A crappy VB application and an Access database, I'll have you know.
Useful things too, but the "practical" modules were admittedly a bit shit (already said more about them 10 seconds ago up the page). Not sure how much exactly I learned in that class that I wouldn't have picked up on my own pretty easily.
Still, I'm on a good CS course now, so it can't have been all bad. I did the extra maths too though, so who knows which thing it was that convinced them to let me in. (I like to think it was my good looks, quick wit and natural charm, of course).
It's been about a year since I did the exams, and I can already hardly remember what we were taught.
If you asked me questions about things that were on the syllabus, I'd (probably) be able to answer, but it'd all be mentally filed under "Stuff I know" rather than "Stuff I learned at A-level", so it's all mixed up with what I learned at GCSE IT, and to a lesser extent what I've learned in the first year of a Computer Science degree.
I remember we definitely learned about the fetch/execute cycle, which seems relevant here. As a teaching tool there was an emulated model of a simple computer (single CPU, tiny amount of RAM, and a choice of input/output devices controlled via byte-sized registers, pun only partially intended). It ran a generic form of Assembly, and you could slow it down arbitrarily; if you wanted to, you could step through the parts of a single cycle, or step one instruction at a time, or run it at a few Hz or whatever speed.
The rest of the course... a bit of a blur. I remember the two practical projects; programming in VB and some simple database stuff in Access (it wasn't mandated that we use Access, but it was generally the assumed thing). The first one was required to be VB though, since the format was for everyone to produce something to the same spec, write up documentation of everything along the way (design process, screenshots of the program running, all the code, testing records) which you then took into an exam to answer questions about what you'd done to solve problem X. Was a strange, strange means of examination.
It's a bastardly nitpicking point and I think your point is a good one despite it, but any group consisting mostly of adults will show a higher life expectancy than average because it excludes the hump of child mortality. Vegetarians can probably quite honestly claim to live longer than average, since most vegetarians decide to adopt their diet at some point after infancy, but the same could be said of any other adult group.
I don't have any data to hand on Buddhist monks, but I'd guess that they tend to already be adults before they get really devoted to it, so the same effect would be at work. But, the fact that they aren't all horribly unhealthy despite the hours of meditation does challenge the idea that physical inactivity directly correlates with mortality.
Maybe it's the diet; low energy food with a low energy lifestyle has to be better for you than crappy food and 8 hours in an office chair (followed by another hour or two in the car and several more hours sat about at home). Or all the meditation, as against physical inactivity while working; I hear stress can do nasty things to your health.
For a second there I thought you were talking about quantum immortality (using the multiple world's interpretation, so long as there's a non-zero chance of you surviving any particularly situation, there must exist a world where you do survive it, and you can only experience one where you did survive, so as an observer you will miraculously find yourself in the universe where you never die, even while all the other versions of you perish in the other universes).
Then I read a few more lines and realised you just think you have a soul. You called it a true self, but that seems to just be a point of semantics. Add a little pantheism ("we are all God") to taste, but otherwise pretty much just a standard belief in some immortal thing that allows your personality to exist past the death of your body.
Question: what's your reasoning for "My belief is that the process of experiencing an existance is not something that can end."? My experience of my own existence is temporarily suspended every time I fall asleep (excepting dreams), so what exactly makes it so inconceivable for experience to come to a permanent end?
And yet, annoying advertising still works. Call it a psychological flaw, but most people will prefer a brand name that seems sort of familiar, even if their association is "that annoying ad" over a brand name they've never heard of. They really have to be very conspicuously annoying with their advertising before there's going to be a negative effect, even if there are some of us making a point to remember who they are and pointedly avoid buying from them.
Makes sense in a way; if a company's managed to advertise well enough that I recognise their name, they're probably big enough to not be complete crooks or outright screwing over their customers. Well... mostly.
I'm just going to put this here, near to the top, to voice disappointment in the collective masses of/. for failing to make the joke I expected them to
*ahem*
HOLY CRAP DID THEY SAY RESONANCE CASCADE?
Everyone grab a crowbar and meet me in the upcoming gloomy post-apocalyptic future.
