I'll stop believing that "The Cloud" isn't affect by weather as soon as the Internet stops slowing down from all those clogged "Tubes" in the sewer system!

Is fashion the only thing the French are willing to fight for?

I feel like I might as well be reading Yahoo! news. Obviously, when your car drives itself, you can get work done on your commute, or whatever else you choose to focus on that doesn't involve driving. Being productive during a time which is normally wasted time is something rich people would love. It's like your own personal chauffeur without the chauffeur. I am surprised this is even a discussion.

I would suggest industrial automation for a large plant, hardware distributor or panel shop. You would need to learn some ladder logic and get some electrical experience but it's not that hard to learn. The problems and scenery will always change, and your managers will always be on your side when it comes to making things work better and more efficiently.

Can a Hot Pocket be cooked in space?

This is something I care really strongly about, so I am going to go ahead and make a post.

The following things have been going on for quite a while:

1) Take-down of YouTube videos which contain only a small portion of a sample of a song.
2) The re-use of samples stolen from other songs, used by the major record companies in many popular songs.

The second, has been going on for more than a couple of decades.

One of the world's most famous examples of this, has been called the "Amen Break". It's basically a drum beat which was taken from a song long ago and been re-used in numerous, top-chart electronic dance music and rap songs, as well as commercials. A good video regarding the history of the "Amen Break" can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

The production of music or a song can be viewed as a morphed compilation of previous works. When musicians produce music, they want to create something which is different, but yet close enough to something else so that listeners are not alienated. Create something that is too close to something else or resembles something that sounds like it was done last decade, people find it boring. Create something that is too different, people don't understand it.

The fact that record companies are running around on YouTube, silencing anything which even slightly resembles something they may own a copyright to, is completely hypocritical and is a slap in the face to the trade they claim to care so much about. Things are reaching a point where an independent musician cannot drop in a vocal or a simple beat that has been used before in order to connect to and express a new message to people. This is, simply put, sad. If left unchecked, and if it continues in the direction it is currently heading, it will systematically dismantle the processes used for the individual to create the very things which make us tick: Music, art, creativity and expression. Eventually, you could be in a world where higher powers have complete control (one could argue that there is some control right now as it is) over how you dance, what is considered art and what is considered the correct message to listen to. (Why do so many people covet and protect the ideas of "get money", "get hoes", and "get drunk"?)

When you inhibit the ability for musicians other than your own to create new works of music, and you have the power and the resources to bend your own rules (own countless samples and beats, and steal from others) to create anything you want, you establish a monopoly not just on tangible items such as music, movies, literature and characters, but cultural progression as well.

One of the first videos I published onto YouTube was an instructional video on how to mix two songs together. I didn't even play the two songs in their entirety. Each song I maybe played 1:00-1:30 seconds of each, most of the time the songs being mixed together (theoretically creating a new song). My voice was dubbed over the entire time, and the playback of the actual music wasn't really the best. Within a week it was ripped down off YouTube. To make matters worse, the record company that claimed copyright infringement, I could not find any evidence that they owned the songs in question after eight hours of scouring the Internet. I never went back to YouTube, it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

YouTube is such a great example because it has already shown us in such a short period of time how far the record companies will go to abuse their power. It has served as a "legal sandbox" if you will. They aren't just targeting the individual posting up the latest release, with a caption saying "Click here to download the 320 mp3!", they are stretching the truth in order to silence every individual garnering up the courage post something. The YouTube community has become a platform where artists fear expressing themselves, as they do not know what exactly will happen.

The copyright enforcement policing by the record companies started out policing entire songs. Now it's on to small portions of the song. Next it will be words or phrases that happen to be in a song. The next thing will be different sounds that are in the song. Then it will be notes. What's after that? Ideas? Do we want the entire world to be such a place?