Encyclopedia Biermania

Okay, I am going to start updating this page more often. I hope everyone had a good 4th of July. I got back into biking and finished repairing my dining room ceiling. Lot of work but it felt good.

Part of the biking is my son Alex is learning to ride without training wheels. He is still a little wobbly but is doing good. He also just earned his white ribbon at swim class last Thursday. This is the 5th of 8 ribbons. It means he can surface dive to pick up rings from the bottom, swim 16 feet underwater (actually he can swim about 40 feet underwater, it's one of his favorite things), swim 32 feet dog paddle, tread water for at least one minute (without any part of the face going into the water), and dive from the edge of the pool with good form.

Today is normally my Linux day, but because this is virtual Monday, I will be working on it all day tomorrow.

Napster: What is my view, simple - I believe in the copyright laws to protect the rights of the artist (who I believe is the legitimate copyright holder), but simply providing an indexing service to tell me who has a particular song does not violate ANY law. If it did then card catalogs at the library would be illegal. Napster is a card catalog of who has what music so you can go to them to "borrow" a copy. The legal issue is the actual downloading which is between you and the person you are downloading it from. If you do download one from them and decide to keep it, yes you should pay money for it. To whom is the real question - ...

Napster should have a clearing house for artists where you can directly contribute to the artist of your choice, so you like a song, pay the artist. If enough people do that - say goodbye to the big labels and hello to more music more readily available at better prices. An artist would probably love to get $5 cash in hand from everyone who wanted their album, a third the price of the record companies and more cash in hand for the artists.

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