Accepting that reporters have opinions is one thing. But removing the already weak expectation that they at least attempt to overcome their biases is not likely to lead to better journalism.
I realize that, to many people, it is completely impossible to be anything like objective. But there is a world of difference between Thucidides, who was biased, but who strove strenuously to overcome his biases, and Naomi Klein, who doesn't even realize that she is biased. This is part of why the former is still being read over 2000 years after he died, while the latter will be forgotten within 10 years of her last publication.
This has long been a subject of great contention in audio software circles. Sellers of sample libraries routinely have EULAs that prohibit users from selling them, or in some cases even from giving them away.
This lengthy thread at kvr is just one of hundreds concerning such policies and the anger they can create. The use of challenge/response copy protection, which gives the licensor total power over these arrangements, is also the subject of regularly reoccurring controversies.
"I have absolute trust in my local police department.
It has been years since I had the adolescent distrust of those responsible for my protection."
Absolute trust in any organization taken as a whole is childish. There is no category of human beings that is worthy of absolute trust. Not priests. Not doctors. Neither teachers nor senators nor judges. And certainly not police officers.
Even a smattering of historical knowledge will bear this out.
"The glory of this century is the achievement of individual rights. One of its downfalls is the abandonment of individual responsibility."
I'm sorry, but I can't let this go....
How does someone conclude this? How does one judge an entire century's worth of human activity? What possible evidence is there for such a sweeping statement?
'Again, how is re-posting a post from TechDirt "copying another's work without permission" when Mike has given open permission for anyone to copy and use TechDirt posts as they see fit? If someone posts material that they did not need permission to copy, how is expressing frustration at those who do use material without permission "a bit hypocritical"?'
She didn't attribute it, though. It is common courtesy to attribute the source of a quote, especially if you are a copyright maximalist.
And remember, the post in question was talking about 50 Cents attitude toward file sharing. He said he was OK with it, and she said that this was selfish of him, and that he shouldn't be OK with it. So even if the copyright owner is OK with people infringing, she was saying it is still wrong.
"But," you cry, "aggregate output has increased!" Fine. Instead of five players making $175,000 each, you've got a million players making a dollar each. Congratulations. You've replaced eight ounces of Creme Brulee with a pound of shit. Eat up.
No, reality has replaced eight ounces of Creme Brulee with a pound of shit. It does this every day. It's called digestion. It's not pretty, but it's an inescapable part of the human condition.
I wonder how many people who go on about this kind of stuff realize that every last complaint one can make against the democratizing forces of the internet could have been made with equal force (and equal impotence) against the printing press. After all, the printing press did decrease the quality of books while increasing their quantity, and the vast majority of what was printed was forgettable trash compared to the contents of a great monastic library.
"I personally have little patience for musicians who feel they should only be pursuing their personal muse and that they should get paid for doing so."
Well if they have a sense of entitlement then that is childish, sure. But if you have a vision, not a childish simulacrum of a vision, but a real live artistic vision, developed over years of training and apprenticeship and study, then setting that aside to write jingles might lead to unhappiness in the long run.
I mean, should Tolkien have written advertising copy, or was he better off following his muse?
"I also find those folks are generally not very good musicians. You have to listen to a lot of music and imitate a lot of music before your personal muse has much talent. I'd much rather jam with somebody who can play in a wide range of existing styles than someone who is busy following their muse."
This is a spurious dichotomy. You don't have to be a silly poseur to believe that there is more to art than making a roomful of drunks say 'that was great!'
And I agree, it takes years of work to have a muse worth listening to. Most people who claim to have one are lying. But not all of them are.
Anyway, sorry for the threadjack. Back to discussing business models for the new millennium.
"Those composers were no doubt *very* concerned with making sure their patrons remained happy with them (not to mention having to make a name for themselves in the first place in order to *attract* those wealthy patrons)."
