> they never reached their potential - all due to the idiots on the board.

In this case it was Elon Musk who was the idiot, because he opened his mouth & violated the law. (He then demonstrated further idiocy by rejecting the U.S. offer to drop the case in exchange for a small fine.)

There are plugins for Firefox and Chrome where you just tap "download" and it rips an MP3 to your phone. Then you tap "play random" and you have a couple 100 songs on rotation.

> but still plug their holy ears should any not-properly-purchased music hit their virgin eardrums?

Your comment reminded me: I get into Las Vegas nightclubs for free, and hear the current hit music for free, since I don't spend any money. Would the music executives/producers consider this a form of piracy too? (I bet the greedy bastards do.)

Also: A lot of people will buy "Greatest Hits" compilations of music they heard when they were children and teens.... mainly for nostalgia (or because they think current music sucks). IOW the record companies lose money today on pirating kids, but they make it up later, when they sell these adults old hits from 20-30 years ago.

Please take a moment to read this old article: "The plaintiffs (musicians) claimed compensation for use of work listed on what are known in the Canadian recording industry as pending lists. These lists, accumulated over many years, contain works for which no licence was obtained and no compensation paid........ the action could have been worth up to $6-billion."

In other words the music industry owed 6 billion dollars to musicians for non-payment of songs they used w/o compensation. - LINK https://business.financialpost... And the followup: The record industry only paid 50 million of the 6000 million owed to artists: https://entertainment.slashdot...

- The Music Industry wants to scold us commoners, and yet THEY are far worse at screwing the musicians than we are.

Beat me to it. I was just about to post "Sounds like Made-up Statistics". I used to download music from piratebay, but not anymore. I get a ton of song in my Amazon Prime account, and if the song is not there, it's available from Youtube or Vimeo or some other legitimate source.

> The most popular form of copyright infringement is stream-ripping (32%)... from sites like YouTube at a low-quality bit rate.

So basically the modern version of Cassette-recording off the radio. Even if the stream-ripping was blocked, these people have NO intention of buying the music legally. Claiming these customers as "lost sales" is ridiculous. (Especially since many of them are children or teens with no money.)

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>Would you call photo albums meaningless?

Photo albums show my family, and family is far far more important than some stupid trophies I got in Final Fantasy 11

You can sit at work & listen to classic SIDtunes that used to play in videogames or demos. There are also music emulators you can download for classic Nintendo, Sega, Playstation consoles & integrate with Winamp

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I'm so tired of businesses thinking they can screw-over customers & get away with it. I'd also like to sue the telemarketer that keeps calling my cellphone every day, even though I told them "Put me on you Do Not Call list". Per US Law if they continue calling, then they can be fined in small claims.

If she's not visible in the video, then she's not visible to human eyes either. She did not become visible until the headlights were on her. (And also: Why in hell was she crossing the road? SHE has eyes too. She should have seen the headlights coming & avoided the car.)

Why so my computer could get fucked by MS latest update? Bullshit. (Also living in fear of malware is as ridiculous as living in fear some mass murdere will drop by & kill you. The probability of both tragedies are very low.)

They do the same in the UK too, and that's not a for-profit healthcare model:

And people scold me because I have Auto-update turned off. Mistakes like what Microsoft did this past weekend are precisely why. I'll update when I know it's safe.

- This bug also reminds me of the "Save with Replace" bug on my ancient Commodore 64 (and its 1541 floppy drive). It would overwrite the previous file with a new file, except the new file was sometimes unreadable garbage. It was even documented in the manual saying "Save your file first. Then erase the old one. Do not use the save-with-replace option as it generates corrupted files."

That was back in the days when nobody had time to fix hardware errors, so they just shipped the computer as is. (And fixed the error in the user documentation.)

Here's the automated rate: U.S. elevators make 18 billion passenger trips per year. Those trips result in about 27 deaths annually,

- I can easily imagine the pre-automated elevators had accidents due to operator stupidity or carelessness.... like closing the door on a passenger & killing him. Or moving the elevator up a floor as someone is trying to exit, and then they plunge to their death.

Automated elevators don't do stupid stuff.

> It's all her fault.

She was jaywalking in the middle of a highway, so yes, it was her fault. Plus she stepped in front of the car when it was only feet away. Even with instant braking, that car would not have stopped in time to miss the impact. SHE caused her own damn death.