Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 420 Editor's Choice: 45
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I think it's great
[Read the article: Defendant owes $222,000 for illegal downloading]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Songwriters and musicians work hard, and they deserve to get paid. The $9250 each of these artists will receive can help put their kids through college, or pay the rent for a while, or help them create more great art,....
What? The money will go to the record companies? The part that doesn't go to the RIAA, that is?
Then what the fuck is everyone yelling about stealing from artists for?
Someone in the near future is going to be teaching case studies about how stupid it is for an intellectual property company to go to war with it's content providers and it's consumers at the same time. Likely a guy who lost his job when Capitol went under. Meanwhile, there is hope. EMI is distributing DRM-free music through Amazon, so at least someone is beginning to get it. And more and more artists are realizing that they don't need a record deal anymore. Much cheaper, even free alternatives, are available and becoming more viable every day. Radiohead is just the beginning.
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Another factor
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We have issues in South America. We need friends in South America. And a lot of those regional jets are being built in Brazil. Regional jets are now their second largest export, in fact.
Is the government going to pursue a course of action that hurts one of the few governments down there will the strength and the will to tell Chavez to fuck off?
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You beat me to the mail in idea
[Read the article: How scalpers hoard "Hannah Montana" tickets]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You beat me to the first one. Springsteen did that 25 years ago and still sold out 4 shows at MSG in about 20 minutes.
The second one would keep people from buying tickets as gifts, so that wouldn't be too popular.
But Ticketmaster is the problem. Centralized sales is a scalpers dream. TM worked when it required sleeping in front of record stores across the country. The problem now is the same one as message board spam, and we haven't solved that one yet. Making the questions too hard might make it so only scalpers could get tickets.
Maybe turn it into an online lottery of sorts. You log in and select your event, and are put into a random queue. When your queue reaches a certain number, 10% of the people are randomly selected and can go on to buy 4 tickets. The rest are moved to other queues to try their luck again. Of course this would require TM to have a better understanding of randomness than most, which is unlikely since they have never been forced to learn anything, or else the scalpers would be able to defeat the system.
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Way late, but
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Regional jets, in my experience, don't take up any gate space at a major airport. One of the joys of regional travel is waiting for the bus, being driven around in a cattle car with a driver who is either slamming on the gas or slamming on the brakes at all times, and waiting in an un-airconditioned plane while the bus comes to take you back to the terminal.
America not having passenger trains has nothing to do with the auto manufacturers, the oil companies, or any other evil entity commonly blamed for our misfortunes. If you are a railroad, transporting passengers is incredibly inefficient. People don't weigh enough and we are too high maintenance to make the economics work, since it takes the same amount of fuel and time and 5 times as many people to transport 200,000 of humans as it does to transport 2,000,000 pounds of coal, for example. High speed rail is great, it addresses most of the issues, but it would require a whole new infrastructure and tickets would cost about as much as airplane tickets if we leave them private. The market is largely speculative at this point. The government could do it, since the government actually gets more benefit from rail than anyone else could, but we don't like government owned transportation companies (Amtrak), or taxpayer subsidized transportation systems (high speed rail everywhere it's been on the ballot). Florida would be perfect for it - 250 miles from Miami to Tampa, 200 miles from Miami to Orlando, 350 miles from Miami to Jacksonville - but it's just too expensive.
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Why do we gives a shit?
[Read the article: How did the T get in LGBT?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Speaking as a heterosexual male who only clicked on this article because I wanted to find out what GLBT or LGBT or whatever it is meant, I seriously don't get it. I don't care what peopple do, as long as they:
- Don't do it with children
- Do it in private
- Don't act like they are better than everybody who wants to do something else and/or constantly go on about how everyone secretly wants to do what they are doing
- Don't demand special treatment because you are different (not disabled, not special needs, just different). That's what I think "straight marriage" types are doing.
The Constitution is in pretty much complete agreement with me on this, so I'm not sure what there is to fight about.
The only difference between G's, L's, B's and the T's is one additional rule: Tell people you are not actually or have not always been a man/woman before engaging in activity where learning this after might fuck somebody up. It's not your job to teach people to be more open minded by having sex with them and then telling them after. Not sure that actually happens but the rule needs to be there for the sake of courtesy.
Anyway, pass the law. It's a start, and a start is better than nothing. It's something to build on in the future, which is more than you have now. Just don't expect much because firing someone or refusing them something for no reason at all is still perfectly legal in 50 states so those who want to discriminate and are reasonably intelligent will do it with impugnity and you won't be able to stop them.