Of the names he mentions, only one ever depended on aristocratic patronage. Ives had a very successful insurance agency and made his music for himself in his leisure hours. Cage and Feldman have both received grants, but if you listen to their music, it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that they were ever trying to make sure their patrons were happy. Nor did they ever make music at their patron's behest.
Really, there have been musical artists who had honest to goodness integrity. Who were genuinely original. Who followed their muse wherever it led them.
It's just that no one really gives a shit about such artists. That's what makes the constant talk about 'originality' in the context of singer-songwriter X or hiphop act Y so fucking grating. No one really wants originality. They use the word in a positively Orwellian sense: to convince themselves that the pablum they consume isn't as vacuous as they know it really is.
"Probably because at it's core it's an insult disguised as an analogy."
Insult? To whom? Perhaps someone is being a bit sensitive?
"It is comparing something that existed BEFORE humans to something that can only be made BY humans."
Actually, tomatoes as we know them today are not remotely natural. Every single variety on the market is bred by professionals, either working for a private company or at a university agricultural research center. Even the heirloom varieties only have to be 100 years old.
"It is comparing a bodily need (food) to a plethora of luxuries."
No. Food is a bodily need, but tomatoes could disappear from the earth without a single person going hungry. In the context of the global food market, tomatoes are a luxury.
"A magic replicator that can only make a SINGLE, SOLITARY variety of tomato is not in any way, shape, or form analogous to the combined efforts of the music/film/literature/video game/etc industries."
1. The post says nothing about the replicator making only one kind of tomato. The fact that you put that in caps tells me that you didn't read it very well.
2. There are over 7000 varieties of tomatoes.
3. Given the fact that 'the combined efforts of the music/film/literature/video game/etc industries' are all in the end a bunch of ones and zeros, the analogy is not really all that far off. This is especially true if you consider that to bring a tomato to your table involves the combined efforts of: agricultural scientists; farmers; the manufacturers and service technicians who make and maintain harvesting equipment; the people who make the boxes they ship in; the middlemen who buy wholesale and bring them to the retail market, and so on.
4. None of this explains why people are being so bitchy about a figure of speech.
"It's certain not special enough to justify the "do something creative once then sit on your duff for the remainder of life and collect royalties" model which isn't available to most other creative careers. Foisting that notion on humanity has to take the prize for the biggest con job in history."
I don't support copyright law the way it exists today. Not at all. But this is an issue that gets glided over rather glibly around these parts, and a few things need to be said regarding it.
Writing popular songs is special in various ways. It's not as if one person can continuously squirt out popular songs. The whole process is actually rather fortuitous.
A person can hone their craft, certainly; they can study and practice and try to keep from growing stale. But they have no control whatever over whether or not anyone else will like what they do.
The idea that someone can turn out updated music the way that a company can turn out updated software is kind of risible. Because the thing that makes a song popular isn't 'quality'.
Judged on any kind of objective level, the music of King Crimson is of infinitely higher quality than anything U2 has ever done. The musicianship is of a much higher caliber, the music is more complex, more intricate, deeper, harder to make, and gives much greater rewards when listened to repeatedly.
But no one really gives a shit about any of this.
What people want out of a pop song is a huge dose of what they already know combined with a tiny little bit of safe, sanitized originality: enough to be able to distinguish the new catchy little ditty from the last catchy little ditty, but not enough to make them think or anything annoying like that.
And so, if one of these 'interesting' (i.e. 'non-big-time-corporate-rockstar-celebrity') musicians have a hit, it will be a sheer coincidence. They just happened to touch a nerve at the exact right time. Their later music might not be popular precisely because they worked at their craft and, well, grew up.
This has little to do with replicated tomatoes, but it is a reality that many people here seem unaware of, so I thought I would throw it out there.
"The hypothesis is that when the music is free instead of for sale, this will create an increased demand for all the scarce goods that will offset or overtake the money lost from not selling the music anymore. This is conjecture. A new equilibrium will be reached, but to say that you can tell whether free music will, on the whole, result in a net increase or decrease in money to artists (and supporting professions) makes me a little skeptical."