Those would actually be more prevention than cure. They're not 100% effective prevention, which is why no-one calls a low-carb diet a vaccine against cancer (unless of course they're trying to sell books about their patented low-carb diet).
If you've already got cancer, it's really much too late to start limiting your radiation exposure. The other things are probably a good idea in any case but seem rather insignificant in the face of that cancer you hypothetically already have.
The standard cures for cancer at the moment would be surgery, chemo and radiotherapy. The research ongoing is into more effective means of killing cancer that include a smaller side-component of killing things that aren't cancer (it's really very easy to kill a cancerous cell, doing so without killing the patient is the challenge)
I was kind of hurrying because I'd foolishly opened a bunch of/. tabs, this one happened to have no comments on it at the time of opening, and I thought I had some kind of chance at a first post (didn't realise I was already way too late until after I'd posted).
For the record, I think phoning home isn't a problem so much as undesired/malicious phoning home. So if this was opt-in I'd be perfectly OK with it, if it's on by default with an option to disable it then it gets a mild frowny face, and if there's no easy way to stop it then there really ought to be.
There's a sensible point hiding under the hyperbole about slavery though; sometimes a company can turn a better profit by doing something unethical, so commitment purely to the bottom line will fail to produce businesses that do good things.
Doing something unethical (of the type that your customers care about) then getting publicly busted for it... that's where ethical behaviour is a more attractive option for the profit-chaser. But too often companies are able to slide along despite unethical practice by being so big (and the bad stuff so remote) that people just buy from them out of habit, without giving a lot of thought to exactly what they might be supporting.
I've not played, but people keep saying that you can agree a sale on the thing from anywhere you like; couldn't he just have flown himself over to another station to make the trade, and left the item safely at home?
Some players play enough and make enough in-game profit that they buy PLEXes in-game and don't pay real money for their subscriptions, at least not every month. Those are the players CCP wants to keep around anyway, as they make the high-level PvP game interesting for the other players.
That, and the fact that their subscription fees have still been paid, even if they bought PLEX with in-game currency.
If you could mine or craft PLEX without anyone paying real money, I think CCP would be less keen on that (hence why that isn't an option)
As I understand it, game time exists as an in-game item so that it can be traded between players. So if you're good at accumulating the game's currency you can buy extra game time with it, and the legal (not TOS-breaking) way to pay real-world money for game currency is to buy extra game time and sell it to the aforementioned group.
"It's a problem that can't be prevented" and "it's a problem that can't be solved" are two rather different things. So it's caused by undesirable mutations as a result of radiation/chemicals/viruses... doesn't mean we can't fix it once it happens. That being more or less the definition of a cure - a fix you apply to a disease after you already have that disease.
I doubt we'll ever have a vaccine for cancer, for the reasons you mentioned, but a cure... a cure could be achieved.
Although rather than 1 cure for all cancer, it'd be more like hundreds of cures for all the different ways a cell can malfunction in a cancerous way. There may be a similar end result, but there's a lot more than 3 specific mutations that can produce a cancer.
The Earth, and the Solar System, is liable to become uninhabitable quite a lot sooner than the universe as a whole. We might not be able to beat entropy forever, but we can feasibly imagine moving onto some other planets or away from the Sun when it turns into a red giant.
Given that people are fairly unlikely to actually die/not reproduce because of a gluten intolerance, the pressure exerted will be small, but even if the rate of reproduction is only a little under the norm in sufferers then (over a sufficient span of time) it'll exert a selective pressure.
That 'sufficient' span of time might well be quite a lot longer than what has already passed though, in which case we wouldn't expect to be seeing the effects yet.
Fees for UK students at UK universities are capped at about half that (~5000 USD). You crazy foreigners would pay a lot more to come to uni here though.
Works for me, I'm at Cambridge. Going by the lists I see online, it's second only to Harvard out of any university in the world, and I should be able to come out the other side with a non-ridiculous amount of debt. Not to sound smug or anything but... actually, no, I do want to sound smug.
Interestingly enough, I think music would be the one realm where a solid 70-year copyright term (with NO allowable extensions) is acceptable. New compilations of the old Jazz and BeBop guys from the 1920's are being released and performed to this very day - quite a few by rather famous musicians. The stuff by The Beatles is fast approaching the 50 year release mark for some of the early material, and it still turns a vast profit, and with two of the authors still living, and the spouses of the other two still living, I would say it's very acceptable for copyright to still cover their materials.
