No, actually, I'm not. I'm assuming that people would put that $10 towards a specific album and thus, a specific artist. If I stream dozens or hundreds of artists a month, the $10 is really diluted, so even if I spent most of my time listening to one artist, they necessarily won't have made as much money off of me as they would've if I'd bought their album.

Well, I mean, to a certain extent I agree. But you and I are having this conversation, which means that we've thought about it. Spotify and services like it mask the conversation from the public. They think that the artists are getting paid an amount commensurate with their skill, and roughly corresponding to the amount that the public enjoys the artist's music. If you ask someone what they think a band gets paid from a streaming service, I'm sure they'll tell you a figure that's much higher than it actually is. To an extent, it even removes the ability of people to vote with their dollars. When $10/month is being split between dozens of artists, even the person that comes out on top is poor. In the end, it may end up backfiring on the streaming services. If bands decide they can make more money doing releases on BandCamp and Spotify is undermining their album sales, maybe they'll pull out of the streaming services to sell fewer albums, but still make more money doing it.

But on a more philosophical level, I think it's sad that art is reduced to a mere calculation and balance sheet. I paid $10 for some albums and I've gotten joy out of them that can't be defined in dollar terms. In a very fundamental way, a lot of music shapes the way we interact with the world. I mean that very literally; music changes and shapes your brain as you listen to it. Emotion and music are tightly interwoven. It's a surprise when you meet someone that takes no enjoyment in music at all.

So while there's a fundamental truth to what you say, driving potential artists away from what could be a workable career doesn't really benefit us. If streaming revenues were enough to make up a decent, middle-ish class living, I don't think I'd argue with you. But these streaming revenues aren't enough to do anything other than have making music as a hobby, and really undermine important album sales. I'm sure there will be lots of artists that continue to make music and live in poverty--that's been true through the ages--but the promise of the age we live in was that MORE artists would be able to reach more people and more EASILY make a living.

While true, it's irrelevant for two reasons:

1) The radio doesn't play the songs you want on demand; and
2) The radio is effectively a way to drive album sales. Spotify is a REPLACEMENT for the album.

It used to be that it was worth it to play your songs on the radio (even at a loss) because people that liked your one song might want to hear the 10 hours you wrote--that would never be heard on the radio--and spend $10 on the album.

Now you pay Spotify $10/month for unlimited access to the entire album. To the entirety of the artist's catalogue. To the entirety of all the included artists' catalogues.

This is obviously and trivially less money than any one of those artists would make previously from you if you liked their music. Perhaps the argument could be made that more people are listening and giving a tiny amount of money to each artist, but I rather think that given the stats I've seen, this isn't even close to true.

This is much different from the time when people were pirating albums, since many fans would go out and buy an album that they downloaded because they wanted to support the artist. Now people feel that because they're paying $10 to Spotify or Rdio that they ARE supporting the artist. They're not going to pay for a subscription AND an album. That's exactly the opposite of the point of these services.

They need a new model. Streaming on its own for $10/month is clearly not enough money to go around. Spotify has infrastructure costs and has been bleeding money (I think they had a break-even or profitable quarter just recently?). Meanwhile, they also need to distribute the remainder of the already paltry $10 between a zillion artists. It makes no sense.

Quite true. Last spring I went to the US (Indiana and Texas) from Iceland with my then-fiance to show him where I grew up and went to school (he grew up in Iceland). It was too bright for him in Indiana, and in Texas it was downright painful for him.

We don't get much of that "sun beating down straight overhead" stuff here that you get in the states, it more sort of rotates around you, with really long sunrises / sunsets (sometimes with multiple sunrises / sunsets in a day as it moves past mountains).

Waaah. I live in Iceland, don't complain to me about a lack of winter sunlight.

I wasn't excusing anything - I don't support any geoengineering that works by increasing the albedo, for many different reasons. But it's simply fact that a large portion of the world's people live in areas that get proportionally little sun. And contrary to myth, they don't have higher suicide rates or anything like that.

The US (where many if not most slashdotters live) is actually an unusually sunny country, by first-world standards. Even Seattle is sunnier than Berlin, which is sunnier than London, which is sunnier than Glasgow...

Yeah, a lot of people already live in the sort of environments that they're warning against. This line got me:

And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that's available to almost everybody

Is that a joke? People's ability to see the night sky varies vastly depending on where they are. In big metro area, all you can see are the brightest of stars. There's little to no majesty to it. It's when you get out into the deep, deep countryside and look up at the uncountable multitude above you that you feel little and insignificant compared to the cosmos around you. There's nothing universal about ready access to a dark sky. And it's getting rarer and rarer.

If they create an exchange with a current crypto currency and conver all their money to it except what is needed from day to day, then drop out of the Eurozone and create their own dollar, each crypto dollar will be the value of the crypto currency used.

