What about independent electronic musicians like myself, who want to produce refined albums and be able to sell them, either as a cd or as an online digital download. Would selling a zip of FLAC or MP3 files on my website for a nice low price even work out these days or in the future? If someone could easily throw those on a torrent site, would people still buy them enough to generate some kind of living? I doubt it, as I've talked to some fantastic independent musicians who've made wonderful albums but have struggled making any more than just some extra pocket change on places like CDBaby. If all musicians are supposed to play live to make a living in the future, it reduces the chance of artists making any career in producing/selling independent electronic music albums. Just wanted to share that viewpoint!

Excuse me? All he implied was (jokingly) that Christians don't make much sense. And you are not making sense here with your defensive comments either, blowing a funny comment out of proportion.

Peter Wiggin

I must add that the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is a fantastic natural history museum as well.

That's if you never accelerate once in space. Also, there's the Bussard ramjet idea, which could point to a solution to interstellar travel in the future.

It's highly unlikely that the form of our proteins are compatible with anything the aliens can digest (if they eat and digest food at all, that is).

Well, if you're still considering that, I could definitely use a few grand right now! :)

Indeed, this news is joy for any webdesigner. I stopped testing against IE6 a little while ago and I'm glad to see it go. IE7 still has many of its rendering issues, but IE8 is a truly solid, solid browser. The first browser from Microsoft I could call a quality product. They even made it possible to debug IE7 bugs with compatibility mode and the developer tools in IE8. Great work Microsoft - killing IE6 in a single shot. Keep doing stuff like this M$, and you may just earn back some credibility :)

I'm not sure about it being as easy. I recently decided to try Ubuntu as a home theater pc system. After about 3 days of searching through forums and talking on IRC, modifying config files, running console commands, and editing settings that should be defaults, I finally managed to get it to play surround sound properly and play video. Average Joe probably wouldn't have gotten to this point, but OK if it worked after that, I'd be happy. Unfortunately the various video player applications I tried randomly quit to desktop every once in a while, and this happened often enough that I was fed up after a couple of weeks.

Formatted, installed Windows XP, and an hour later the system was ready and worked perfectly.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and feel somewhat crippled when I don't have the command prompt & various tools, but it's far from being a solid, easy to use OS for home purposes at this point. Not to mention the lack of all the simple 'home' applications that Windows has - I know that's not the fault of the OS, but still is a problem.

Anyways, if Ubuntu is supposed to be so easy for home use, why should it take even a geek like me hours, days, to get it working for home theater use? Why aren't there better defaults set? Why do you have to go into the console to edit some simple settings or do a surround sound test?

Yep :(

Apparently a webcam recording of improv on that theme, in a YouTube video with a couple hundred views threatens their company somehow. I'd send them a counter notice, but apparently I'd be "subject to liability" and "under penalty of perjury" if I was wrong ( http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=59826 ), so I gave up. I imagine most people in my situation would do the same instead of dealing with the hassle and risk, and thus we can arrive almost at a form of odd.. censorship ?

I got sent a YouTube infringement/takedown notice for posting a video of me improvising on the theme of "Summertime" on my midi keyboard. Is using the chord structure of a popular song and playing an original improv on it really infringing copyright?