Well in some cases, I am more than skeptical. Professional audio engineers are doing much worse now than they were 15 years ago. The kind of independently run recording studios that serviced the burgeoning punk and metal movements of the 80's are almost completely gone. And it is just going to get worse, as more and more of these unemployed engineers have to fight with all of the recent graduates of music tech diploma mills for the tiny handful of jobs left in the content industries.
But if the question is: 'is all of this change good or bad for the art of music?', then the answer is very definitely GOOD. For most of the past 100 years, a handful of people with money had a stranglehold over the making and distribution of musical recordings. Nothing that they didn't like passed through this iron web. Unless one thinks that these people were infallible, it is quite obvious that music is better served by eliminating this stranglehold than it is by maintaining it.
"For audio, you still need sound boards, engineers, studios, backup musicians, managers, etc. True, editing is easier. You can mix several tracks in a PC more efficiently than on magnetic tape. But then, how much mixing is normally done? If you're mixing together several "takes", then you're paying extra studio time for those takes. It's always been more efficient to try and get everything in one take.....
Enlighten me if you can find how audio production is less expensive because of technology. (Don't confuse "easier" or "higher quality" with "less expensive.")"
People don't need big 'sound boards' to make decent recordings, nor do they need backup musicians or managers. They need microphones, preamps, and a recorder. All of these things have gotten immensely cheaper in the past 10 years. Or rather, the market for cheaper but functional alternatives for all of these things has grown.
Mixing boards are merely a convenient collection of preamps with various routing options, some simple equalizers and some gain controls. Most modern recording software has all of the functionality of these boards except the preamps. And the cheapest prosumer audio interface boasts a much better signal to noise ratio than the finest Studer Revox tape recorder.
But if you really want a board, they have gotten much cheaper in the past 10 years as well.
As for "But then, how much mixing is normally done?" The answer is 'A LOT'. Most modern music is heavily processed and edited. Frequently the whole thing is assembled after the process of tracking is finished. Mixing engineers are the celebrities of the audio world.
As for "It's always been more efficient to try and get everything in one take." well, sure. In the world of classical music, or acoustic jazz, that methodology would still apply. But most pop music doesn't work that way at all. The drums are edited into loops; the vocal parts are comped from 30 different takes, autotuned, and compressed to death; The whole song is edited to insure that every single chorus sounds exactly the same. And all of this is done during the mixing stage.
Furthermore, the instrumental parts often employ samples, not as in sampled parts, but as in immense collections of multisampled instruments triggered via MIDI. Many of the orchestral parts that you hear in pop music, TV and movies are made this way, using computer workstations and sample libraries like VSL or EWQLSO. This, too, dramatically cuts the costs involved.
Now VSL and EWQLSO are plugins. And the amazing fact about audio plugins is that many of them are free. Legitimately free. Just to be clear, we are talking about free musical instruments and audio effects here: complex synthesizers, samplers, equalizers and enhancers, compressors with sidechain controls, de-essers, noise gates and just about every other signal processing device one can imagine. And each of these plugins can be instantiated as many times as one could want, meaning that e.g. one compressor plugin can be 20 different compressors at the same time, each with different settings, whereas a hardware compressor can only process one or two tracks at a time.
And many of these free musical instruments and audio effects are amazingly good. So much so that they drive down the prices of their commercial competitors.
It is obvious how all of these things make recording a much cheaper process than it used to be.
"Facepalm is also a good example of the difference between "label" and "no label". 2008, she toured in Europe and the UK, did about 30 dates, plus a bunch more in the US to support her "who killed Amanda Palmer" album. She was a busy girl getting tons of exposure. Then she went nuclear on her record label (because they wanted to edit her video to remove her less than, umm, appealing near nakedness), and she went from working regularly and on the fast track to the top to someone who played a few days in Australia and had to pass the hat to make ends meet.
