This is wonderful, wish I had mod points. Well, other than the lack of a spell check.

Except for that little fact that that is how it DID operate for several thousand years. Musicians and authors and performers were paid for their PERFORMANCE. For the one time exhibition of the work, or the one time commission for the portrait or artwork. There is nothing in the world keeping you from buying a chair from me and then copying it for your own use. Well, nothing except for stupid and monopolistic IP laws that is.

Another problem here, if the artist in this article was getting X dollars, what extortionist amount was the label getting?

If I build a chair for someone, I get paid x dollars. If 1000 people sit in that chair I do not get paid 1000x dollars. I've never quite understood why copyright artists get "royalties". You create a song, you perform the song, you get paid. Why should you get paid every single time someone hears your song? As an artist you should not be set for life based on a single miraculously successful song.

That's because, amazingly enough, that's exactly what they did. Many, many E-books are simply OCR'd versions of the print book, which makes almost zero sense.

You mean your Reagan phone? Oh - sorry. I guess the fact that it's a 30yr old program and it's actually cheaper for the program to provide cell phones than traditional land lines shouldn't make any difference...

And I guarantee he, personally, does none of that.

I hate it when someone actually explains things in an understandable way but does it from an AC post. Hard to give proper credit that way, ya know? I never knew about Trillian's shortcomings in that area since all the folks I talked to were on AIM and MSN at the time.

Weird, I remember using Trillian specifically because it supported a bunch of the incompatible IM protocols that the zillion different companies used back in the day.

How about this, tell me why you don't believe in Thor, Osiris, or Marduk. I will then apply those exact same reasons to your "god" and they will be equally valid. Considering the several thousand gods known to have been worshipped over the years the difference between us is negligable. I simply believe in one fewer gods than you.

Wrong. Weakness has nothing to do with it. In the states, most large companies anymore have what is called "PTO" Paid Time Off. If you can schedule in advance then you can use those PTO days as vacation, in theory, without penalty. Though they do of course get logged. If you get sick and have to call in last minute, you can usually still be paid from your PTO, but you get "attendance points" for doing so.

You also get "attendance points" if you are late or absent for any reason. After a certain number of "attendance points" you are fired. Regardless of where the points came from. Sick, late, no show. Doesn't matter. So even though you can be sick and still be paid, you will get fired for it in short order. Mind you most places I've worked the PTO accrues at apx .02 hours of PTO per hour worked so roughly an hour a week.

Also, ANY type of advancement or promotion tends to look at used PTO. The more PTO you've used the less likely you are to get raises, promotions, etc. That INCLUDES pre-approved vacation time.

This is from my own experience of course. But it was this way at American Express, Amazon, Go Daddy, AOL, 2Wire, and several other places I've worked.

Agreed, I've spent a lot of money with GoG over the past year. And most of the stuff works just fine off a USB stick so I can take my games with me!

I keep saying this over and over and over.

Real life is the biggest MMO out there, and strangely enough, I like to do things by myself sometimes. So why shouldn't I be allowed to do stuff by myself in MMO's occasionally. I've played far to many MMO's where you have to be in a group to wipe your ass for crying out loud.

Just because a game has multi-player in the title does NOT mean I should HAVE to be in a group to accomplish every little thing.

We have always been at war with West Eurasia...

We have never been at war with West Eurasia...

The share they are allowed to keep is minuscule. In Arizona it's apx 0.1% of sales tax collected. It's been a few years since I ran my business so I'm sure the numbers have changed a bit - sorry for a non-exact figure.

Because there is far more money to be siphoned off using scanners and spectrometers.