So if the odds are better, then aren't you saying that we have more (and better) musicians to listen to b/c there is money to be made? I think you might have just proven my point.
I think our major point of disagreement has to do with property rights. Whistling or singing a song is fundamentally different than creating an exact digital replica of the original master and then willfully distributing it to thousands of freeloaders.
I believe that property rights are essential to pure capitalism. Clearly, we do not experience pure capitalism, but that is no reason to give up on it and subscribe to a collectivist notion of fileswappers as modern-day Robin Hoods merrily redistributing intellectual property to society's victims.
Property rights are crucial to Capitalism because they form the basis for much of our individual freedom. Contrast land ownership with mere occupancy as was the case during medieval surfdom. When you own land you have an undisputable right to occupy that land and to do with it as you choose, with some minor limitations known in the modern world as zoning.
When you engage in the capitalist enterprise of production, you create a product. That product is your exclusive property, and you may do with it as you see fit. If you build a bird house, you may sell it to the neighbors for $50 if they are willing to pay for it.
The digital age has opened up a whole new realm of production and reproduction. While in the above example you would have to build birdhouse after birdhouse, you can now write a song or a computer program, and instead of worrying about how you will make enough to sell to everyone who might wish to buy one, you have the luxury of being able to dedicate your efforts to the first copy, knowing that as soon as it is done you can effortlessly produce more copies as you see fit (or as demand dictates).
If someone comes along and steals your master copy, then that person deprives you of your just rewards for your initial effort. If that person gives away copies of your software for free against your will, he/she deprives you of the ability to profit from your ingenuity. Just because someone can copy your work does not make it right to copy it.
So, property (intellectual and physical) rights are critical to successful capitalism because they protect the outcome of production, and in capitalism production is the way that individuals express their freedom.
The Robin Hood who steals the product of one individual's freedom diminishes the creator's freedom by limiting the ways in which the creator may use it to benefit himself.
Thus, if you believe that (pure) capitalism is a system that maximizes individual freedom, then theft or unauthorized copying and distribution of the product of that freedom dilutes and diminishes the freedom of the creator and is therefore counter to the ends of Capitalism.
In reality, a lot of people would never have bought the CD to begin with (because they're so damned expensive).
That is rubbish. Who are you to decide. That's like me breaking into your house and stealing something with dust on it and claiming innocence because "you would never have used it anyway".
You didn't read what I wrote. My point was that deterrence is one of several motivations behind the criminal justice system.
If you do not believe that laws should exist, then that is your prerogative. But anarchy is not a practical system, since there are those (fileswappers included) who do not respect the rights of others, and so laws must be created to protect those rights.
Having laws with no enforcement would be pointless, so obviously someone has to enforce those laws. The laws being enforced is all we are talking about here. It is precisely the same as if you walked into a record store and stole a copy of the latest Britney Spears album. When you do that you deprive Britney of the royalties that she might have received from the illicitly made copies.
You need to ask yourself the following question before coming to a final decision on the morality of fileswapping: Do we want people to put effort and energy into creating music? If we do, then we should protect the property they create just as we would protect the property of a jeweler, farmer, or shopkeeper.
Or, it could be that you do not believe in capitalism. Capitalism is a system in which people are free to invest their efforts in order to make a profit by exchanging goods and services with others on the terms that they see fit. Along with Capitalism comes a respect for property rights, which is where your logic breaks down. If property rights are not respected, someone can steal your car, music, invention, or wallet through coercion or fraud. Distributing someone's intellectual property through massive P2P networks forces the owner to provide copies for untold numbers of people for free, and so the action of putting someone else's music (property) up for download amounts to coercion.
Some have attempted the argument that the downloaded copies wouldn't have necessarily been sales, and so there is nothing wrong with file swapping. But who are they to judge. Let the owner of the material decide how it is distributed.
He probably won't respond to your comment. There really is not a legitimate argument to justify filesharing. It's theft, albeit a wimpy kind of theft much like shoplifting.:)
Punishment for a crime is intended to deter others from committing that crime. Stealing music is the equivalent of shoplifting. Individual thefts are of relatively low monetary value, and most people who shoplift don't consider their crime to have a significant impact on anyone else.
The RIAA has the right to prosecute any offenders it can catch (the fact that there are lots of offenders doesn't change that), and to attempt to have the harshest penalty available under law administered to those offenders if they are found guilty by a court.
Deterrence has in fact been shown to work as a general principle of the justice system, among which are state moderated retribution, punishment, and remediation. You may discount one or more of these factors, but the rest hold as legitimate outcomes of the RIAA's lawsuits (if they are successful).
The same logic you use would fail if applied to things like insider trading, etc. To any organization, secrecy has varying levels of importance to different individuals. In order for most terrorist attacks to be carried out, there must be collaboration with people who are only peripherally involved in the actual attack. These people, or the people they talk to over a few beers, may decide that it's worth trying to make some money on, and before you know it the market is an accurate predictor of terrorist acts.