She spent almost all of 2009 playing for little groups, a few shows here and there, and her big income appeared to be her friday night flea market. Now she makes a deal with Live Nation, and suddenly she has 4 or 5 shows in the UK out of nowhere. Hmm. Who killed Amanda Palmer? It would appear she did it herself."
You are increasingly giving me a really creepy feeling. You are truly obsessed with Mike and Amanda Palmer.
The level of detail of your knowledge of the latter's career is quite bizarre given your stated dislike of her music.
Your collected posts about both of them add up to more words than some novels. And the fake-friendly nastiness of your posts is pretty much the standard style for notes from stalkers and serial killers.
"Yes, the bank should be responsible for running a secure, safe system, where a user has a reasonable expectation of security from the bank.
But the user is not just a spectator in this game. We are active players with a role to fill - not to get duped into giving up our credentials. It's not the banks job to protect us from ourselves. At what point do we take responsibility for our own mistakes?"
I have found that you are much more likely to hear an individual say 'it was my fault' than you are to the representative of a bank say 'it was our fault'.
When someone (the police never did figure out who) printed up a bunch of checks that had our account number and someone else's name on them, no one at the bank noticed. There were dozens of checks, all cashed within a couple of days, all with our account number and the fake person's name.
Somehow, it just doesn't seem like that much of a hassle to verify that the name on a check matches the one on the account before cashing it.
When we finally noticed what was going on, the bank had no process in place to help us out. No one could answer our questions. We finally went to the corporate office and talked to the only helpful woman we met in the whole experience, and got the whole thing cleared up.
This was over a month later.
The funny part was that and one of her co workers had told her 'you know, you don't have to help these people' before she came to help us.
"It's just realizing that most of the artists doing this stuff, from Jill Sobule, Facepalm, etc to Corey Smith all have something in common: they aren't playing to the masses in the slightest, but to niche markets that are likely way more loyal than the general music fan."
In my case, all of my favorite artists, from Bela Bartok to the Tallis Scholars to Frank Zappa to Mike Patton, are niche markets.
Maybe that's why I have trouble empathizing with the likes of Sony and EMI: 99% of the encounters I have with their mainstream, overcompressed, autotuned music are involuntary.
On the post: Is It So Wrong To Admit That Journalists Have Opinions Too?
I realize that, to many people, it is completely impossible to be anything like objective. But there is a world of difference between Thucidides, who was biased, but who strove strenuously to overcome his biases, and Naomi Klein, who doesn't even realize that she is biased. This is part of why the former is still being read over 2000 years after he died, while the latter will be forgotten within 10 years of her last publication.
On the post: Ownership Or License: The Difference Matters
This lengthy thread at kvr is just one of hundreds concerning such policies and the anger they can create. The use of challenge/response copy protection, which gives the licensor total power over these arrangements, is also the subject of regularly reoccurring controversies.
On the post: Austin Police Chief To Go After Anonymous Commenters
It has been years since I had the adolescent distrust of those responsible for my protection."
Absolute trust in any organization taken as a whole is childish. There is no category of human beings that is worthy of absolute trust. Not priests. Not doctors. Neither teachers nor senators nor judges. And certainly not police officers.
Even a smattering of historical knowledge will bear this out.
On the post: Mark Helprin: All The Reviews Of My Book Sucked Because Publishers Assigned The People I Insult To Review It
I'm sorry, but I can't let this go....
How does someone conclude this? How does one judge an entire century's worth of human activity? What possible evidence is there for such a sweeping statement?
On the post: Lily Allen, Don't Apologize To Me, Apologize To Everyone Else
She didn't attribute it, though. It is common courtesy to attribute the source of a quote, especially if you are a copyright maximalist.
And remember, the post in question was talking about 50 Cents attitude toward file sharing. He said he was OK with it, and she said that this was selfish of him, and that he shouldn't be OK with it. So even if the copyright owner is OK with people infringing, she was saying it is still wrong.
