Napolean, you idiot. Napolean.

The summary said exactly the same thing you did, except much more succinctly. And people complain about Slashdot's editors??

That was exactly my point, and why I don't give a shit about denying the record companies their previously ridiculous profit margins. It seems you both agree with me on that score.

You can say it's 99 cents, but this year alone I've probably downloaded about 1500 songs from a private music torrent site. The majority of them, maybe 60-70%, I delete after listening, because it was listening on a trial basis and I just wasn't into whatever I was checking out.

As a kid, I spent ~$15 per CD on way too many CDs with one good song and 9 shitty ones. Everyone has different justifications for using bittorrent; that's one of mine. I still go to shows, knowing that the artists keep a good chunk of that revenue for themselves, unlike CD and iTunes sales, where all but the Top 5 Acts in the World get almost nothing from that revenue. That's another rationalization on my part, sure, but i'm pretty damn comfortable with it.

And look around - 15+ years after Napster, music is still being made. One could argue that the variety of acts available is bigger than ever. And the only thing different is that today's Madonna's and Metallica's no longer get $100 million record deals; they just make their $100 million touring. I'm okay with that too.

No one has made any convincing argument to me yet as to how downloading is going to kill music and put good musicians in the poorhouse. I'm all ears.

Whoever marked you as Informative is a tool, because they believed your BS. You're regurgitating an article from 2003 (fucking 2003!!!) in which the Home Office "stressed that new procedures had skewed the figures" and "With new recording procedures taken into account the actual overall rise was just 2 per cent"

So thanks, troll, and thank you very much, mod who marked it "interesting", as you're the one who just swallowed these lies fully, without any shred of critical thinking whatsoever. Takes 2 seconds to Google where he came up with that tosh. Christ.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1418339/Gun-crime-soars-by-35pc.html

Clearly the poster I was responding to was talking about desktop/laptop OS X marketshare, and implying that somehow Apple had failed in getting more people to adopt it. I was merely observing that in fact, OS X's share of the consumer-level desktop/laptop has been slowly rising for years, and to expect the same kind of growth in that area as in mobile devices would be the real meaningless comparison - since Apple pretty much invented the entire current "mobile devices" sector as we know it.

Perhaps my rhetorical Linux comment was mis-interpreted as the main point of my post, which it was not meant to be. I was just pointing out that Apple has indeed made inroads in all areas, and to dismiss that with the old cliche of "oh their marketing is just better" is truly putting blinders on. If the consumer-level Linux experience on desktops and laptops was so great, and more importantly, so easy for average users to manage, you would have seen growth there. You haven't.

Uh, yeah. That's exactly what he's saying. But since you're too thick to get it, here's why your simplistic analogy doesn't work when it comes to macro-economics.

Pulling the band-aid off slowly makes it hurt less, albeit for a longer period of time. Ripping the band-aid off, in this case, would cause massive bleeding and possibly rip the entire limb off that had the band-aid on it in the first place.

Of course, if you're okay with 30% unemployment and increased crime rates nationwide (worldwide?), among other world-changing effects, then maybe we should go with your solution. It worked out great in the 1930's, after all.

He got down-modded for going off on a tangent that was part of his own anti-Obama-birther-Tea-Party mania, not for the quote. What part of that quote has anything to do with anti-science evolution-denying assholes on the House Science Committee?

I mean, okay, it's a terrible thing that Obama wanted NASA to help in making Americans less repugnant to the Muslim world because.... wait, why is that a bad thing again?

Where's the (-1, Idiot) mod point when I need it?

Let's be honest, that was true, to some extent, right from the start. It's only that it seems to have gotten even worse in the last 20 years, or that we're more aware of it.