"There is now a menace which is called Twitter," Erdogan said. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."

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Comcast lost 275,000 cable subscribers last quarter, and has lost 622,000 in the first 9 months of 2010. More evidence of "cord cutting"? Nope, says the cable giant. It's evidence that the economy sucks. That's the short version of the company's explanation for the drop during its earnings call this morning: It had a variety of reasons to explain the exodus of subscribers, but all of them revolved around money that their previous customers don't have or don't want to part with.

How about the 400 people who chimed in to say, "Me too!" in the comments of my original post? Are they all idiots? How about me? I found several of those $1.99 charges on my own bills. How about the Verizon whistleblower who has begged his managers to change this greedy scheme, and been told to shut up? Is he mistaken?

"I'm going to let the letter to the F.C.C. speak for us," he said. "I'm not able to comment further."

"But you're saying that you don't charge that $1.99 fee!" I told him. "Yet it's happened to hundreds of my readers, and it's happened to me. So what are we missing?"

"I'm going to let the letter to the F.C.C. speak for us."

"But it just says Verizon isn't doing it!"

"I'm going to let the letter to the F.C.C. speak for us."

As the record industry moved through this stage there was a decline in learning orientation -- in learning what fans actually wanted -- both in terms of how they consumed music and what they were willing to pay for. So to, they began to discount the role that luck played in their success, to assume that the mass-marketing successes that occurred near the end the CD boom, which sold 3-4 million copies, applied to the natural laws of the universe, rather than that of a relatively short-lived phenomenon. This addiction to blockbuster artists is what characterizes the second stage of decline, which Collin's deemed The Undisciplined Pursuit of More. Here, the record industry started out on an unsustainable quest, and, because of their huge successes, they were pressured to grow.

Having reached the peak of the CD boom in 1999, the record industry had become a nearly $15-billion-a-year juggernaut, but under the pressure for more growth they collapsed, and, in the process, a vicious cycle of expectations had been set that strained the artists, the fans, the culture, and their systems to the point of breaking. Since record industry was unable to deliver new music with "consistent tactical excellence," they began to fray at the edges. Disruptive technologies were released, an epidemic of file-sharing proceeded, and, at this critical juncture, vested interests of music executives struggled and competed to achieve repetitive consumption through obsolescence. But these executives were too late, as the record industry, by externalizing the blame for their decline in sales, had already started to show symptoms of stage three, Denial of Risk and Peril.

Music executives began discounting negative data, amplifying positive data, and putting a positive spin on ambiguous data. In stage three, Collin's argues that those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks -- "or otherwise explain away the data" -- rather than accepting responsibility and confronting "the frightening reality that their enterprise may be in serious trouble." Right away, the Internet and file-sharing became easy scapegoats for the decline in sales that the record industry faced.

The company's representative, Phil Foster says "the cartridge is fine. Why it didn't read I do not know," suggesting another human error made on election night.

"I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM."

"We need DRM to show our customers the limits of the license they have entered into with us."