But they are ALL biased, mostly in favor of hiding the inconvenient truth.

There, fixed it for you.

So, they come late to the party, call the lead singer titless, and puke on the birthday cake.

So unlike the old Microsoft : )

You hit the nail on the head. Since corps took control of radio stations, commercial music went downhill really fast. They did the same to the programming industry recently. It reached a point where hobby works are better quality than enterprise stuff.

Corporations are the anti-Midas. Everything they touch turns to crap.

Exactly. The problem of the news industry is twofold: greed and sloth.

Since greed is promoted as a virtue in capitalism, I will leave that alone.

However, when the industry becomes so complacent that most of the professional journalism is full of mindless parroting of press releases, the problem is aggravated.

Nobody will pay for the current shoddy journalism. Press releases can be had for free elsewhere. Until the industry learns to provide a compelling, insightful analysis, people will not buy this mindless stuff.

And when you fail, please do not go crying to daddy 'the govt' saying the world is going to miss your public service if you die. We won't miss you.

There is a certain limit to how much content can be supported by subscription fees, after that subscription fees become increasingly unattractive in order to keep up the same revenue stream and after that subscription fees alone won't bring in enough revenue to keep some businesses afloat.

There. Something to think about.

Well, the key word here is 'taking'. When one downloads something they do not take, they copy.

I do not know why you think hitting a problem is only bad in Linux. Let me give you an example.

A co-worker of mine has been complaining about word opening documents very slowly after she's been upgraded to office 2007. Some documents opened fine, others took MINUTES to load( a 27kb document, at that). It was driving her nuts.

Guess what. Updating the chipset driver fixed the problem.

How in the whole world would a normal person know that? It took me days of checking for dead network printers, viruses, removing crapware, cleaning the registry, to finally try and upgrade the driver.

Example two: Out of our 30 or so computers in the office, two consistently refused to apply policies after we moved them to the domain. The reason: although the boxes were fairly new, the hardware guys loaded them with old drivers for the network card. As a result, the network started MUCH LATER than the group policy was applied, hence the domain controller could not be found during policy ran at startup.

Windows just isn't made for the common man. I don't know if it ever will be.

This used to be true in the 90's. Now that more people are aware of open source, more designers are involved in open source projects.

Check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsZvwyxJ9vk&feature=player_embedded

I second that. Their management console is horrible - it does not hold computers in the group, is counter-intuitive, and fails to keep removed computers out - always adds them again to the main list. The management server is limited to N computers and if you get new users you have to install another management server. And they sell only in bulk of 10 or 25 licenses.

[quote]Of course I haven't read the article, not knowing Dutch and not bothering with a translate this page thing, and I know nothing of the music industry - for all I know the Dutch distribute 99% of the world's music, though I doubt it.[/quote]

Fixed that for you.

But let me see what's in my playlist as a european at this moment:
De-Phazz - New Format Recordings, HQ Germany
Gotan Project - Beggars Group, London, UK
Buena Vista Social Club - Wold Circuit, London, UK
Cheb I Sabbah - Six Degrees Recordings, NY, US

While none of them are from the Netherlands, most of them are not from the "overseas" either, but more like next door.