http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Michaelson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macklemore
What I find very interesting is this very American idea of measuring success by the amount of money an artist makes. It is perfectly fine to have someone screeching to pure noise, as long as studios' marketing convinced us that this was "the voice" and had an expensive contract to prove it. Vincent van gogh would be considered a total failure for example, by today's standard. It is not enough that you were able to have career based on music and were able to cater to a vast audience. Since artists did not usually become extremely rich, ergo we never had good artists. Thus Vincent van Gogh never existed. Nor did Franz Schubert.
If Mariah carey had gone independent instead of being with Columbia or Virgin Records etc. she would have been able to retain all of the profits, instead of just 10-15% share of it. Consider the irony. The middle-men should be the one getting the 10-15% profits after deducting actual costs. But instead, it is the content creator.
What ends up happening is, that labels latch on to a "hit formula" and kill creativity by making snoop dogg and other artists sacrifice their styles in favor of the "formula", to maximize revenue. Worse, with their publicizing muscle and money, they don't exactly provide a level field for independents, since they ensure that the independents are all but drowned in the noise of all the ads, even if their own artists might be all but junk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Claims_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosa_v._Alvarez-Machain
In essence, US claims that one way or the other, USA has jurisdiction over every living person on earth. You might be a British citizen, who has never been to USA and has not broken any of the British laws, but you can be prosecuted regardless, if you knowingly or unknowingly broke US laws, without ever setting foot in USA.
Why exactly have US and China managed to stay on top of the list continuously for past few years, without managing to act the least bit "responsible"? Mod me troll or flamebait if you want to, but Japan even on per-capita basis is lower on list than most other countries. If US and Chinese politicians are willing to sit on their asses and screw the world, why this special onus of "responsibility" on Japan? USA could have done better, and should have so long ago. But US government was more busy trying to convince everyone that global-warming was a "myth" and attempting to argue that it was better to kill the planet than "harm the economy". When we go painting Japan as "one of the world's top polluters", let us remember to name and shame the top two or three as well.
The only reason you cannot and shall not have another 911 is because, earlier there was an expectation amongst crew and passengers that if they complied, there was a very reasonable chance that they would get to survive, but now people would simply take any would-be hijackers apart. So if there is another attack vector, it will likely be very very similar to 26/11 mumbai attacks. A very public suicide mission to attack people in crowded mall or landmark, like the Kenya westgate shopping mall attack. You do NOT need the TSA anymore. Passengers on the plane are now all the security one needs. TSA is just a waste of money post-911. But as far as effectiveness of gadgets is considered, they would have been considered pretty effective pre-911 since they can actually kill a person or two. They would have worked just effectively as box-cutters. in a pre-911 world. But post-911 what one should expect is mumbai 26/11 style attacks. Sadly, terrorism sponsoring states like Pakistan are actually being funded by USA to do trial-runs of such attacks on rival countries, before they are launched against US itself. And that is the real problem. You guys fund, train create your own terrorists, to get your own nation attacked. And then you geniuses think that spying on, and strip-searching your own citizens will solve that problem for you.
Corporations care just for the profits. If it is profitable for them to break laws, despite the current penalties involved, they will do so. Make it unprofitable and they are as law-abiding as the next guy.
You know, it might be kinda better than all that xenophobic bullshit about FOREIGNERS making profittttsss off you.... and trying to shut them down and costing even the legitimately employed folks of the company, their jobs. But I guess, racism and xenophobia is more popular...
If you were actually a foreign terrorist, and for some insane reason you did decide to discuss your "super secret plans" in email or over phone, unless you are completely retarded as well, you will use your local dialect instead of English. And you will use common words or phrase *in your own dialect* as previously agreed codewords. You will NOT communicate in English. So NSA might flag the foreign language conversation as suspicious, but I doubt there will be a perfect automatic speech translation in place that can immediately translate. And even if you had someone translate ever single piece of foreign language conversation, you still will have to deal with guessing what the code words mean.
In other words, a sweeping eavesdropping program will get you zilch unless you even for a second believe the other guys to be total morons. They might be insane, but they are not at least that. Only time you will have results by eavesdropping is if you already knew someone to be a terrorist, and were monitoring all their calls and tried to assume everything to be a terrorist communication.
The other situation where you will have results is, if we change the definition of results to "eavesdrop on our own troublemaker citizens and political opponents and have blackmail material on them to ensure we stay in power". Now *those* are the guys who will communicate in a language your eavesdropper program can listen to and collect material on. Think of collecting bits and pieces of info on every time someone mentions your political opponent's name and sifting through that to see if you can find anything on him to ensure his complete submission.
And unless you want to have a de facto dictatorship cemented even further and no chances of having even a semblance of democracy, feel free to sacrifice privacy. You will eventually sacrificing your freedom or liberty too.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.