That's not quite the point. I'm not arguing that musicians deserve pay because they work particularly hard. But you have to work extremely hard to become a great musician. If you take the money out of music then people can't spend all day practicing. They may still play, but they can never get to the heights that they could if they didn't have to work another job. In my opinion that would be a tremendous shame.

What you say is probably true for mass-appeal pop music. It's not true for highly trained classical musicians. I appreciate that the figure of 10,000 hours was my number (picked because it sounded big - clearly I should have thought a bit harder), but you must see that the amount of work that you describe is just a world away from the work that goes into top-level music (which generally amounts to playing all day, every day for years). My point isn't that they therefore deserve to be remunerated; it's simply not possible for people to spend enough time to get really good if they aren't remunerated for it, because you can't practice enough and work a separate job.

Similarly, when it comes to highly skilled musicians, helping the organisation means helping the musicians. The organisations are almost always charities (I've just looked up Britain's permanent orchestras, and of the five orchestras that Wikipedia lists as the most prestigious all five are charities). A large amount of their money goes on their musicians (I've looked up one at random (since charities' accounts are available online) - the London Philharmonic - which spends 60% of its income on paying its musicians. Almost all the rest goes on paying for a venue). And they aren't comfortably off - in 4 out of the past 5 years, deducting their profit from CD distribution would leave them well into the red. CD sales may represent a small part of an orchestra's turnover (for the LPO just a little over 10%), but the low cost of it means that it has a disproportionate impact on financial viability.

How many of the best doctors today spend all day doing something other than medicine? I suspect none - I'm sure that it's true that the best doctors are motivated by more than just a desire for money, but to be the best they need to spend all day, day-in, day-out improving their skills, and that's just not possible if they have to spend most of their time working somewhere else to make money.

Art is no different. To be really good at something you have to spend tens of thousands of hours practicing. If you can't make a living through art then I'm sure many people will still create it - but if they can't spend those tens of thousands of hours on practice they'll never hit the high notes that make for something exceptional.

Copying my reply to a comment above: "If you have ever known a trained professional musician you'll know that great musicians work incredibly hard, practicing all week and giving concerts on top of that. If you go to see a great orchestra you are seeing the result of tens of thousands of hours of work - per person. There can easily be 50 person-years of diligent practice to get to the result you hear. Part-time or hobbyist players are simply not even close to being a substitute for great professional musicians."

The same is true of other forms of art. The amount of work it takes to become a great artist is huge (not to mention often expensive to the artist). This isn't a case of saying that they deserve remuneration because they work hard; it is simply impossible to spend ten hours a day practicing an instrument (for example) and also carry on a second job. If you make it impossible to earn a living from art you kill off the best artists - who are surely the ones that we should be keen to encourage.

Art isn't different to any other intellectual activity in this respect. I am a lawyer, and I love my job; if I couldn't make a living from it I would still want to carry it on in some capacity. But if I had to work another job I could never spend enough time on it to be really good. I'm sure that the same is true of things like programming or other technical roles.

If you have ever known a trained professional musician you'll know that great musicians work incredibly hard, practicing all week and giving concerts on top of that. If you go to see a great orchestra you are seeing the result of tens of thousands of hours of work - per person. There can easily be 50 person-years of diligent practice to get to the result you hear. Part-time or hobbyist players are simply not even close to being a substitute for great professional musicians.

I'm not convinced by either their data or their analysis. Data from the Eighteenth Century Collection Online (and compiled in Joel Mokyr the Enlightened Economy) puts publishing in England in 1800 at 3,000 books per year - it's difficult to believe that this fell to 1,000 per year in 1843. They don't cite their sources so it's impossible to check the numbers they give; they also seemingly rely only on data from one particular year, which tends to suggest that they chose not to look more widely because it would undermine their point.

