Regardless of how poorly she lied or tried to cover up the fact that she downloaded these tracks, we should not ignore the pettiness of the underlying crime relative to the fine.
Petty to you maybe. But I happen to know studio engineers who have recently lost their job, artists like the Futureheads (thanks god they had the courage to go it alone. They rock!) who get dropped from their labels. THERE ARE VICTIMS HERE.
Studio engineers lose their job all the time and right now in a down-turned economy, people in every field of business have lost their job, so please explain as to why anyone should even care if a studio engineer lost their job. Workers have contracts and companies have profit margins, for all we know the studio engineer was stealing microphones.
BTW artists get dropped by their label all the time and its rarely ever a problem for the artist, the real problem is where the label begins refusing new material and has the band on a multiple works contract. If you've produced 2 albums and your record label wants a 3rd but won't accept your material, you cannot go to another label for up to 5 years in some cases.
That is an offensive word. Please retract it.
> not to mention basic grammar.
> Studio engineers lose their job all the time and right now in a down-turned economy, ...
You're missing a comma after "now". Also, engineers don't lose their jobs "all the time", they frequently lose their jobs.
> so please explain as to why anyone should even care if a studio engineer lost their job
"as to" is redundant. "Even" is redundant. In any case, my point, since you evidently missed it (perhaps due to excessive focus on such vital issues as etiquette and "basic" grammar?), was that those job losses are directly related to lost revenues as a result of rampant piracy.
> for all we know the studio engineer was stealing microphones
Silly; see above.
> BTW artists get dropped by their label all the time and its rarely ever a problem for the artist
Again, "all the time" is poor english. And "its" should have an apostrophe.
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
EDIT: BTW cool username! I'd actually thought of that for an album name, although I think deliberately mispelling it, spidey-style, to "electro-magnetic" would be even cooler (would be particularly appropriate for an electro outfit, naturally).
EDIT: Also, I feel it's important to point out that the reason I capitalized the last sentence (and let's be fair here: it was only four words) is that the great majority of the posts related to filesharing assume that simply because there is no financial reward for making files available, there is no harm done. But as Frederik Bastiat would say, there is what you see, and what you don't see. And what you don't see is that in at the very least a substantial amount of cases, unauthorized downloads lead to lost sales. The case itself had evidence of this, namely that her shopping list (I believe from Best Buy) only listed purchases of DVDs and games (it had a single CD purchase, IIRC).
I wasn't talking about your paragraph either, I was talking about your use of block-capitals. I generally don't waste my time picking apart peoples sentences unless someone has offered to pay me for the service, perhaps you should consider doing the same.
As for my use of retarded, it isn't an offensive word, I know many if you'd prefer to hear one of them. However, I wasn't even using it in an offensive context. I'm fully aware retard is used as an insult, but I didn't call you a retard, I said we, as in the HN community, are not retarded. I was merely stating that you use of block-capitalization was insulting, because you assumed people on HN cannot understand basic grammar!
@2nd edit: Regardless, everyone has a reason for using block-capitalization, but it never justifies it.
It was obviously colloquial language. But since you were being so prickly about it, I decided to repay you in kind.
> Look buddy, I've worked as a writer
Look, buddy, you're not going to see expressions like "all the time", save from direct spoken-word quotations, in any newspaper worth its salt.
> Commas are used however the writer sees fit and in the paragraph you take your third point from, they were elisions not clauses.
For the comma issue I refer you to "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk, Jr., page 8:
"3. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas."
> I generally don't waste my time picking apart peoples sentences unless someone has offered to pay me for the service, perhaps you should consider doing the same.
Nor do I; I just do it when someone gets pedantic about "basic" grammar in what was obvously a colloquial expression and then proceeds to make numerous -- admittedly minor -- similar "basic" grammar mistakes. And I didn't appreciate the vindictiveness and severity vis a vis a very small abuse of all-caps.