Explain why it is our problem, and why the force of the state is necessary to provide you a living?
Because society as a whole decided that it was better than the alternative. Has the pendulum swung too far? Do copyright holders have too much control? Absolutely. Should the alternative be that no one needs to pay for content anymore? Absolutely not.
Yeah, God damn Russia for protecting their interests after the US and EU were caught red-handed orchestrating a violent revolution which removed the democratically elected pro-Russian leader!
Slough off shitty old site and let the better designs win, not the one with "history". Keeping 1990's-looking sites around isn't really good.
Keeping 1990's-looking sites if fine if they work right. After all, they usually look better and are more functional and less buggy than 2014-looking sites.
It doesn't matter where the torrent comes from, you're going to be connecting to the same people.
If you can figure out how to connect to the right people, sure. What about those of us, like me, who only occasionally connected to the Pirate Bay (for me, it's getting archived MLB broadcasts that MLB has refused to release online)? Yes, people who are really plugged into the system and pay attention to it are probably still going to get by just fine.
However, if you're not interested in the latest AAA movie release, and are looking for smaller, more obscure or older stuff, where there may only be 3-4 people seeding.. at all, this just got a lot harder.
"cost of living"? Let me know when you've seen what the "cost of living" is for a billionaire, and then we'll talk scale. Hint: Yachts and jets are expensive. Oh wait wait you expect a billionaire to be living like a poor person...
"Cost of living" is a phrase most often used to describe the amount of money it takes to live above poverty levels in a certain geographic region. "Luxuries" are not factored in, whether it's a rich person buying a yacht or a poor person buying a big-screen TV.
Ok, Obama. We get it. You're mad at Putin for not handing over the guy who humiliated and exposed you, Snowden. You don't need to spam your butthurt everywhere.
I realize that as nerds we tend to live in our own little bubbles and magnify the importance of nerdy things, but on the list of grievances the US (and Ukraine, and the EU) have against Russia, Snowden is pretty far down.
The Republicans had no choice but to accept the retard that the warmonger put on his ticket.
Whoa, that's a little revisionist. When Palin was announced, Republicans were ECSTATIC. Most people were not excited about McCain, but Palin got the base energized. Until she started opening her mouth, there really was no saving her after that point.
we all share the benefits of them whether we like it or not
I'm sure we all share in those kickbacks from the defense contracts, right?
If, like so many people seem to espouse these days, your metric for success is "more jobs," then sure, we all benefit a tiny amount. Of course, there's that pesky opportunity cost..
___In most cases, insurance rates are much higher than before
You know, the insurance rates were going to rise regardless of the health care law or not. That's what they do. The insurance companies do it because they can get away with it, and now they have some convenient BS so they can pretend that rates weren't going up. The biggest flaw in the law (besides that it's not single-payer) is that it does little to actually bring costs down.
Considering Reagan is known historically as the worst US president in modern history, I say good riddance. Another "Reagan" would effectively be the end of our planet.
"The worst US president?" By whose measure?
I'm not Reagan's biggest fan, but GWB and perhaps Carter are worse modern US president.
If you want to be technical he killed confederates, not americans
I thought one of Lincoln's big legal arguments for the Civil War was that there was no constitutional standing for the Southern secession, so they were not a foreign country; they were rebellious Americans.
Not on the original PS1 memory card. It was like using floppy disks again, since the official PS1 memory card held 128kB of data, divided into 15 8kB blocks. Many games required more than one block, meaning that if you had a bunch of games that needed to save, and a household with more than one user, you needed a lot of memory cards, or a "super" memory card. I had one which was 2MB I think, divided into 16 128k "pages." Buttons on the memory card itself selected what page was active and would be read by the playstation. I have not-so-fond memories of corrupted memory cards (the non-Sony ones were problematic) and of using the PS1 interface to copy saved game data between cards.
Well it was. Where I went to college, sports was not considered the business of the university. But that was a long time ago in a country far, far away. No tuition fees either.
The colleges where sports are considered a big business in the big conferences, they more than pay for themselves; they pay for many other things as well. Alumni contributions, ticket prices, merchandise, broadcasting deals. It's the less popular sports that -aren't- treated that way that tend to be the money sinks.
If college athletes win their final suit to get paid as professionals instead of as unpaid amateurs, then we REALLY might see some changes to how college athletics are handled. Thing is that it's hard to tell whether college sports would be more of a drain so they can pay the players, or if colleges might scale them back. At this point I think it could go either way.
So the top 1% can afford to have a political voice individually, without forming corporations, while the rest of us need some way to pool the money of thousands in order to accomplish that. Explain again how restricting corporate speech hurts that 1%? Would you have the government regulate the political speech of newspapers and cable news channels?
Fine, but keep in mind any "corporate speech" restrictions would also restrict the ACLU, EFF, Southern Poverty Law Center, basically any non-profit that we like. And of course it would also be completely unconstitutional. To put some restrictions in place requires a constitutional amendment.
Before the media decided she should be destroyed, she had the highest approval rating of any governor.
That says less about the media and more about the judgement of Alaskans.
She is extremely bright.
I lean conservative and even that doesn't pass the laugh test for me.
If the media focused on Obama's many, many blunders, you would think he was a complete retard
Both conservatives and liberals tend to agree that Obama is a disappointment as a president, though usually not for the same reasons. There was no "media takedown" of Palin, any more that if you say something stupid, the media love to feed on it, like they feed on any "controversy."
That's not going to help. Why? Because if everyone who REALLY CARED about the issue actually stopped purchasing and downloading, everyone else would continue to do so. The number of people who really care about this is much smaller than the opinion on Slashdot would have you believe.
If they simple CAN'T secure their networks, maybe they shouldn't have those networks.
It's not just copyright infringement, they could be part of a botnet, they could be enabling child porn downloads, they could easily be the victims of identity theft.
The whole insecure network being abused issue is basically identity theft, since these are all actions done under the name of the person owning the network.
Unfortunately rightsholders (rather than copyright holders) have this mental defect in their brains that prevent them to understand anything regarding lowering the price of their products.
Don't know what you've seen, but I pay less for a music album now (either a physical CD or itunes/amazon full album download) than I did in the 90s, far less if you account for inflation. Same for DVDs, same for video games. Video games in particular are far cheaper than they've ever been.
and of course they go after cox, which is a private family owned company, is dwarfed in size by comcast and time warner, produces no related music/movie/tv content, and makes a crapload of money. bmg and round hill are gambling that they (cox) would rather settle than spend an insane amount of that money in a prolonged legal battle.
There is also the possibility they want to devalue Cox to make it easier/cheaper to purchase.
Don't use that excuse. That's the refrain of discredited conspiracy theorists everywhere who don't have a leg to stand on. Let's hear the real allegations and see the real proof, then we can come to a real conclusion about what you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Explain why it is our problem, and why the force of the state is necessary to provide you a living?
Because society as a whole decided that it was better than the alternative. Has the pendulum swung too far? Do copyright holders have too much control? Absolutely. Should the alternative be that no one needs to pay for content anymore? Absolutely not.
Yeah, God damn Russia for protecting their interests after the US and EU were caught red-handed orchestrating a violent revolution which removed the democratically elected pro-Russian leader!
Go back to Russia Today, moron.
Slough off shitty old site and let the better designs win, not the one with "history". Keeping 1990's-looking sites around isn't really good.
Keeping 1990's-looking sites if fine if they work right. After all, they usually look better and are more functional and less buggy than 2014-looking sites.
It doesn't matter where the torrent comes from, you're going to be connecting to the same people.
If you can figure out how to connect to the right people, sure. What about those of us, like me, who only occasionally connected to the Pirate Bay (for me, it's getting archived MLB broadcasts that MLB has refused to release online)? Yes, people who are really plugged into the system and pay attention to it are probably still going to get by just fine.
However, if you're not interested in the latest AAA movie release, and are looking for smaller, more obscure or older stuff, where there may only be 3-4 people seeding.. at all, this just got a lot harder.
"cost of living"? Let me know when you've seen what the "cost of living" is for a billionaire, and then we'll talk scale. Hint: Yachts and jets are expensive. Oh wait wait you expect a billionaire to be living like a poor person...
"Cost of living" is a phrase most often used to describe the amount of money it takes to live above poverty levels in a certain geographic region. "Luxuries" are not factored in, whether it's a rich person buying a yacht or a poor person buying a big-screen TV.
Ok, Obama. We get it. You're mad at Putin for not handing over the guy who humiliated and exposed you, Snowden. You don't need to spam your butthurt everywhere.
I realize that as nerds we tend to live in our own little bubbles and magnify the importance of nerdy things, but on the list of grievances the US (and Ukraine, and the EU) have against Russia, Snowden is pretty far down.
The Republicans had no choice but to accept the retard that the warmonger put on his ticket.
Whoa, that's a little revisionist. When Palin was announced, Republicans were ECSTATIC. Most people were not excited about McCain, but Palin got the base energized. Until she started opening her mouth, there really was no saving her after that point.
Haha! Hey, that AC who works at Russia Today is back! Welcome back, comrade.
we all share the benefits of them whether we like it or not
I'm sure we all share in those kickbacks from the defense contracts, right?
If, like so many people seem to espouse these days, your metric for success is "more jobs," then sure, we all benefit a tiny amount. Of course, there's that pesky opportunity cost..
___In most cases, insurance rates are much higher than before
You know, the insurance rates were going to rise regardless of the health care law or not. That's what they do. The insurance companies do it because they can get away with it, and now they have some convenient BS so they can pretend that rates weren't going up. The biggest flaw in the law (besides that it's not single-payer) is that it does little to actually bring costs down.
Considering Reagan is known historically as the worst US president in modern history, I say good riddance. Another "Reagan" would effectively be the end of our planet.
"The worst US president?" By whose measure?
I'm not Reagan's biggest fan, but GWB and perhaps Carter are worse modern US president.
Ike also warned of the Military Industrial alliance, something that the current power brokers have become very very comfortable with.
If you want to be technical he killed confederates, not americans
I thought one of Lincoln's big legal arguments for the Civil War was that there was no constitutional standing for the Southern secession, so they were not a foreign country; they were rebellious Americans.
You can fit a lot of savegames on a memory card.
Not on the original PS1 memory card. It was like using floppy disks again, since the official PS1 memory card held 128kB of data, divided into 15 8kB blocks. Many games required more than one block, meaning that if you had a bunch of games that needed to save, and a household with more than one user, you needed a lot of memory cards, or a "super" memory card. I had one which was 2MB I think, divided into 16 128k "pages." Buttons on the memory card itself selected what page was active and would be read by the playstation. I have not-so-fond memories of corrupted memory cards (the non-Sony ones were problematic) and of using the PS1 interface to copy saved game data between cards.
Well it was. Where I went to college, sports was not considered the business of the university. But that was a long time ago in a country far, far away. No tuition fees either.
The colleges where sports are considered a big business in the big conferences, they more than pay for themselves; they pay for many other things as well. Alumni contributions, ticket prices, merchandise, broadcasting deals. It's the less popular sports that -aren't- treated that way that tend to be the money sinks.
If college athletes win their final suit to get paid as professionals instead of as unpaid amateurs, then we REALLY might see some changes to how college athletics are handled. Thing is that it's hard to tell whether college sports would be more of a drain so they can pay the players, or if colleges might scale them back. At this point I think it could go either way.
Computer games? Really?
Ah, but in the US, naturally we call football 'soccer,' or, more descriptively, "really boring hockey with bad acting."
So the top 1% can afford to have a political voice individually, without forming corporations, while the rest of us need some way to pool the money of thousands in order to accomplish that. Explain again how restricting corporate speech hurts that 1%? Would you have the government regulate the political speech of newspapers and cable news channels?
Fine, but keep in mind any "corporate speech" restrictions would also restrict the ACLU, EFF, Southern Poverty Law Center, basically any non-profit that we like. And of course it would also be completely unconstitutional. To put some restrictions in place requires a constitutional amendment.
Before the media decided she should be destroyed, she had the highest approval rating of any governor.
That says less about the media and more about the judgement of Alaskans.
She is extremely bright.
I lean conservative and even that doesn't pass the laugh test for me.
If the media focused on Obama's many, many blunders, you would think he was a complete retard
Both conservatives and liberals tend to agree that Obama is a disappointment as a president, though usually not for the same reasons. There was no "media takedown" of Palin, any more that if you say something stupid, the media love to feed on it, like they feed on any "controversy."
Of course he is. Natural born citizen. US mother. And his birth certificate is not a sloppy forgery.
I would have figured that argument was truly dead and buried, along with "the moon landing was faked" and "9/11 was an inside job."
STOP BUYING THEIR MUSIC!
Stop downloading their music.
Ignore their entire existence.
That's not going to help. Why? Because if everyone who REALLY CARED about the issue actually stopped purchasing and downloading, everyone else would continue to do so. The number of people who really care about this is much smaller than the opinion on Slashdot would have you believe.
If they simple CAN'T secure their networks, maybe they shouldn't have those networks.
It's not just copyright infringement, they could be part of a botnet, they could be enabling child porn downloads, they could easily be the victims of identity theft.
The whole insecure network being abused issue is basically identity theft, since these are all actions done under the name of the person owning the network.
Unfortunately rightsholders (rather than copyright holders) have this mental defect in their brains that prevent them to understand anything regarding lowering the price of their products.
Don't know what you've seen, but I pay less for a music album now (either a physical CD or itunes/amazon full album download) than I did in the 90s, far less if you account for inflation. Same for DVDs, same for video games. Video games in particular are far cheaper than they've ever been.
and of course they go after cox, which is a private family owned company, is dwarfed in size by comcast and time warner, produces no related music/movie/tv content, and makes a crapload of money. bmg and round hill are gambling that they (cox) would rather settle than spend an insane amount of that money in a prolonged legal battle.
There is also the possibility they want to devalue Cox to make it easier/cheaper to purchase.
WTF are you going on about? Seriously?
Have you been living under a rock?
Don't use that excuse. That's the refrain of discredited conspiracy theorists everywhere who don't have a leg to stand on. Let's hear the real allegations and see the real proof, then we can come to a real conclusion about what you're talking about.