On the post: Paul Graham: Content Really Was Just A Way To Mark Up Paper
No, reality has replaced eight ounces of Creme Brulee with a pound of shit. It does this every day. It's called digestion. It's not pretty, but it's an inescapable part of the human condition.
I wonder how many people who go on about this kind of stuff realize that every last complaint one can make against the democratizing forces of the internet could have been made with equal force (and equal impotence) against the printing press. After all, the printing press did decrease the quality of books while increasing their quantity, and the vast majority of what was printed was forgettable trash compared to the contents of a great monastic library.
On the post: Musicians Are Never Just About The Music
Well if they have a sense of entitlement then that is childish, sure. But if you have a vision, not a childish simulacrum of a vision, but a real live artistic vision, developed over years of training and apprenticeship and study, then setting that aside to write jingles might lead to unhappiness in the long run.
I mean, should Tolkien have written advertising copy, or was he better off following his muse?
"I also find those folks are generally not very good musicians. You have to listen to a lot of music and imitate a lot of music before your personal muse has much talent. I'd much rather jam with somebody who can play in a wide range of existing styles than someone who is busy following their muse."
This is a spurious dichotomy. You don't have to be a silly poseur to believe that there is more to art than making a roomful of drunks say 'that was great!'
And I agree, it takes years of work to have a muse worth listening to. Most people who claim to have one are lying. But not all of them are.
Anyway, sorry for the threadjack. Back to discussing business models for the new millennium.
On the post: Musicians Are Never Just About The Music
Of the names he mentions, only one ever depended on aristocratic patronage. Ives had a very successful insurance agency and made his music for himself in his leisure hours. Cage and Feldman have both received grants, but if you listen to their music, it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that they were ever trying to make sure their patrons were happy. Nor did they ever make music at their patron's behest.
Really, there have been musical artists who had honest to goodness integrity. Who were genuinely original. Who followed their muse wherever it led them.
It's just that no one really gives a shit about such artists. That's what makes the constant talk about 'originality' in the context of singer-songwriter X or hiphop act Y so fucking grating. No one really wants originality. They use the word in a positively Orwellian sense: to convince themselves that the pablum they consume isn't as vacuous as they know it really is.
On the post: Revisiting The Replicator Analogy: How Infinite Goods Create More Jobs
Insult? To whom? Perhaps someone is being a bit sensitive?
"It is comparing something that existed BEFORE humans to something that can only be made BY humans."
Actually, tomatoes as we know them today are not remotely natural. Every single variety on the market is bred by professionals, either working for a private company or at a university agricultural research center. Even the heirloom varieties only have to be 100 years old.
"It is comparing a bodily need (food) to a plethora of luxuries."
No. Food is a bodily need, but tomatoes could disappear from the earth without a single person going hungry. In the context of the global food market, tomatoes are a luxury.
"A magic replicator that can only make a SINGLE, SOLITARY variety of tomato is not in any way, shape, or form analogous to the combined efforts of the music/film/literature/video game/etc industries."
1. The post says nothing about the replicator making only one kind of tomato. The fact that you put that in caps tells me that you didn't read it very well.
2. There are over 7000 varieties of tomatoes.
3. Given the fact that 'the combined efforts of the music/film/literature/video game/etc industries' are all in the end a bunch of ones and zeros, the analogy is not really all that far off. This is especially true if you consider that to bring a tomato to your table involves the combined efforts of: agricultural scientists; farmers; the manufacturers and service technicians who make and maintain harvesting equipment; the people who make the boxes they ship in; the middlemen who buy wholesale and bring them to the retail market, and so on.
4. None of this explains why people are being so bitchy about a figure of speech.
On the post: Revisiting The Replicator Analogy: How Infinite Goods Create More Jobs
It's a figure of speech for chrissakes.
