So if the record companies use the file traders as market research, how will they do such market research if they shut them down?...

WIRED: BigChampagne is Watching You. But even as the industry as a whole litigates, many of the individual labels are quietly reaching out to BigChampagne, turning file-sharing networks into the world's biggest focus group. In the beleaguered music business, this market research strategy that dare not speak its name is fast becoming the Nielsen ratings of the peer-to-peer world. [Tomalak's Realm]

4:02:55 PM    

Beautiful...

Sweet Surrender. At the center of the universe is a horribly wounded angel. Its wings are torn and blackened, its skin plastered with a dull purple blood that never seems to grow totally dry. It is disfigured, mangled, covered in seared, faintly glowing cracks. The face is fixed in an eternal, unchanging expression of pure, limitless joy. The eyes are empty sockets. The arms are eternally outstretched, because they are tied in place. It is nothing anyone would call conscious, and is only in the barest, barest sense of the word still alive. If anything resembling awareness remains, that awareness consists of nothing but an infinite field of gridded black and white squares, a test pattern scattered with dancing dots that shift and jump and blur into one another. It would be tempting to say this is consciousness, but in fact the angel is not aware of the test pattern. It simply is. This test pattern is useful. [kuro5hin.org]

4:00:18 PM