Siriusly (sic)? And even if you don't want to pay $10-13 a month for that, is there a problem with listening to Pandora on your computer and clicking the buy link on tracks that you think you might want to listen to in the car? Or maybe you can hop on over to a mall and grab some albums out of FYE, or if you're more rural even Wal-mart has some. Of course, if you're more rural, how many FM stations do you actually get? And what kind of variety can you pull? And if you don't want to have to pay for the music...well I'm sure there's a few pirating options left.
And personally the FM stations tend to have too many commercials for me to be able to enjoy any real music time on my commute. Generally after every 3rd song there's about 10 minutes worth of commercials, and the way the stations tend to time it, I wind up catching the commercials at the start of the commute, have a few tunes in the middle, and finish up the rest of the commute with more commercials. It's also no sense in listening to FM in the mornings since all the rock stations around here play John Boy and Billy.
tl;dr: I much prefer the drone of the engine to any of the torture that local FM has to offer.
Actually...yes they are.
Individually, they do not have your complete credit history on file. For that, you do have to access each one to pull down all three parts of your complete story. However, individually, all three have at least your Name, Address, Social Security Number, Drivers License, and at least a partial phone history, on file.
tl;dr: Each of the three companies, individually, has enough identifying information to ruin you for life.
I'm sick of this damn strawman argument making excuses for these fucking fat-cats. America has plenty of high-density urban areas that are just about as archaic in their infrastructure as the Rural Co-Ops. In my state, Cox cable only rolled out proper RG-6 cable lines to handle the digital signal about 5 years ago, and there are still neighborhoods using the old RG-59 standard to the home, which is a bleeding nightmare to get proper speeds on. Proper speeds being about 10Mbps. Comcast is running tiered service, and I haven't heard anything but complaints about quality. Standard Cable is a fucking joke. AT&T DSL doesn't have nearly enough CO's to handle the number of people who want to get broadband, and no plans on building up any more for the forseeable (5 year) future. In fact, the best service I've heard about in Georgia is from a fucking electric Co-Op that's bringing FTTH service that provides Electricity, TV, Phone, and 10Mbps Uncapped Internet for better overall rates than Cox does for just TV, Phone, and 200GB monthly cap Internet. Exact comparisons: BRMEMC's price for Electricity, TV, Phone, AND Uncapped internet on the combined bill runs roughly $50 to $100 CHEAPER than Cox for just TV, Phone, and 200GB Internet.
There is nothing that stops these companies from providing higher throughput with current technologies that are in place except for greed and the desire to milk subscribers for every penny they have. I know for a fact that every service Truck that Cox owns has a Ladder or bucket and several 2,000' Spools of RG-6 cable and no shortage of high throughput line taps to be able to upgrade every single customer still on the old standard to the proper lines for sustained service. There is no reason for Cox to not be able to make a huge profit on providing $50 1Gbps service. Instead, we've got all these fucking companies going the other way and saying that we need to provide less service for the same fucking money. Instead of increasing to come closer to matching the rest of the world, our fucking service providers are shoving it up our collective asses and DEGRADING our services.
That's it! It's time for the tech minded to Unite and take this damn Country in the right direction towards faster propagation of information instead of the current trend towards slower. This means we need to start making our own active business war against the Data conglomerate! I don't care if a good deal of the bandwidth winds up being used for Cat videos, the Internet is now our emergency communication system, there is no current technology any faster to be able to spread news across the entire continent, and the trend for degradation of these speeds will only serve to make us more and more vulnerable.
Towards the end of my last stint at RadioShack they started having us do cold calling of the people who bought cell phones from us and were nearing the end of their contract. I maybe called 6 numbers my entire stint there. Once I had called two people back to back that said they didn't sign anything authorizing the call. Unfortunately, they did... it was just buried in all the paperwork when they signed RadioShack's copy of the carrier contract. After that, I only went through and marked off the numbers in the call list as they came up. Also, just before the customer got to the section that gave RadioShack the authorization I made up my own spiel to say "Before you sign this, understand that the only purpose of this page is saying that you're giving us permission to interrupt your dinner in two years to harass you into coming into the store for an upgrade. It is not required for your contract to go through." My manager was pissed when he realized what I was saying... I didn't care. He never argued it or wrote me up for it.
I gave up a lot of my soul in doing sales, but there's one bit of integrity that I didn't let go. At least now I'm in a position where I can start getting a good bit of my soul back.
I feel your pain. I'm an amateur photographer with all the high end equipment I need to capture beautiful shots (I prefer landscapes and still life). I absolutely abhor being told by my wife or parents that I'm going to be the designated photographer for an event, and, after losing yet another explosive argument where they won't accept "No" as an answer, I will often "forget" my camera equipment accidentally on purpose, and remind them that I said flatly...no. I'm going to an event to partake in it! Just by being behind a lens of any kind, be it smart phone, Digital Cam, Film Cam, Google Glass... I'm no longer a participant; I'm relegated to an objective observer, and my family doesn't understand why it pisses me off so much.
Then that is how their publishers / production houses must have wanted it...
FTFY
Let's get one thing straight here; Unless the creator was very good with contract negotiations and/or was a very big name on his/her own (Seus, Rand, Stephen King, etc) , it's the distribution houses that got the copyright and it's the distribution houses that are getting these extensions. And even in the name of Seus or Tolkein, it's not even the author that's making money off his works any more. It's his freakin' estate getting a free ride on his fame rather than doing anything productive themselves. Those are the damn freeloaders you need to pull the rug out from under, not the downloader.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.
