This is a picture of the President on the day he was briefed about the possibility of terrorists high-jacking planes. The president was on his month long vacation in Texas. This is one of the longest vacation’s a president has ever taken, especially considering it was August and he started the job in January. I don’t know about you but how soon is acceptable to take a vacation after starting your new job?
Colin Powell said yesterday his speech last February to the UN Security Council was not based on solid intelligence. A lot of things with the Bush Administration lately aren’t based on solid intelligence.Here’s Powell’s statement to the UN in February of 2003:
“Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
-Colin Powell to the UN Security Council, February 2003.
I guess there’s no reason to believe Mr. Powell any more.
Scientists actually look into the numbers of file sharing and record sales.
John Schwartz writes in the New York Times today that File Swapping has no connection to lagging record sales:
Using complex mathematical formulas, they determined that spikes in downloading had almost no discernible effect on sales. Even under their worst-case example, “it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy,” they wrote. “After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error” given that 803 million records were sold in 2002. Sales dropped by 139 million albums from 2000 to 2002.
“While downloads occur on a vast scale, most users are likely individuals who would not have bought the album even in the absence of file sharing,” the professors wrote.
In an interview, Professor Oberholzer-Gee said that previous research assumed that every download could be thought of as a lost sale. In fact, he said, most downloaders were drawn to free music and were unlikely to spend $18 on a CD.
“Say I offer you a free flight to Florida,” he asks. “How likely is it that you will go to Florida? It is very likely, because the price is free.” If there were no free ticket, that trip to Florida would be much less likely, he said. Similarly, free music might draw all kinds of people, but “it doesn’t mean that these people would buy CD’s at $18,” he said.