Sorry, but unless there's hard assets behind it, it's going to float. And the float will be way down, just the same as any other Greek currency. Greece's creditors and exporters don't want New Drachmas, CryptoDrachmas, or anything of the sort: they want dollars and euros. To get dollars and euros, Greece has to make and export goods and services at a rate competitive with their rate of imports. For their government to get dollars and euros, they actually have to stamp out corruption, tax evasion, and so forth. Greece's inability to do these things is the reason they're in the bind they are today.

You mean this article? Albeit the summary was poor, but it covers the firmware hacking.

And FYI, if anyone actually takes the time to read the Kaspersky report they'd catch that the infection is believed to have been done on thousands to tens of thousands of computers, NOT "most HDDs". The firmware has the capability to infect most HDDs, but most HDDs are not infected - according to the very source report itself.

Which should be obvious. Because if you're the NSA and you're writing a super-infection to use against top-level targets, the last thing you want to do is have it on every last computer in the world, increasing your likelihood of being found by many orders of magnitude. The NSA's preferred method of infection is interdiction - intercepting objects while in transit to targets, such as CDs or hard drives, infecting them, then letting them continue on their way.

Once again, the NSA doesn't give a rat's arse if you're going to the Pirate Bay to download I Am Legend. It has far more important things to worry about, like people building atomic bombs and invading other countries.

Whatever they convert it into, New Drachmas or Cryptodrachmas, it's still going to devalue like crazy. Both, being backed by the same entity (the state) will have the same credibility problem. Except even moreso for the cryptocurrency because of all of the concerns that carries with for many investors.

You do realize that to import goods, you have to pay for them, right?
You do realize that without international trade Greece would resemble Somalia, right?

Yes, Greece can declare itself another North Korea and cut itself off from the world if it wants to give the global financial system the middle finger. But hey, good luck with that...

If I were an investor, I'd be glad to see the Euro kick out any countries that undermine the currency.

There's also this big lie that "Greece has been saddled with debts that they could never pay". Greece's state assets are worth an order of magnitude more than their debts. They could sell off a tenth of them and have all of their debts in the clear right away.

Obviously, they don't want to privatize everything, and I don't blame them. But the concept that this debt is impossible to service is simply a lie. They just don't want to. Heck, they could do it without excessive pain to the middle class or extensive privatization if only they'd go after their wealthy - there's a couple dozen Greek billionaires and countless more in the next eschelons. And these are the biggest tax dodgers who don't pay anywhere close to their fair share. But Greece is apparently either unable or unwilling to go after them.

It's easy for Americans who've never had to live with a weak, low circulation currency to say "EURO BAD!". But they've never seen the consequences. How even in a good economy your money steadily becomes more and more worthless because inflation of such currencies is almost always worse than that of stronger currencies. How you pay out the nose for loans because of the higher risk of inflation or currency swings. How many companies won't even work with transfers to / from your currency.

Big, strong currencies offer serious benefits. America has been given a *massive* economic boost due to the widespread usage of the Greenback. Their economy would be nowhere near what it is today if each state had its own currency.

The fact that the Troika hasn't been willing to give one iota on the Greece issue should be enough of a reflection on how little consequence they think an exit of Greece from the eurozone would be. Germany in particular doesn't want to give any ground (I imagine all of the nazi-name calling has played no small part), but they're hardly alone, many countries are taking a very hardline stance on Greece. Most parties feel that the consequence of giving way to Greece could be significant, but the consequences of their exit - while not completely painless - would not be that dramatic.

On the other hand, in Greece, there's only one route for exit, and that's capital controls (or a rapid conversion over the weekend) where everyone's assets are converted to some kind of new-drachma, which instantly devalues to half its value or less. Which is why everyone is taking their euros out of the banks, they're not stupid (unfortunately, thieves aren't stupid either, breakins have become an epidemic as they look for people hoarding money at home).

I can't see a cryptocurrency helping in any way... if anything I'd guess it'd only serve to unnerve markets even more and lose even more value as a consequence. I could picture it maybe as a simultaneous and rate-locked currency to a physical New Drachma, maybe. But it sounds IMHO like an incredibly risky move even then. I mean, one presumes for example that there's a government-controlled master key to "print" more cryptocoins? Then that means that your entire economy can be crushed overnight by someone hacking, physically stealing, misusing, cracking, or whatnot your master key. Isn't that an unnecessarily big risk to take? And on an individual level it seems full of problems as well...

Don't get me wrong, I don't think cryptocurrencies are inherently an evil or shouldn't exist. But I would have serious second thoughts about such a massive nationwide rollout on a country that's already in chaos.

It's de rigueur, and honest funding sources expect you to credit them.

In my field it's usually a paragraph right before the references cited. Sometimes there is also a Conflict of Interest statement, which I think is required by certain journals.