Those minstrels got paid - and generally paid pretty good. They got to eat while many of their fellows were starving on the little plot of land they were working for the Earl or whatever. And they wandered from town to town because no town could afford to keep them very long.

Make no mistake, these folks were living pretty high compared to the rest of society in those times.

Sure, you can make your own music for yourself. Don't plan on selling it, though, because everyone else can make their own music also. Or, you can listen to other people's music for free - just pay the membership fee for the service and you have your choice. Of course, not even the streaming service is very profitable, much less the artists - there is no money in it anywhere.

Music for the last hundred years or so has been driven by promotion. You hear about it because people are paying to make sure you hear about it. There are (were?) magazines dedicated to music promotion. AM and FM radio have been driven because of promotion. Free concerts have existed because of promotion - where the artist gets paid but nobody paid any admission. This is all coming to an end and the end of the road is no more promotion - you hear about what you hear about and you don't hear about anything very much.

Maybe it is a more eglitarian form of entertainment, but it means the end of things like a common cultural reference. A band is never going to escape their locality, which might be geographic or it might be a very narrowly focused group of people, or both. It means that you can never talk to someone that you just met about a band you both have heard of.

Why would you purchase something that you can select to stream to a mobile device any time you want? Seems silly to me.

What streaming has done is given the power of the radio "request" to everyone and they all get their requests instantly. No need to buy anything, just make your selections and listen.

Oh, and if you want an MP3 file (for some unknown reason), that's what BitTorrent is for.

So who is getting paid here? Well, the streaming service is getting something, either a membership fee or ads. Both are a pittance because nobody is going to pay a high membership fee and the ads aren't generating lots of sales so they aren't very valuable. With that, the streaming service can pay the artists something - something like $0.0042 a play or about $500 a year.

There isn't any money in it. And there isn't anything that can be done to somehow push more money in or take more money out.

The problem with the "up and coming" band just getting by with touring is that there is no "coming". They might get enough exposure to net a better grade bar or two but nobody is paying for promotion. They are probably lucky if they can afford to stop off at Office Depot to run off some flyers to pass around. What the record label is for is paying for promotion - and making money by backing a few successful and a few more unsuccessful bands. They have seriously fallen down on that trying to control their risk, just like the rest of businesses today.

No risk = no reward. But that formula hasn't been taught very well in MBA class.

What "publishing" in general was 50 years ago was taking on 10 things, be it books, bands or whatever and promoting the heck out of them With reasonably good selection up front you had something like 7 flops, two moderate successes and one pretty good performer - which altogether paid for the promotion of all ten with some profit left over. The problem is the MBAs came in and decided they could make more money by getting rid of the seven flops without considering how you do that. So we have the entire spectrum of "publishers" trying to find the three successes without encountering any flops at all. Lots of really smart (and successful) people figured out a long time ago that you can't do that reliably and this lesson is being relearned every day. Unfortunately, MBA schools taught that you just had to be smart enough to find the three successes and all would be good. We are experiencing what happens when this is being applied across the spectrum of publishing - books, movies, music, software, magazines, etc.

The Dish Hopper is somewhat of a joke, It is a way to convert satellite broadcast into streaming - you see, it isn't a DVR at all but a device that requests something be saved for you at Dish Network HQ. Then, later you can have it streamed to you over the Internet. They claim the device is limited to 2000 hours, but this would appear to be an entirely arbitrary number. Since your "saved" content is likely shared with everyone else, why would there be any limit at all?

Do you really think that they are saving a unique copy of Two Broke Girls rather than simply having one that everyone shares?

Unfortunately, it is going to suffer the same fate as all streaming - congestion. We are starting to see streaming degrading because of Internet congestion now and it is only going to get worse as time goes on. Having a faster link from the "head end" to the home isn't going to fix it as long as we have a node configuration where a node feeds a neighborhood - both FIOS and every cable and DSL system utilizes this sort of configuration.

Cox in Phoenix is trying to be forward looking and reducing the number of homes per node from 1000 to 500 and that may help somewhat. But with higher and higher bandwidth expectations (see Netflix recent announcement), once we move into a point where streaming is being done by a large number of households it would have to be more like 100 homes per node - and that isn't going to happen without major restructuring. Major, as in when we moved cable from RF to digital distribution.

Most other cable networks are at 1000 homes per node and maybe 1Gb feed to each node. That means if homes are hoping for 10Mb/sec streaming only a 1 in 10 is going to get it. When we get past 1 in 10 streaming, that is about the end for streaming as a distribution technique.

