politicians.

In the end that is why I've always rejected stuff like Windows Market Place or Apple's App Store or EA's Origin. I want to go through a 3rd party and not buy directly from the publisher or OS vendor (yes, I'm sure someone will point out that I'm a hypocrite who needs to burn in a fire because Valve release their own titles via Steam, whatever), In the end I don't want the 1st party or the publisher as the sole arbiter of every term and condition.

There is a reason I don't buy my health insurance directly from Pfizer or the nearest Hospital, because both would love to have me over that barrel. This is the same reason I buy from GOG or Greenman or Steam. I want a collective bargaining power.

Unfortunately, I think I'm in the extreme minority on this one.

That was the refreshing aspect of the article. It went somewhere other than asking where the boobies go and if we should paint it pink.

Less about the movie than the fact that everybody and their brother is going to (or was going to) watch it this weekend. This created an instant shared experience for our culture.

It also comes in handy when taking it back to the Apple Store for repairs.

They own the following (via Wikipedia):

MTV, MTV2, MTV Tr3Âs, MTV Desi, MTV Hits, MTV Jams, mtvU, Nickelodeon, Nick 2/Nick at Nite, Nick Jr., TeenNick, Nicktoons, CMT, CMT Pure Country, CMT (Canada) (10%), TV Land, VH1, VH1 Classic, VH1 Soul, BET Networks, BET, BET Hip-Hop, BET Gospel, Centric, Palladia, Comedy Central, Logo, TMF, VIVA and Spike.

Of course the real loss there is Nickelodeon. Folks have to plop their kids down in front of something and no Nickelodeon or Nick Jr. means crying young 'uns and cancelled service. Not a pleasant thought if I were DirecTV.

"I see lots of people having kids like it was deciding to buy a Diet Coke."

Your parents may have told you that you were planned, but odds are they were lying.

I'm not saying it is smart and I'm certainly not saying it is economically sound, but for most of us the two factors that chose our conception were a bottle of cheap wine and .5 seconds of thoughtless deliberation.

It was going to be "butt", but that would have involve a cut-away of Ayn Rand wrestling a polar bear.

It insists upon itself.

True, I was thinking more along the lines of physical and monetary when it comes to negative impact, but the liar's paradox even creeps in, in that limited scope.

Where this really has me wondering is when it comes to telling the truth and bursting a market bubble or causing a run on something that is vital. You don't call a famine a famine because it only causes more people to starve to death, but should you call a bubble a bubble when it saves others from throwing their resources down a rat hole?

I wish I had the answers.

That which causes a negative impact that cannot be undone and is beyond the will of the one who receives it, so long as the receiver is competent and not currently the ward of an unwilling party?

It is an easy problem only from a technocrat's view, but for everyone else it is a screaming horror.

Say you own some ocean front property. It is a few inches less than it was a decade ago. 10 years from now it will be worse.

You don't want less land because you have less to sell. The government doesn't want you to have less land because it is prime real estate and those tax dollars matter. So we sit back and try to kill the messenger for as long as possible.

Because it isn't completely chained down by Congress.

A lot of folks like to crow on about how anything related to the government is automatically incompetent. For those folks I can only say this: NASA managed to get enough folks to OK their plans within 500 something men and woman in Congress, who all wanted to know what NASA could do for them in their re-election (ie, provide local jobs). I don't think anyone realizes how herculean that task is/was while also managing to get the shuttle of the ground. Insanely inefficient method of doing it? Absolutely. Incompetent? Absolutely not, pulling that off was nothing short of a miracle.

In this case it is private in that firms can buy and use a rubber gasket without guaranteeing that it be manufactured in Pennsylvania or Arkansas or wherever for the next 20 years at the cost of X million to provide Y jobs (I'll admit that is a very shallow and probably a totally unfair and incorrect example). Yes, the public is still footing the bill, but at least it is removed from the agendas of 500+ people to something a bit more goal oriented. /rant