Moreover, the argument is not a sensible one. The claims are outlandish, and incoherent: the establishment of copyright in 1710, we're told, "crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom"; but in just the previous paragraph the author is claiming that it is impressive that Germany managed to catch up with the UK by 1900, and in the penultimate paragraph we find out that this is even more impressive as it took place in spite of copyright being introduced in Germany in the 19th century! Not one of the points supports the conclusion. And the claims about publishing and development rely on ignoring the historical context: the time period (the second half of the 19th century) is after the English industrial revolution but contains the German equivalent. One wonders how many of that impressive quantity of books were translations of books published in England a half-century earlier.

There is a benefit to the consumer: playing video games on the new Xbox. The consumer doesn't pick, in isolation, whether they want always-on connectivity; they choose whether or not to buy the whole bundle of good and bad design decisions that make up the Xbox. There is presumably a group of people who will move from wanting an Xbox to not wanting one because of this feature, but my gut feeling is that they won't be that numerous, because I think that the games, not the technical requirements, are probably uppermost in peoples' minds when buying a console.

Where have you seen this used? It seems like it wouldn't work anywhere where you have external consultants or clients attending meetings, or meetings with more than a couple of people - in either case because it would be a big deal if you turned up and the conference room was being used.

You're imagining that things are so bad that a guarantee backed by the US government is not enough to stop a bank run, and the run is so widespread that the government cannot meet the bill. In that case the government has collapsed. The banks have collapsed. The stock market has collapsed, the hedge funds have collapsed, the insurance markets and pension companies and every other type of financial institution has collapsed. In this situation, you lose. It doesn't matter if your money was in bitcoins or invested in gold - you just lose. As I said above there's really little point in an American individual hedging against the collapse of the US government - if that happens you just lose.

You need to look at the bigger picture - taking depositors' money is only a small part of what happened in Cyprus. It's the result of widespread bank failure and the government defaulting. If the same happened in the US - the government defaulting on its debt and deposit banks collapsing - you would be in huge trouble whether the government took your savings or not. I'm not sure that there's any point in a private citizen living in the US hedging against the collapse of the government; if that happens you've lost no matter how prepared you are.

I assume that there's some sort of calculation behind this: presumably the extra usage that the cards get by being extremely convenient to use outweighs the losses. I say that because (at least in this country - I don't know about elsewhere) if your credit card is misused by a retailer it's the credit card company that bears the loss. They still haven't moved away from the old model - presumably because the amount of fraud is not great enough to justify the cost and loss of convenience of something more secure.

That's not a fair summary.

What they have said is that they won't be changing the scores because there's a significant disadvantage (people being unhappy with the lost nostalgia) and not much of an advantage, since having a couple of over- or under-valued letters doesn't make much difference in a game with so much inherent luck.

Yes, as with absolutely any type of lawsuit it is possible for a claimant to frame a defendant. They could equally crack their wireless and post defamatory statements about themselves or drop their belongings in the person's shopping bag. This is the reason that perjury is a serious criminal offence that renders a person liable to a lengthy period of imprisonment.

I suspect that the GP means the particular subset of (largely modernist/post-modernist) fiction that uses formatting, foot-notes and deliberately fragmented writing (so that flicking backwards and forwards is often necessary). Ebooks are indeed not much good for those.

I'm not sure that the problems that people have with ereaders are really the manufacturers' or publishers' fault. Locking and removing content remotely are irrelevant (and unheard of) to almost everyone; the Kindle's DRM has no impact at all on the common use case of buying your own books. It seems to me that ereaders have done extremely well - the only thing they have failed to do is to live up to the exaggerated predictions of some commentators.

There are limiting factors on ebooks that I think are inherent rather than being someone's fault. They aren't much good for books where you will want to flick from page to page or scan through for some half-remembered diagram - so a lot of non-fiction is better suited to paper books. They also lack the ability to spontaneously lend them to someone - if a friend is staying over and wants something to read, chances are they don't have their ereader with them. The screen size can never be right for every book you want to read, especially if you want to read newspapers and magazines as well as paperbacks. Those are, I think, bigger problems for the average user than the vague possibility that Amazon might remove their content - and I don't think they are really anyone's fault.