H.R. 6166: Military Commissions Act of 2006
4 (A) As provided by the Constitution and by
5 this section, the President has the authority for
6 the United States to interpret the meaning and
7 application of the Geneva Conventions
This is the bill that allows the US to imprison and torture at will, based only on suspicion. 218 Republicans and 34 Democrats voted in favor of this act. Read more…
Viral media is all the rage these days, and Bauman runs one of the few viral sites actually making money. Without spending a penny on direct advertising, he’s turned the high school hobby he ran out of his bedroom into one of the Internet’s top-ranked humor sites, getting 1.2 million hits a day. There’s a television pilot in the can, a book deal in negotiation, and a potential pact to bring eBaum content to cell phones. Annual ad revenue has doubled over the past year to $10 million, and the only overhead is bandwidth and salaries: Bauman is becoming a rich man. He has 30 employees who handle the coding, marketing, financial affairs, and assorted office details. He drives a shiny black Porsche Carrera. Besides gobbling up real estate around town and gas wells in Kentucky, he sponsors heavyweight boxing champ Hasim “the Rock” Rahman.
But Bauman’s success hasn’t just brought him riches and trips to Vegas. It has also gotten him mired in a messy brawl. His site has been hacked, his office vandalized, and his mug distorted on numerous online sites dedicated to attacking him. “Maybe Zeus and Thor will smite that whore,” goes the theme song for the animated site EbaumsWorldSucks. “Oh, eBaum’s World is going dowwwwwwn!” Bauman is not laughing. “We get death threats all the time,” he says.
I tried to sign up for the gravatar service, but I’ve been waiting days for my avatar to be rated. I’ve decided to disable gravatars for now, since the service seems to be very unreliable.
Though the methodology is complex, the results are straightforward: some US music consumers “could have decreased their CD purchases (prior to 2004) by about 13 percent due to Internet file sharing.”
The scholarly consensus is not unanimous, however. Michel notes that Oberholzer and Strumpf (2004) found no correlation between file-sharing and P2P use in 2002, and a more recent paper by a Harvard student found that file-sharing benefited more obscure artists.
So, if you download music from via p2p you are a thief. You are a thief if you rip music from a cd that you borrowed from a friend, or that you bought yourself. You’re a potential thief if you buy a cd and attempt to play it on your windows pc, and you require a rootkit to be installed for continued surveillance. Essentially, you are a thief if you don’t continually give money to big record companies. This is doubly true if you use the Internet to find more obscure, independent artists to support, rather than the popular talentless corporate spawns you’re told to like. In fact, most indepentent artists’ albums weren’t even included in the study, given that they don’t show up on sales statistics.
I just got a lecture from someone who didn’t like my use of “profane” language. I generally avoid it, and I’d go so far as to say I almost never use language that people would call profanity. I do, however, have a problem with people who take offense at the mere use of a word, regardless of its context or meaning. People who would be perfectly fine if I used a synonym of the word, but take offense at the use of the word itself.
