Most Hated Meddling Billionaire

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So it seems that everyone has a pet meddling billionaire that they like to blame for the world's ills, so it only seemed right to hold an election for which is the worst!

I've tried to assemble a representative field of intrusive tycoons, but if I missed your favorite feel free to write them in.

So, without further ado...

None of the above. Steve Jobs. Damn cheap piece-of-(expletive) iPods. If nothing else, Steve Jobs has done more than any other single human being to try to kill off the format of the CD (and with it, the concept of the album as a single, cohesive, indivisible artistic statement). In my book, that alone makes him worthy of my contempt.

I wonder, would Dark Side of the Moon and Sgt. Pepper's exist, if individual tracks back then were as easy to break up and sell separately as they are now?

Meh, if I'm gonna purchase music, I'd like to be able to only buy the songs that I like.

As for most hated meddling billionaire, how about all of them? ;P

Have any of these 10^9 ers injured you or taken something from you (by force)?

ruveyn

Where's Steve Ballmer?

I look up to all billionaires simply because they're billionaires. I hope to reach that level of wealth myself one day.

Anyone who throws hate at billionaires is merely jealous, even if the jealousy is only subconscious. You're frustrated that, even though you don't like these people, they've become so much more successful than you.

I have every album Pink Floyd ever made (and Syd Barrett's solo work) as well as every album the Beatles ever made (along with much of the solo work of all) in my purse simply because Steve Jobs made it possible for me to convert my 800 or so CDs into a format that fits into a few square inches rather than the entire wall of my living room.

Thank you Steve Jobs.


For the record, I simply put my ipod on the "album" setting and listen to the albums in their entirety. I do this because I am >40. People who are much younger than me weren't going to listen to Pink Floyd or the Beatles anyway. That's their parents' music. Instead they listen to singles that stand alone and they have no need for or desire for concept albums. This is the way their grandparents listened to music.

Much as I like concept albums- probably because of my age- I don't see them as an inherently superior way to experience music.

Steve Jobs did not invent or even come close to perfecting compression formats. All he did was generate an online market for selling really crappy format (m4a is a really horrible format) rip of songs. Not only that but the design scheme sucks, too, in that you never really own the music and can easily lose purchases and never be able to re-download them.

The only thing Steve Jobs ever did was come up with great marketing ideas.

So yeah, I'd have to vote Steve Jobs, too.

Explain this further, I've never heard of that. Bear in mind that iTunes music has been DRM free for the past few years.

But you do own the music as long as you back it up. And I always do. There is even a reminder whenever you buy something on itunes that you should back it up. Everything I bought I burned to CDs and those CDs have the music on them as surely as any commercial CD I might buy. (My CDs and backups of itunes purchases are now in file folder binders, to save space.) Once when I accidentally erased someof my itunes purchases I simply went back to my CD backups and re-downloaded them from there. In addition, the whole library is more recently frequently backed up on an external hard drive.

If my house burned down I'd lose it all and of course itunes would not let me re-download for free songs that I had lost that way. But neither would bookstores allow me to get free new copies of the books that would also perish.

You do own the copy of whatever you buy and it's up to you to protect that copy because it won't be replaced if you destroy or lose it. But this is true of anything you buy.

I have heard of Apple letting people download their collections for free as long they can verify the songs have already been purchased on their accounts. In fact, if you download an app on the App Store which you've already bought, it'll just download for free, so it might work the same for music.

I purchased songs a few years ago on itunes and lost them through a hard drive failure and itunes won't allow me to redownload them even though i had purchased them through their store.

Was that when they were still DRM'd? Did you ring up Apple and explain your situation?

Losing data in a hard drive failure isn't Apple's fault and this issue isn't exclusive to iTunes, BTW. I lost a game in a hard drive failure, but I don't blame the game company - it was my fault for not backing my s**t up, and I learnt my lesson from that. All my data is now backed up. Twice.

It's their fault that they don't have on record that I purchased those items with my account. There's no reason for them, even with heavy DRM, to not keep attached to my account what songs and videos I've purchased.

They do keep a record of what you bought, and if you'd phoned them up, they'd have probably sorted it for you.

That's just them being nice, though. Really, they have no obligation to do any of that. I didn't expect the game company to send me another copy, and if something happened to a possession I had because of my carelessness, I wouldn't expect the company that sold it to me to replace it for free.

But why should a computer file be different from everything else you buy? Other companies won't replace things you lose (even if they get stolen or destroyed by accident) even if they have a record of you buying them. Why should it be different for purchased files? Like Asp-Z said, companies that sell games won't replace a game you accidentally lose or have destroyed (unless it self-destructed because of some defect).

I think it's grand if Apple really has replaced some peoples' libraries. Perhaps when I inadvertently erased some songs out of my computer I could have called them up. But I had them on CD in a folder on my shelf so I just re-loaded them from there. Yes, I know I'm being smug about backing things up. But really, when you buy files from them it even tells you to back them up and has an annoying little prompt that won't go away until you have acknowledged it. I don't think it's fair to hold Apple accountable for replacing something when literally no other company will replace things you buy (even with a record of purchase) unless you buy special insurance for that. Walk into BestBuy with a receipt for a DVD you bought and tell them you left it on the bus and can you have another one and they will just laugh.