Don't forget that greed is more important to most people than the success of an abstract cause.
There is a very simple answer. When you outsource you have another company accountable for the quality and timing of the work being outsourced.
Plus, someone takes responsibility for managing the workers, and for the final result. Frequently, outsourcing contracts include a "performance clause" that basically says that if the work done is not adequate, the client does not have to pay full price for the outsourced work.
With an employee off the street (or off the net in the case of telecommuting) the hiring company undertakes the risk that the work will not be of adequate quality as well as the management overhead.
If someone comes up with a way of managing telecommuting employees that makes companies comfortable, then I'm sure they'll do more of that than outsourcing. As it stands, decisions to outsource are (at least in my experience) often made because the organization lacks a specific skill set, and this most often is allowed to happen b/c management wasn't prepared for the decision that they are forced to make. This makes things like performance clauses sound very appealing.
DoubleClick's clients should really be upset. If you were paying DoubleClick to drive traffic to your site, wouldn't you want traffic that at least voluntarily sought information about what you provide rather than fools who clicked the "your system is not secure" pseudo dialog box?
Re:calling clueful car manufacturers
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 1
Reminds me of being in L.A. I was wondering why pressing the "seek" button on the rental car's radio only found the same 3 or 4 stations... I thought "this is L.A., there have to be more than 3 or 4 stations here"... Then I tried turning the knob. There was a station on nearly every available FM frequency. No wonder seek was confused.
Re:Is it really an incentive?
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 1
Assuming someone were to finance or lease the VW, the cost of the IPod added in would amount to about $5 per month or less.
You'd think that designing and implementing such a thing would cost a fraction of what it costs to make and run this advertisent.
Perhaps, but that would pale in comparison to the cost of fielding thousands of questions from customers asking why their headphones didn't work when plugged into that jack.
It's nice to know that someone has actually used all of those scripting features in GiMP, however I think you should be aware that Windows does a good job with the right mouse button for cutting/pasting, which would save you a lot of clicks when you're in Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
So if the odds are better, then aren't you saying that we have more (and better) musicians to listen to b/c there is money to be made? I think you might have just proven my point.
I think our major point of disagreement has to do with property rights. Whistling or singing a song is fundamentally different than creating an exact digital replica of the original master and then willfully distributing it to thousands of freeloaders.
I believe that property rights are essential to pure capitalism. Clearly, we do not experience pure capitalism, but that is no reason to give up on it and subscribe to a collectivist notion of fileswappers as modern-day Robin Hoods merrily redistributing intellectual property to society's victims.
Property rights are crucial to Capitalism because they form the basis for much of our individual freedom. Contrast land ownership with mere occupancy as was the case during medieval surfdom. When you own land you have an undisputable right to occupy that land and to do with it as you choose, with some minor limitations known in the modern world as zoning.
When you engage in the capitalist enterprise of production, you create a product. That product is your exclusive property, and you may do with it as you see fit. If you build a bird house, you may sell it to the neighbors for $50 if they are willing to pay for it.
The digital age has opened up a whole new realm of production and reproduction. While in the above example you would have to build birdhouse after birdhouse, you can now write a song or a computer program, and instead of worrying about how you will make enough to sell to everyone who might wish to buy one, you have the luxury of being able to dedicate your efforts to the first copy, knowing that as soon as it is done you can effortlessly produce more copies as you see fit (or as demand dictates).
If someone comes along and steals your master copy, then that person deprives you of your just rewards for your initial effort. If that person gives away copies of your software for free against your will, he/she deprives you of the ability to profit from your ingenuity. Just because someone can copy your work does not make it right to copy it.
So, property (intellectual and physical) rights are critical to successful capitalism because they protect the outcome of production, and in capitalism production is the way that individuals express their freedom.
The Robin Hood who steals the product of one individual's freedom diminishes the creator's freedom by limiting the ways in which the creator may use it to benefit himself.
Thus, if you believe that (pure) capitalism is a system that maximizes individual freedom, then theft or unauthorized copying and distribution of the product of that freedom dilutes and diminishes the freedom of the creator and is therefore counter to the ends of Capitalism.
If you're right, then why do musicians sign record deals? Why not just make a few MP3s and continue living out of their parents' house?
didididit didah didididit didah
dadadididit didididahdah
That is rubbish. Who are you to decide. That's like me breaking into your house and stealing something with dust on it and claiming innocence because "you would never have used it anyway".
dididit dah dididah didadadit didit dahdidit (space) didit dahdidit dit didah didididit
You didn't read what I wrote. My point was that deterrence is one of several motivations behind the criminal justice system.
If you do not believe that laws should exist, then that is your prerogative. But anarchy is not a practical system, since there are those (fileswappers included) who do not respect the rights of others, and so laws must be created to protect those rights.
Having laws with no enforcement would be pointless, so obviously someone has to enforce those laws. The laws being enforced is all we are talking about here. It is precisely the same as if you walked into a record store and stole a copy of the latest Britney Spears album. When you do that you deprive Britney of the royalties that she might have received from the illicitly made copies.
You need to ask yourself the following question before coming to a final decision on the morality of fileswapping: Do we want people to put effort and energy into creating music? If we do, then we should protect the property they create just as we would protect the property of a jeweler, farmer, or shopkeeper.
Or, it could be that you do not believe in capitalism. Capitalism is a system in which people are free to invest their efforts in order to make a profit by exchanging goods and services with others on the terms that they see fit. Along with Capitalism comes a respect for property rights, which is where your logic breaks down. If property rights are not respected, someone can steal your car, music, invention, or wallet through coercion or fraud. Distributing someone's intellectual property through massive P2P networks forces the owner to provide copies for untold numbers of people for free, and so the action of putting someone else's music (property) up for download amounts to coercion.
Some have attempted the argument that the downloaded copies wouldn't have necessarily been sales, and so there is nothing wrong with file swapping. But who are they to judge. Let the owner of the material decide how it is distributed.
What's the difference from a practical standpoint?
He probably won't respond to your comment. There really is not a legitimate argument to justify filesharing. It's theft, albeit a wimpy kind of theft much like shoplifting. :)
Punishment for a crime is intended to deter others from committing that crime. Stealing music is the equivalent of shoplifting. Individual thefts are of relatively low monetary value, and most people who shoplift don't consider their crime to have a significant impact on anyone else.
The RIAA has the right to prosecute any offenders it can catch (the fact that there are lots of offenders doesn't change that), and to attempt to have the harshest penalty available under law administered to those offenders if they are found guilty by a court.
Deterrence has in fact been shown to work as a general principle of the justice system, among which are state moderated retribution, punishment, and remediation. You may discount one or more of these factors, but the rest hold as legitimate outcomes of the RIAA's lawsuits (if they are successful).
The same logic you use would fail if applied to things like insider trading, etc. To any organization, secrecy has varying levels of importance to different individuals. In order for most terrorist attacks to be carried out, there must be collaboration with people who are only peripherally involved in the actual attack. These people, or the people they talk to over a few beers, may decide that it's worth trying to make some money on, and before you know it the market is an accurate predictor of terrorist acts.
Don't forget that greed is more important to most people than the success of an abstract cause.
Start paying for your own tuition.
Are you planning on opening up an electrical filling station in your garage?
There is a very simple answer. When you outsource you have another company accountable for the quality and timing of the work being outsourced.
Plus, someone takes responsibility for managing the workers, and for the final result. Frequently, outsourcing contracts include a "performance clause" that basically says that if the work done is not adequate, the client does not have to pay full price for the outsourced work.
With an employee off the street (or off the net in the case of telecommuting) the hiring company undertakes the risk that the work will not be of adequate quality as well as the management overhead.
If someone comes up with a way of managing telecommuting employees that makes companies comfortable, then I'm sure they'll do more of that than outsourcing. As it stands, decisions to outsource are (at least in my experience) often made because the organization lacks a specific skill set, and this most often is allowed to happen b/c management wasn't prepared for the decision that they are forced to make. This makes things like performance clauses sound very appealing.
I can see it now. People calling tech support saying "I just got a haircut and now my computer says 'Invalid Passpicture'".
Logic! It's not found often here on Slashdot.
Would that be legal for a Ham?
kf8qe
Sure, that determines the click-through ratio, but not the success rate of the ad itself. Ads are supposed to result in sales.
DoubleClick's clients should really be upset. If you were paying DoubleClick to drive traffic to your site, wouldn't you want traffic that at least voluntarily sought information about what you provide rather than fools who clicked the "your system is not secure" pseudo dialog box?
Reminds me of being in L.A. I was wondering why pressing the "seek" button on the rental car's radio only found the same 3 or 4 stations... I thought "this is L.A., there have to be more than 3 or 4 stations here"... Then I tried turning the knob. There was a station on nearly every available FM frequency. No wonder seek was confused.
Assuming someone were to finance or lease the VW, the cost of the IPod added in would amount to about $5 per month or less.
Perhaps, but that would pale in comparison to the cost of fielding thousands of questions from customers asking why their headphones didn't work when plugged into that jack.
It's nice to know that someone has actually used all of those scripting features in GiMP, however I think you should be aware that Windows does a good job with the right mouse button for cutting/pasting, which would save you a lot of clicks when you're in Windows.
Absolutely not. I agree with you, modding an X-Box is quite silly as well.
What if there is a EULA that you agree to when you open the plastic case?