Next up: Mike Masnick mixes metaphors and writes verse that doesn't scan properly. News at 10
On the post: Revisiting The Replicator Analogy: How Infinite Goods Create More Jobs
I don't support copyright law the way it exists today. Not at all. But this is an issue that gets glided over rather glibly around these parts, and a few things need to be said regarding it.
Writing popular songs is special in various ways. It's not as if one person can continuously squirt out popular songs. The whole process is actually rather fortuitous.
A person can hone their craft, certainly; they can study and practice and try to keep from growing stale. But they have no control whatever over whether or not anyone else will like what they do.
The idea that someone can turn out updated music the way that a company can turn out updated software is kind of risible. Because the thing that makes a song popular isn't 'quality'.
Judged on any kind of objective level, the music of King Crimson is of infinitely higher quality than anything U2 has ever done. The musicianship is of a much higher caliber, the music is more complex, more intricate, deeper, harder to make, and gives much greater rewards when listened to repeatedly.
But no one really gives a shit about any of this.
What people want out of a pop song is a huge dose of what they already know combined with a tiny little bit of safe, sanitized originality: enough to be able to distinguish the new catchy little ditty from the last catchy little ditty, but not enough to make them think or anything annoying like that.
And so, if one of these 'interesting' (i.e. 'non-big-time-corporate-rockstar-celebrity') musicians have a hit, it will be a sheer coincidence. They just happened to touch a nerve at the exact right time. Their later music might not be popular precisely because they worked at their craft and, well, grew up.
This has little to do with replicated tomatoes, but it is a reality that many people here seem unaware of, so I thought I would throw it out there.
Plus, I am on my fourth beer.
On the post: Revisiting The Replicator Analogy: How Infinite Goods Create More Jobs
Well in some cases, I am more than skeptical. Professional audio engineers are doing much worse now than they were 15 years ago. The kind of independently run recording studios that serviced the burgeoning punk and metal movements of the 80's are almost completely gone. And it is just going to get worse, as more and more of these unemployed engineers have to fight with all of the recent graduates of music tech diploma mills for the tiny handful of jobs left in the content industries.
But if the question is: 'is all of this change good or bad for the art of music?', then the answer is very definitely GOOD. For most of the past 100 years, a handful of people with money had a stranglehold over the making and distribution of musical recordings. Nothing that they didn't like passed through this iron web. Unless one thinks that these people were infallible, it is quite obvious that music is better served by eliminating this stranglehold than it is by maintaining it.
On the post: Publicity Rights Of Dead People: Courtney Love Threatens Activision Over Kurt Cobain In Guitar Hero
Why does she care? We all know she had him murdered.
Oh, of course, it's subterfuge.
On the post: Mininova Told To Remove Infringing Material
It's like saying I go to a boxing gym to work out, so I am the world champion. You are missing a couple of steps in the process."
No, it's like saying that if you go to a boxing gym to hang out that you are 'connected with the local boxing scene', which would be true.
On the post: Interview With William Patry: Understanding How The Copyright Debate Got Twisted
Enlighten me if you can find how audio production is less expensive because of technology. (Don't confuse "easier" or "higher quality" with "less expensive.")"
People don't need big 'sound boards' to make decent recordings, nor do they need backup musicians or managers. They need microphones, preamps, and a recorder. All of these things have gotten immensely cheaper in the past 10 years. Or rather, the market for cheaper but functional alternatives for all of these things has grown.
Mixing boards are merely a convenient collection of preamps with various routing options, some simple equalizers and some gain controls. Most modern recording software has all of the functionality of these boards except the preamps. And the cheapest prosumer audio interface boasts a much better signal to noise ratio than the finest Studer Revox tape recorder.
But if you really want a board, they have gotten much cheaper in the past 10 years as well.
As for "But then, how much mixing is normally done?" The answer is 'A LOT'. Most modern music is heavily processed and edited. Frequently the whole thing is assembled after the process of tracking is finished. Mixing engineers are the celebrities of the audio world.
