They did not need IP law, as to copy anything was extremely expensive and time consuming.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to typeset a book by hand? Or to paint a reproduction of a picture? Or to get an orchestra together to learn and play a piece of music?

You could not just anonymously get a copy off the pirate bay.

There were less people doing it too. It would be bloody obvious who made the copy, and who made the original. I bet you that people had their own, perhaps violent, ways of resolving these issues even if it was not coded into the law.

The situation nowadays is completely different. The way artists and audiences interact is by mass distribution of recorded media, which is impractical without IP laws.

"And I hope one day to be able to say with pride, "I recorded, mixed, and mastered this project all in Linux, using nothing but FOSS!"."

Some people already can.

I think it depends on what you want to do. For projects where it's straight forward recording, like live music, then Ardour on Linux is fine. Particularly if you still use a mixing desk/outboard fx. The sound quality is only limited by your A/D converters.

For composing in the computer, with soft synths and samples etc, Cubase and Ableton rule. Until Ardour gets midi there is no competition. Seq24 on Linux is still a lot of fun though. :)

Games are harder to pirate than music and films. Therefore more games are sold.

Games are large in terms of data, and cannot be lossily compressed like mp3/DIVX. Games have strong copy protection. Games need to be cracked, which is an uncertain process and often conflicts with patches/updated content.

Well, why not?

I think the innovation here is that they are using pre-polarised diaphragms to avoid the high voltages used in previous electrostatic speakers. They are a little like electret mics driven in reverse.

By the way, Magnaplanar speakers are not actually electrostatic. They use a coil and a magnet, just like a conventional speaker.

I'm not sure that it is piezoelectric.

In the video, it appears the paper is covered in tiny electrostatic speakers. They mention a pre polarised diaphragm. It is electret, rather than externally polarised, as that lets them use much lower voltages.

I don't think anyone has made an electret speaker before. High voltage electrostatic speakers are easy to find though.

It is probably fairly efficient, but requires a lot of transducers, and their small size means no bass.

"It never fails to surprise how unimaginative visionaries can be."

Perhaps with the kind of music he was playing, distortion would have sucked.
It works best musically with fewer musicians and small arrangements with simple harmonic structures.
Go much beyond a major chord and fuzz starts to sound bad. There is too much dissonance and it sounds too messy.

It used to be the job of the brass section to give you that harmonically rich sound!

Once bands became three/four piece, and guitarists stopped playing all those complicated chords they could use fuzz on guitar and not take up all the space where the other musicians live!

What has this got to do with creativity?

Before autotune, we'd drop in on the same bit of vocal for hours if need be.

Now, if the spirit of the take is good, but there are a couple of pitch problems, you can fix them without endless retakes taking away the vibe.

I'd say it does the opposite to removing creativity. It liberates artists to let go a little when singing and go for feel over perfection.

They were not afraid of 'box cutters'.

The reason for this is that there are no reports or evidence of any kind anywhere that the hijackers had box cutters.

It's far more likely they were carrying combat knives. The box cutter myth was started to explain how they carried the knives through airport security.

See:
http://edwardjayepstein.com/nether_fictoid9.htm

"If a user can't be bothered to check what comes in the version of a product they are buying (whether it is a cell phone plan or an operating system), then they deserve whatever they get. "

You don't quite get it.

You talk as if there was a single version which they are evaluating, in which case they would deserve what they got.

With confusion marketing, there are many subtly different versions, and the user has to make a *comparative* evaluation. If there are enough versions, the effort to evaluate *all* of them before buying becomes unreasonable.