Seriously, if an electrical load at a friggin' school poses any measurable risk of fire before tripping the breaker, there's a much bigger moral crime being committed here than the theft of $0.05.

Agreed. I think the wrong part is treating the cost to secure the site as *damage*. That seems to be just as sloppy reasoning as "I only did it for a minute." At most I would consider the marginal cost of fixing the site right away as damage, and even that's questionable.

a) This isn't radio. Spotify's user base isn't that large, so 2% isn't as much as it sounds.
b) The more songs you have, the better chance you have of somebody listening to it. So if you have only one song, yeah that might be hard to hit. But if you have 40, it is easier.
c) Big caveat to my calculation: I don't know what Spotify's sliding scale is. For 2% of the user base, the payout may be significantly larger and thus the required number of plays to make a reasonable income smaller.
d) Spotify's revenue comes from ads, so it makes sense to split it up based on how popular a song/group is. If only 0.01% of the user base is listening to your music, you can't expect Spotify to give you a large piece of the ad revenue generated by their service.

The entertainment industry, whether it be music, tv/movies, or sports, is about popularity. If you can't boost your popularity, it just isn't going to work out, regardless of Spotify's business model. That is the reality.

That's delightfully evil! You'd be a shoe-in to the USB spec team.

The only thing I'd add is that the power circuit is completed through the user's fingers first, so it delivers an electric shock if the plug is inserted with the indexing lined up correctly.

If it was a hit song, then why is there no income in July? And August? Oh wait, there is, he might still be collecting money for work done years for DECADES to come.

Who else gets payed for work they did once? Let him add the total, over his lifetime AND his childrens lifetime, and divide it by the number of hours he spend on it. Wanna bet it comes to far more then minimum wage? And this is ONE source of payment? You ever did work and get payed by multiple people for decades to come? No, me neither.

This artist purposely uses misleading data. That means he is a lying piece of scum.

The summary states how much artists are payed and the claim that the artists think that because the payout is not a billion dollars, they are payed to little and spotify is in the wrong.

I am sure many a person cleaning toilets is ALSO not happy with the payout. But the market value of cleaning toilets is low and so apparently is the market value of music by most artists.

Is spotify paying to little or is "indie" (read non-popular) music simply not a viable product in todays entertainment market.

THINK OF THIS: I see NOTHING in the article that could not lead to the conclusion: For barely any plays at all, unknown artists earn more per month then the majority of Americans. 3300 bucks? Isn't that in fact several times minimum wage in the US?

So what are they bitching about? Can I bitch that I am not payed enough for having sex with women? I only make 3300 dollars a month for shagging 400.000 women and I just don't think that is enough...

How much do these artists they should be payed FOR A SINGLE song that, statistically speaking, nobody wants to hear?

Life is hard, many people have to do back breaking work and still don't earn 3300 a month. And they certainly don't get payed for work they did last month, last year or even a decade ago.

How much do these "artists" expect to be payed anyway for a SINGLE listen to a SINGLE song by a SINGLE person?

Flash drives often don't have any USB logo. Some of mine have writing on the logo side and some have writing on the other side or both.

The port on my phone is upside down, so that the USB logo faces the back of the phone.

The users aren't the only people who don't bother to think.

Connectors that are (un)plugged often should either be symmetrical or clearly indexed. The original (big) USB plug was almost right (in the sense that the plug wouldn't go in the wrong way), except that it was difficult to tell which way the index should be facing. Firewire was a decent implementation of an indexed plug.

The current micro USB plugs are ridiculous, though. It can takes three tries to plug it in and every time you get it wrong you stress the socket a little. The difference in feel between a correct and incorrect fit is very mushy with some plugs/sockets.

While we're on the subject, a pure rectangle (a la the USB A plug) is even worse. The USB connector design over the years has been so bad that I wouldn't be too hopeful about what they come up with next.

400,000 plays?

Ok, let's stop and think about that for a moment. If you are a serious enough musician that you intend to do this professionally, let's assume you have put up at least 1 album, which for the sake of argument is about 10 songs. Spotify has 24 million active users, http://press.spotify.com/us/information/. So to make the 400,000 play cut, about 2% of Spotify's user base has to listen to at least one of your ten songs per month. That does not seem unreasonable to me. If you can't make that cut, the professional music gig probably isn't going to work out for you, sorry.

Am I missing something here?

I did read the article. I'm not sure how the point "The Chinese have a lot more people than we do" is negated by pointing out that the phenomenon is really, "The Chinese + the populations of a bunch of other nations." That just makes the point even more true. We can become marginally more productive or more educated than we are, but we're never going to do so as fast as country of uneducated farmers sending their first generation of kids to newly-built engineering schools. The bottom line is that we're about 4.5% of the world's population (and falling) and we're producing 21% of the academic papers. There's simply no possible way for that to continue while the rest of the world develops. Assuming our percentage of the world's population stays the same (and it won't), I'd expect us to asymptotically approach 4.5% of the world's papers even with top notch academics.

I'm all for more R&D funding as a percentage of GDP, but again, "growth in R&D funding as a percentage of GDP" is a questionable metric to compare to developing nations. What percentage of South Korea's GDP was spent on R&D 50 years ago compared to ours? What is it now compared to ours? Should ours have grown at the same rate as theirs? Probably not.

Wikipedia has a great article on the physics of explosively pumped flux compression generators (which is so much more fun to say than e-bomb).

The thing is, we should be losing ground by metrics like "absolute number of scientific papers produced." China has 4 times as many people as we do and is in the process of increasing the percentage of its population that gets advanced education and participates in the industrial economy. China surpassing the US in papers produced is inevitable. They'll do it as soon as they're 1/4th as academically productive per capita as we are. Or, stated differently, we would have to remain permanently 4x as productive as the Chinese to stay ahead forever. Not going to happen.

In effect you're saying the US is little better than a banana republic, where the public officials (and therefore laws) are for sale, and if you have enough money you can have whatever you want.

Yes and no. In a real banana republic situation, you can't get rid of your corrupt lawmakers even if they're doing thing that the majority absolutely hates. The corruption is so ingrained that elections are basically meaningless. In a functioning democracy, you get voted out if you're doing something offensive enough that the public notices and considers it bad enough to override whatever reasons they had for voting you in to begin with. As long as the corruption you engage in is esoteric or small scale enough that the public doesn't notice or care enough to remove you, you can get away with it in any democracy. Tweaking the auto sales distribution rules probably qualifies.

Why do states wish to entrench a specific business model or exclude someone from it?

Because while it's expensive to buy US Senators and other high profile offices, it's pretty cheap to buy state legislators--well within the grasp of one of the district's wealthier entrepenurs. Like a guy who owns a major car dealership.

The colors are bolder on the Australian bills and the different sizes are nice, but I likely wouldn't be able to count them as quickly as you can. I've never mixed up US money, either. Even when they were all green, I could instantly recognize and count the bills. Besides the vision impaired, I don't think any Americans ever really had problems with the green money.

I think much of the issue you're describing is what everyone finds with foreign currency. Foreign money feeling alien and difficult to recognize and count quickly is so common that it's almost cliche. Every time I travel, I have to keep the bills carefully sorted and double check the printed number before I hand it over. The effect may be more exaggerated when visiting a place with more subtle bill differences, but it's not unheard of anywhere. Also, if you're trained to look for color and size differences, seeking out the numbers may require a more conscious effort.