As for "It's always been more efficient to try and get everything in one take." well, sure. In the world of classical music, or acoustic jazz, that methodology would still apply. But most pop music doesn't work that way at all. The drums are edited into loops; the vocal parts are comped from 30 different takes, autotuned, and compressed to death; The whole song is edited to insure that every single chorus sounds exactly the same. And all of this is done during the mixing stage.
Furthermore, the instrumental parts often employ samples, not as in sampled parts, but as in immense collections of multisampled instruments triggered via MIDI. Many of the orchestral parts that you hear in pop music, TV and movies are made this way, using computer workstations and sample libraries like VSL or EWQLSO. This, too, dramatically cuts the costs involved.
Now VSL and EWQLSO are plugins. And the amazing fact about audio plugins is that many of them are free. Legitimately free. Just to be clear, we are talking about free musical instruments and audio effects here: complex synthesizers, samplers, equalizers and enhancers, compressors with sidechain controls, de-essers, noise gates and just about every other signal processing device one can imagine. And each of these plugins can be instantiated as many times as one could want, meaning that e.g. one compressor plugin can be 20 different compressors at the same time, each with different settings, whereas a hardware compressor can only process one or two tracks at a time.
And many of these free musical instruments and audio effects are amazingly good. So much so that they drive down the prices of their commercial competitors.
It is obvious how all of these things make recording a much cheaper process than it used to be.
On the post: Interview With William Patry: Understanding How The Copyright Debate Got Twisted
As a matter of curiosity, how would you explain the amount of art that has been made without such a revenue stream?
James Joyce for instance?
Rabelais?
Rembrandt?
Poe?
On the post: Radiohead Leaks Its Own Track To BitTorrent; Apparently Still Happy With 'Free'
She spent almost all of 2009 playing for little groups, a few shows here and there, and her big income appeared to be her friday night flea market. Now she makes a deal with Live Nation, and suddenly she has 4 or 5 shows in the UK out of nowhere. Hmm. Who killed Amanda Palmer? It would appear she did it herself."
You are increasingly giving me a really creepy feeling. You are truly obsessed with Mike and Amanda Palmer.
The level of detail of your knowledge of the latter's career is quite bizarre given your stated dislike of her music.
Your collected posts about both of them add up to more words than some novels. And the fake-friendly nastiness of your posts is pretty much the standard style for notes from stalkers and serial killers.
Seriously, dude, you need to get out more.
On the post: Is It ID Theft Or Was The Bank Robbed?
But the user is not just a spectator in this game. We are active players with a role to fill - not to get duped into giving up our credentials. It's not the banks job to protect us from ourselves. At what point do we take responsibility for our own mistakes?"
I have found that you are much more likely to hear an individual say 'it was my fault' than you are to the representative of a bank say 'it was our fault'.
When someone (the police never did figure out who) printed up a bunch of checks that had our account number and someone else's name on them, no one at the bank noticed. There were dozens of checks, all cashed within a couple of days, all with our account number and the fake person's name.
Somehow, it just doesn't seem like that much of a hassle to verify that the name on a check matches the one on the account before cashing it.
When we finally noticed what was going on, the bank had no process in place to help us out. No one could answer our questions. We finally went to the corporate office and talked to the only helpful woman we met in the whole experience, and got the whole thing cleared up.
This was over a month later.
The funny part was that and one of her co workers had told her 'you know, you don't have to help these people' before she came to help us.
On the post: Myth Debunking: Fans Just Want Everything For Free
Did someone ask you to?
On the post: How Imogen Heap Connected With Fans, And Created Her New Album With Their Help
In my case, all of my favorite artists, from Bela Bartok to the Tallis Scholars to Frank Zappa to Mike Patton, are niche markets.
Maybe that's why I have trouble empathizing with the likes of Sony and EMI: 99% of the encounters I have with their mainstream, overcompressed, autotuned music are involuntary.
Next >>