Here's part 2 of Orson Scott Card's article on mp3's, music sharing and the RIAA: The real gripe for the record companies is not these fictional “lost sales.” What's keeping them up at night is the realization that musicians don't need record companies any more. Musicians can go into a studio, record their own music exactly as they want it, and not as some executive says they have to record it because “that's what the kids want.” Then they can sell CDs at their live performances and set up online, with a bunch of MP3s that people can share around.…

This is a good (and funny) article about introverts. ISTP here, by the way.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=370_0_1_0_C In late April, two teen-age students in Oakland, California, got an unwelcome, real-life lesson in civics. During a heated class discussion at Oakland High School about politics and President Bush, the boys made comments the exact nature of which are in dispute, but which their teacher believed constituted a threat toward the president. The teacher went to the FBI. Secret Service agents showed up at the high school the next day to interview the boys, both 16. The school principal sat in for an hour and a half as agents interviewed each student individually, without their parents? knowledge or…

and I like to go to Dave & Buster's every once in a while, so we had a bunch of voucher slips that we needed to convert before 10/1, and also somehow we'd accumulated a handful of comp cards. We decided to go last night to preserve our ticket vouchers and to drain the extra cards to get rid of them. After all is said and done, we wound up with 5400 tickets – so we spent half of them on this: