If this is true, what is your conclusion as to why the RI/MPAA don't court the pirates? Free advertising is free advertising after all.

Because their competition, the independent artists and labels, rely on P2P and sharing. The RIAA labels have Clear Channel and the TV networks; they don't need file sharing. The indies do. The fight against "piracy" is actually an anticompetitive move against the independents.

The thing that really scares the hell out of them (or should) is that with the internet, publishers are no longer needed. Hell, there are several professional recording studios here in a town of only 110,000 and you can have a CD produced, mastered, and factory stamped in lots of 1000 for $1 per copy; I've had friends produce CDs this way. When Patty was a teenager she had a CD by some punk band that said "be kind, burn a copy for a friend."

As Doctorow says, nobody ever lost a dime from piracy but many have starved from obscurity.

Look up Draco sometime.
Hmmm...

Draco commonly refers to:

Draco is the Latin word for dragon.
Draco may also refer to:

Science and technology[edit source | editbeta]DRACO (antiviral), a group of experimental antiviral drugs
Draco (constellation), a constellation in the northern part of the sky
Draco (dwarf galaxy), a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way
Draco (genus), a genus of gliding lizards.
Draco (programming language), a shareware programming language for CP/M and the Amiga
Draco (rocket engine), an orbital maneuvering thruster being built for the SpaceX Dragon and upper stage of the Falcon 9 spacecraft
Draco, the database engine used by FileMaker Pro
DraCo, a partly Amiga compatible computer built by MacroSystem AG
Draco GNU/Linux, a Linux distribution
Draco, name given by the U.S. cable channel The Weather Channel to the December 2012 North American blizzard
History[edit source | editbeta]Dacian Draco, a Dacian military standard composed of a wolf head and snake tail
Draco (lawgiver) (from Greek: ??????), the first lawgiver of ancient Athens, Greece, from whom the term draconian is derived
Draco (physician) (from Greek: ??????), the name of several physicians in the family of Hippocrates
Draco (military standard), a Roman cavalry military standard in the shape of a dragon, adopted after the Dacian Wars
Literature, film, and television[edit source | editbeta]Draco Malfoy, a character in the Harry Potter series of books and movies
Draco, the name of the last dragon in the film Dragonheart.
Draco, a warlord character in the television series Xena: Warrior Princess
Antares Draco, an Imperial Knight from Star Wars: Legacy
Jaq Draco, an Inquisitor who is the protagonist of Ian Watson's Inquisition War Trilogy
Games[edit source | editbeta]Draco-Hedron Ovinxer, the destructive dragon form of Ovinxer and the final boss of the game Gun Nac
Draco Centauros, a dragon-like humanoid from the Puyo Puyo video game series
Draco, a 9/9 Artifact Dragon from the card game Magic: The Gathering
Draco, a character in the fictional opera The Dream Oath: Maria and Draco in Final Fantasy VI
Draco, a black dragon found in the Kasumanium Mines in Dark Ages (computer game)
Other uses[edit source | editbeta]Draco Boats, Manufacured in Flekkefjord, Norway in the 70's and 80's
Draco, a supposed reptilian alien race that has been purported to exist by certain UFO conspiracy theorists
Draco Racing, a motorsports team
Draco Rosa, a Puerto Rican songwriter and former member of Puerto Rican boy band Menudo
A guitar built by BC Rich guitars. It has a cutaway V body with Rockfield or Duncan pickups.
A Romanian-made shortened pistol version of the AKM assault rifle

Well, that was helpful... not.

You could, you know, stop stealing after you get caught twice.

Copyright infringement is not theft, and I say that as a copyright holder who has issued DMCA takedowns. Your MAFIAA language makes you look like a MAFIAA shill, or someone they've brainwashed. If you download my book you have stolen nothing from me, any more than if you've stolen Asimov's books by checking them out at the public library and reading them for free.

Selling that book you download is theft, because the money you received should have gone to the copyright holder.

Your misuse of language completely negates any possible communication.

Sounds nice in paper, and yet millions of people are expected to end their lives early at considerable taxpayer expense "simply" because they don't "want" to eat less.

Early death doesn't cost the government, it saves the government money. Everyone dies, it's just a matter of when. Let me use a real-life example -- my uncle and his mother.

Uncle Bill caught TB in his thirties and lost a lung because of it. Plus he used his remaining lung to smoke four packs of Kools a day while working in the city's garbage incinerator. He died at age 60 from COPD. He never collected a dime of his city pension or Sociual Security or Medicare.

My Grandma, OTOH, lived a hundred years. She collected Social Security for forty years, all the while seeing a doctor every two weeks on the Government's dime using medicare.

Early death saves the government money, living a long time costs the government.

I don't know a lot about sweet potatoes (can't stand them myself) but I doubt you could grow them in places like where they grow rice -- parts of the world where there are two seasons, dry and rainy. Your choice of crops is limited in those places, which is why so much of the Asia eats so much rice. It's easy to grow rice in a rainy climate. When I was in Thailand in the USAF, they grew rice in the rainy season and something else (can't remember what) in the dry season.

It's not the phone, it's the carrier. At $40 per month for unlimited everything, changing carriers is kind of out of the question. My daughter's on AT&T with an iPhone and her bill is always over $100.

Not all phones have GPS so I don't see how it could be mandatory by law, but yes, they can triangulate your position from cell towers, albeit with lower precision.

Yes, everything you say is so. If your grandparents all died of heart disease, we now have stents, transplants, etc.

I had a great uncle like your relative. Started smoking at age 12, quit at 82 and died at 92. Might have lived to well over a hundred without the tobacco.

While what they're doing is laudable it isn't a fight for our freedom, it's a fight for their bottom line. How many are now shutting GPS off on their phones when they're not using it? How many are avoiding these services as much as possible?

And Google is surely losing cloud customers. It seems to me that this has Google scared shitless.

I'm offtopic here, just wanted to say I agree with your sig.

I honestly don't understand why people are putting up with this shit. A company who deliberately rooted PCs with a trojan on store-bought CDs, removed features from a game machine after it was already purchased and used, exposing customer information in plain text in an internet-facing database, and people still give them money?? My mind is boggled.

XBone? Nope, not with that built-in NSA camera and microphone.

Nintendo? Isn't theirs a handheld with a dinky screen?

PCs? When you can no longer actually own a game?

These kids would love Quake II. None of the bullshit you put up with today. Computer gaming used to be fun rather than a way to be stolen from by rich assholes.

I wonder if Road Rash 95 will run on Windows 7? AFK

It's not just the NSA. I'm outraged that they're spying on citizens, even though they have no reason to be interested in me. I'm outraged that advertisers insist on knowing my GPS position, who's on my contacts list, etc. It's creepy and it pisses me off. I thought stalking was illegal?

All the KSHE app wanted was access to the internet, sound chip, and sleep circuitry (so It wouldn't stop playing when the screen blanked out). So far, playing KSHE is the only thing the Android does that the Motorola feature phone wouldn't, although the camera is a lot better and it has way more storage. Hell, I could play pac-man on the feature phone without telling them who I knew and where I was.

Wait - OK, this one is "waterproof". Dropping it in the toilet isn't as dangerous (that's how my Razr died ten years ago).

The solution you are looking for is SElinux, and it is already enabled in the latest cyanogenmod nightlies.

I'd love to do that but my carrier wouldn't go along. Hell, it's the latest Android and they disabled sideloading apps before shipping it. If I installed Linux it would be a four inch wifi tablet.

This isn't going to make you stop aging at 30, it will simply slow the aging process. Have you not noticed that some people at 50 look 70 and some 60 look 50? Some people simply age faster than others and this study shows why.