oldschooltaper
Remember your first iPod?
Chances are you were forced to use something called iTunes. Now people do not think twice about iTunes.
But back then there was just no sensible reason, from the user's perspective, not to let a user add/remove music from an iPod without jumping through an additional hoop. People had to spend countless hours deciphering the protocol in order to build programs that could do what iTunes did: add/remove music.
Out of the box, the iPod was literally unusable without first installing some Apple software.
No matter how wonderful the design of an Apple device, the hoop jumping just becomes increasingly tiresome. I'm too tired to do the Apple dance.
Getting accepted is the biggest hurdle. Once you are in all you really need to do to secure an opportunity is graduate. It's in the institution's best interest to see that you graduate and carry on the good name of the institution after graduation in whatever position you decide to take in whatever sector of the economy.
People will listen to you merely based on the fact you graduated from a top tier institution. They will assume you are intelligent. There is no need to prove it.
Some people will even hire you solely based on those phenomena.
Why would any graduate be against this? There is very little incentive to think outside the box.
The sheep are not the graduates of top tier institutions. The sheep are the people who blindly follow them.
There is little need to be a good leader when you can be a leader "by default" thanks to "presumed competence" and the fear of questioning anyone who has graduated from a top tier institution.
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In other words, you can buy the great Apple form factor and design, but you don't have to deal with the restrictions of the OS. You could install your own OS.
Obviously this would initially only target hackers. NetBSD can run on some Apple hardware. And there is all the Hackintosh work to build on. Eventually there would be more free OS offerings to install after giving the hacker community some time to adjust to the newfound freedom.
Apple could even sell OSX and iOS separately.
There is a lot of value just in the Apple hardware. Even without the Apple OS offerings. Apple is primarily a hardware company.
Maybe the truth is that it has always been this way. Maybe musicians didn't ask to be paid for doing what they love. Maybe record companies just realised they could profit recording and distributing a musician's music. And the musicians were quite happy to be paid.
But once record companies give a musician this "easy money", musicians are unlikely to ever want to sacrafice that benefit. Eventually it becomes viewed as an entitlement.
Digital recording and the internet means we don't need record companies to distribute music anymore.
Will musicians stop making music? Will the quality of music decline?
These are very weak arguments with no evidence to support them.
Thiel is, first and foremost, advancing his own interests by enouraging students to drop out and pursue startups in which he will have a stake.
He wants to hide this among otherwise valid criticisms of the system. But he really can't.
Unless he's paying you not to attend, you are foolish not to attend university because of what he says (versus your own reasons).
I would tell you how but I don't use OSX. Surely someone else can tell you, or you could learn yourself. It's worth learning how to use mplayer, if you are serious about audio.
For Duritz, who admits he collects bootlegs[1], bittorrent is being envisioned here as a promotional tool, not a distribution tool. Radio used to be the main promotional tool. Disc jockeys (once fully human, now often pre-programmed since radio stations have all been acquired by large corporations) could make or break an artist. And it's been this way for as long as the recording industry has existed.
Even if you were lucky enough to get time at Sun Studios in Memphis, if the radio did not agree to play your songs, "no one" would know you exist. And you would not become a cash cow for some record company.
No listener has to pay for radio. It's "free".
Duritz is smart. His band is also in need of some promotion. Who is going to listen to radio at the point when everyone is connected to the internet and when the internet offers a more flexible way to get music "for free"? The answer is no one. That point is inevitable.
1. Assuming he's a reasonably serious collecter that implies he knows all about distribution of "pirated" content. Before file sharing became easy, this used to be the postal mail. People mailed cassette tapes to each other. As an artist, he also sees a side of the "pirating" issue many collectors of bootlegs (perhaps analogous to today's bittorrent addicts) do not see.