Truth, Computing and Fail

A storm of discussions and opinions has been kicked up in the online community regarding the decision of some ISPs to introduce metered access. The argument put forward by the ISPs is that while majority of the people use their internet connection for casual e-mails and browsing stuff, the smartass motherfuckers in this minority get away with downloading tons of movies, music, software etc etc even though both of them shell out the same amount for access. Don’t be fooled, all their trash talk about inadequate infrastructure to handle the burgeoning demand of bandwidth is crap. They have been finding a way to deal with since the last 15 years. They would do quite well to repeat the same in the future too. If they are actually concerned about the customer who pays more yet uses less, why don’t they introduce some special plan for these kind of users where they would be charged for something like per 500 MB of data transfer? That would be enough to handle your ‘casual surfers’. Face it assholes, the internet is no more about just e-mail and HTML 3.1 . We have come a long way since that.

How does the rant against the big music corps figure in this discussion? Well, you would soon see how they are related. Yesterday I was listening to songs on the last.fm recommendations radio with the ’80s tag. I came across a band named Kix, which was one of those countless glam metal/sleaze rock bands from L.A. who had a meteoric rise only to fade away that soon. I don’t remember the track name but it was terrible shit and someone in the shoutbox said that the band sounds like a ‘poor man’s version of Ratt’. To put it in a word, batshit. Now, if the big music corps were to have their way, I would have been forced to buy a copy of the whole album only to be stomping over the CD after a single session of listening to it. Don’t mention iTunes. I find paying 99 cents for each track equally retarded. If my internet connection was supposedly metered and I was just inching towards the 40 GB limit they imposed on my connection, I would have thought twice before streaming the song, thereby having no other choice but to buy the CD.

The point here is that both these businesses are working on concepts and models that are totally outdated and irrelevant in today’s highly advanced technological society. The bands and artists have always made shitloads of money even if their albums have been a modest success at best. ‘There can never be adequate compensation for an artist’s efforts’ is just BS. People have families to look after, kids to raise, ailing parents to tend to. They don’t earn just to splurge on some airheaded diva. If RandomBigMusicCorp still plays the same stuck record, tell them to shoot the artists so that they could go to heaven and play with dollar bills and dive in pools of gold coins like Uncle Scrooge.

So here is to both of you,

P.S. Haven’t posted anything technical for a while. Surely will make up for it within the next 3-4 days