So how long could the Hopper possibly last? Maybe three years. Maybe. Converting from satellite broadcast to streaming is a silly thing for Dish to be doing as there is no impending collapse of satellite distribution. Sort of like Netflix dropping,or thinking about and quickly forgetting about dropping DVD distribution.

I have three Roku boxes and an Apple TV box. I expect them all to be paperweights in 1-2 years.

The question to ask is since it is proven that people will pay $30-60 a month for Internet service, why would Google offer it for free? Just to build market share? I doubt it.

Google is getting compensated in some manner. Now the first thing that comes to mind is they are avoiding paying someone else to deliver their exclusive content - plenty of places are waking up to the fact that Google is making billions off of delivering ads to people with the local cable company picking up the tab for the delivery of that content. It isn't common in the US (yet) for high-volume content providers to be paying for delivery but things are changing - look at what Netflix is doing.

Another thing is Google makes money from selling demographic and marketing information, not just delivering ads. So if you are using their Internet connection they obviously know the most popular Internet sites for your connection. Aggregated with all your neighbors gives them the information of what is popular for your zip code and that is saleable. How much monitoring and tracking are you comfortable with? Google will push that envelope as much as they can and will make billions doing it.

Excuse me, but have you tried a Roku box? Or Apple TV? You can subscribe to services for live sporting events without having cable TV.

Unfortunately, it isn't free, but I'm sure someone is figuring out a way to pirate those services.

Oh that is pretty funny. You seem to think that once the physical plant is in that is the end of the matter.

Well, there is this little thing called maintenance. If you don't maintain the physical plant, it goes to crap in a short period of time. Copper rusts. Coax deteriorates in other ways. Every connection point is a risk factor, and every box with some electronics in it is vulnerable to failure. Pretty much that means line crews are out at least five days a week and they need some coverage 24x7. The maintenance costs are high.

Cable companies generally farm out the installs to other companies but keep the hardline and node maintenance to themselves. Fiber has its own set of problems with physical damage but every connection point has a bunch of electronics that is subject to failure, so while the problems are different there is still a heavy maintenance requirement.

No, these folks aren't just sitting there and letting the system rot around them. Well, not if it is working. There is nowhere near as much profit as you seem to think in running the system.

If only it could be outsourced to someplace with cheap labor. Sadly, in Arizona they can't use cheap illegals because of the training and turnover requirements. Obviously, the cheaper illegals are used anywhere they can be.

Copyright doesn't affect anyone's right to view something, only to distribute it.

So you can view anything, but you may not have the right to copy it and post it somewhere else. Especially if you claim to be the author of it.

Obviously the only control you have over preventing people from viewing something is to restrict access or not post it to begin with.

Build some train tracks? Sorry, the land has been used up with houses and highways. To build a rail system some houses are going to have to be torn down - and they way we have been building in clustered houses it would mean tearing down whole communities.

Buses might stand a chance, but the US has had such an incredibly bad history of bus transportation that nobody expects it to ever work.

Not building power plants? Heck, we haven't been building big power plants since the 1970s and we are just about out of the cushion that was built in the 1950s and 1960s. We so vastly overbuilt that it has taken us 40 years to fill the capacity that we built. Of course the trap we constructed is deep and wide because there is no way to build suffficient capacity in the next ten years that we will need in the next five. Electric power is going to get a lot less stable and a lot more expensive in the next few years.

It isn't just the evil corporations. The problem with labor is that we have had cheap labor for so long that nobody understands how to function with expensive labor and all we have in the West today is expensive labor. So cheap labor is going to get used, no matter where it is. Sure, we could pass laws making it illegal to import goods manufactured with cheap labor, but that wouldn't solve the problem. Trying to make labor expensive in developing countries is unlikely to fix the problem either, again because we are so familiar with cheap labor. It would exist somehwere and it would be found and used.

Probably the worst thing that could happen would be a flexible humaniform robot that could perform menial labor.

Well, it would seem obvious to anyone that lived through the 1950s and 1960s that we need to get out of the bottle and make use of some other bottles.

Failing that, humanity will die drowning in their own wastes. We can grow or we can die, there is no "sustainable". This is easily seen with any lifeform. If humanity doesn't grow beyond the current container it is in, it is doomed just as a bacteria colony in a petri dish.

There was no effort to identify who Jammie Thomas uploaded files to, only that she made the files available from her computer for others to download. I don't see that changing anytime soon, so identifying who the downloader might be is unimportant, only that there are files being offered for download.

I also tend to agree that No Good Can Possibly Come From Piracy. I have seen plenty of justifications like the studios are making plenty of money as it is even with rampant piracy and the Star Trek justification - if we get rid of revenue everything will be free. Unfortunately what we are seeing is the "early adopter stage" still with piracy. It is somewhat more mainstream than it was five years ago but overall Internet speeds are increasing worldwide and that makes piracy faster and easier. We are educating children that there is no need to pay for anything on the Internet and I think the lessons are taking hold. This means we will see piracy being more and more mainstream. So when do studios decide there is no longer enough revenue to even bother with digital distribution? As a bulk of the material on The Pirate Bay is digitally recorded OTA and satellite broadcasts, what happens when it is decided there just isn't any point in putting this stuff out for the pirates to grab? I think the point comes when broadcast ad revenues drop to the point where it is clear that "popular" does not result in revenue - just pirate viewers.

Is the answer to this that the Internet comes with a fee for getting access to all that content from studios? I don't think so - because the Netflix model doesn't begin to compensate studios as is easily seen by the Netflix content selection. Nobody is giving Netflix anything that could have any other revenue stream associated with it - Stars pulled out because even as a cable channel they were getting more than Netflix could cough up. No, a subscription fee isn't going to cut it. And comparing it to the media tariff is pointless because none of that has ever been distributed to anyone.

Since 1980 people have pretty much consistently voted for more government benefits, bigger government programs and whatever else the government says it needs to increase payments to people. We have gotten ourselves into a financial mess with a president promoting lower taxes and a Congress that spends as much as possible to keep the gravy train going.

Sure you would. No more searches at airports would mean the instant revocation of insurance coverage for airlines - remember, they proved they can't handle the security screening. No foreign military bases would mean all the cheap stuff from China and South Korea would disappear in a blinding flash. North Korea is just waiting for the US to give up on the South so they can walk in and take over. We could probably give up bases in Europe now, but in a lot of ways these bases are a net gain for everyone's economy.

Foreign wars? Sure, I suppose. Today we are trying to follow a "You broke it, you own it" philosophy and it is taking time - because the countries are far less stable than either Germany or Japan were at the end of WWII where we had to follow a similar course. Unfortunately some bright folks thought we could do this on the cheap and not bother the people about it. I'd say a much better course would have been to sell bonds to support the effort and maybe a special "war tax". We could have actually seen if Congress would have gone along with that. I suspect they would have. Afganistan was a pretty popular engagement.

At a Federal level the IRS has no "statute of limitations" on unpaid taxes, which is what this is. If they suddenly discovered that your great-great-grandfather didn't pay some taxes that were owed in 1930 they would be able to collect them - likely as not through attaching his estate and tracking that down through all the decendents until they found some cash.

I was subject to this sort of confiscation and they went back 10 years to decide that a tax shelter that was approved by the IRS had suddenly become unapproved and now taxes from 10 years ago were now owed, with interest for the 10 years they weren't paid. Some folks in the program had bills in the six and seven figures.

Basically, once you understand that the IRS has their own police force and their own court system you can see there is nothing they can't get away with. California is a small-time player and just copying what the IRS has done for a long time.

No, I am sure there is no appealing this.

Just to annoy here, I'd say that someone struck with a degenerative disease that makes it necessary to depend on others for life means that person has a pretty low quality of life. Are you sure life is worth living under those circumstances? I'm not. Being forced to be utterly dependent on other people for life can be OK but it can also be a living hell.

However, one thing I am not in favor of at all is giving the state and/or their appointed representatives, the power to decide that my life isn't worth living any longer and to take steps. Once you are spending the State's money on continuous care, it becomes the State's obligation to make sure its money is being well spent. And that does absolutely mean they get to decide if your life is worth living - worth it to them.

That is one big problem with state-funded healthcare. It becomes the state's business whatever your health (or lack thereof) is. If you have an STD and they are paying for treatment it behooves the state to find out how you got it and make sure it is less likely to reoccur. If you smoke, it becomes the state's obligation to get you to stop, whatever that entails, even up to preventing the sale of all smoking materials. If you are overweight, you are going to cost more money for healthcare in the future and therefore need to have the state step in and help you with your diet.

Remember, all the healthcare privacy in the world doesn't help because there is always the exception for the payer, be it the insurance company or the state.

Source Code got a little confusing in that if you buy into multiple universes being split up, how do you have communication back from an alternate to the "original"? That was how it ended and clearly the phone calls from the alternate universe had an effect on the original. That requires some very twisted causality that isn't generally explained by the quantum multiverse concept.

Let's see, might China have an incentive to make some changes so they could listen in on all communications with BlackBerry phones in use by the US government?

Gosh, I suppose the might.

As BlackBerry is the only certified secure phone presently, having the company in the hands of a pretty much hostile trading partner might just be a bad idea for both US and Canada.