Still, there's stuff I don't get. How are the very same labels that bitched and moaned about Apple's refusal to price anything above 99 cents with DRM restrictions going to be willing to let Amazon sell their stuff for ten cents cheaper and without restrictions? I guess it's already happened with the first two that signed on, but I'm suspicious that some agreement is in place whereby Amazon agrees to jack up the price after a certain amount of time. I guess we'll see.

That agreement does seem odd.

Record execs seem to hate Apple because Apple refuses to allow them to charge more.

So they make an agreement with Amazon that allows Amazon to sell the songs for....less?

And why do you think that is?

Change of heart?

The objective is to either kill iTunes or to make it at least a 50/50 split between iTunes and another competitor so that the music execs have some kind of leverage to get what they really want -- to jack up the price.

This is only about one thing: they want to charge 50 cents for a download of Lou Vega's "Mambo #5" and charge $1.99 for the latest new releases.

This model is obviously more profitable because for every 1 person buying an oldie there are a thousand buying the latest Amy Winehouse.

Reducing prices on old songs just to jack up prices on new releases (and calling it "market based pricing") is a bad deal for consumers in the long run.

There's nothing mysterious about this. I'm pretty sure that answer is that Apple wishes to make more per sale than Amazon or Rhapsody or Napster. It seems much more likely that record companies have a fixed rate at which they sell songs and that Apple's markup from the wholesale price they pay for the song is $0.10 more than Amazon and others.

That may be true, but I don't know.

I just don't TRUST them.

How the "value" of media is determined is so loopey that I just can't trust them to give me a fair price on their own -- so outside entity (in this case Apple) needs to be there to force them to be fair to consumers.

Look at how TV shows are "valued" these days. A boxed season of "Deadwood" costs $100.00?? How was that "value" determined?

All I know is that if it were Microsoft that came out with iTunes instead of apple -- we'd all be paying $1.99 for new releases. Or RENTING them with some kind of subscription service (an even bigger rip off, IMHO). Who really wins when you pay someone (like Apple or Microsoft or Amazon) $120 a year to "rent" a single from Fergie?

All this technical debate about how the documnents were produced is TOTALLY BESIDE THE POINT! Whether the documents were valid or not, the following facts remain:

. The key witness asserts that the INFORMATION in them is TRUE, and there is additional corroborating evidence. The underlying story is true. Therefore, the man who got himself elected by cultivating an image of military toughness while his campaign denigrated the service of others, who led us into a disastrous war under premises that have been demonstrated to be false and who staged a carrier landing and posed in a flight suit in order to bolster false claims of success in that war is revealed to have used his family's pull to get into the National Guard in order to avoid going to Vietnam and then SHIRKED a good part of his obligation.

. CBS News failed in its obligation to report the truth and inform the public of the significant facts they needed to make an informed decision. They were more afraid of offending those in power and the effect that might have on their financial bottom line than they were of failing in their basic function.

Those are the things we need to keep the focus on! I fervently hope that Rather's suit will serve to bring the truth to light in such a way that all will finally be forced to acknowledge it.

-- debpet

I say forget any grand conspiracy theories -- this seems more like a case of Bush going AWOL and the commanders just kind of shrugging their shoulders and not doing anything about it because of who George's dad was.

At the time the thinking must have been, "Who cares?"

Once George got into politics years later THEN embarrassing records started getting lost, misplaced, shredded, etc. I'm sure some people did it just to protect their own ass because they allowed George to break the rules and they didn't want to get in trouble -- others may have "lost" records as a favor to George.

The bottom line is the guy DID go AWOL. You really don't need a "grand global conspiracy" to explain it. All that's required is that George had a powerful daddy and the commanders figured, eh, why bother going after George for not showing up? They either didn't care or they looked the other way as a favor. Bigger fish to fry and who cares. Years later, however, when people started trying to hide the fact that they didn't do their jobs...