Couldn't disagree more. If music is still relevant and popular enough to be profitable after 50 or 70 years then it's an important part of our culture and it's high time for it to go into the public domain.
That's exactly my point about the trade we're making - we give away the right to (legally) copy, share and build on these works, despite them being cornerstones of our own culture. They're the modern equivalent of folk songs or tribal chants, but they're privately owned. It's a not-quite tangible cost to our society that these works remain in private hands, and that's only off-set by the gain from new creations that wouldn't exist if copyright terms were shorter. I contend that we're paying too high a price in terms of an impoverished public domain for too little benefit in the form of new creative work.
Whether or not the original owner is still making money is entirely irrelevant; the purpose of giving up that right was to encourage new works, not guarantee the author of important works a paycheck forever. Taking The Beatles as an example, I would say they've been fairly well compensated for their creations. They don't need to continue making money on work they did 50 years ago, but they can so they will (I don't blame them for that, who wouldn't keeping making money if they could).
That Hollywood is being bled dry of good ideas by the length of copyright is (ironically enough, given their role in the massive extension of copyright) another example of how copyright is costing us more than it's worth. Film-makers are a form of artist, but there's a vast wealth in our culture that's off limits to them when they try to make a film because its all under the lock and key of copyright. If it means they end up rehashing the same old shit, or they're forced to adapt inferior works, then it's indirectly a cost to us all, in that we end up watching dross instead of decent films.
The counter-argument that springs to mind is that it's good that authors get to control their work, and prevent hack directors making crappy adaptations, but does a crappy adaptation diminish the original work in any way? And what of the good adaptations that we're missing out on because the authors don't trust Hollywood? I suppose you could argue that the author of an old work should still see a cut of the movie's profits, but that returns to my point about why anyone should continue to profit on work they did decades ago.
I agree that the proper purpose of a state is to protect its citizens from tyranny, from having their rights taken away by the man with the biggest gun.
I don't agree that this means those rights are meaningless without that government. In the absence of a police force/justice system it would be much easier to infringe someone's rights without suffering any ill consequence, but I think that even if we were in a state of complete anarchy we'd still see it as being wrong for "the chap with a gun" to go on a killing spree.
Copyright is a legal construct granting an artist (or their employer, or a corporation, or whoever) exclusive control over the making of copies of a work, and hence also denying everyone else that right unless they have authorisation from the copyright owner. In theory that legally granted monopoly eventually expires and the work enters the public domain, allowing everyone to copy it however they please (except it doesn't any more... whenever something old but profitable comes close to going public the industry lobbies for another extension).
In the absence of copyright law, everything would be public domain, everyone would have a natural right to share, to copy, to trade, to make derivative works, to do whatever they want with whatever information they have (I'm using information for want of a better term to describe all the possible copyrightable works). I think the original point was that this natural right should be given primacy, rather than everyone accepting copyright law and giving up their right to copy.
The original idea of copyright law was that, as a society, we temporarily give up the right to make copies of a new work, so that the creative types will be able to make a profit from a short period of monopoly, hence have the motive to make more nice things, and the public domain would be enriched by that when the copyrights expire. Unfortunately the length of that temporary period has grown ever longer, and the law no longer serves its original purpose. Now, instead of serving to enrich the public domain it serves only to enrich copyright owners. Maybe that does mean more creative works, a gain for society, but it also means a corresponding loss from the public domain. The question is whether that trade is fair; whether the assumed increase in creative output from longer copyright terms justifies us giving away our right to make copies.
Honestly, I doubt that there's any great difference in the number of things that would be made between, say a 50 year copyright term and a 70 year one (extend that logic back to as short a copyright term as you think sensible... I doubt it makes much difference to the number of works being made past 20 years) and given that copyright also serves to stifle creative output (any creative work that would be infringing on earlier work can be blocked by means of copyright) I think its fair to say that the trade is not fair at all - we're giving away the right to make copies for decades and getting very little back for it that we wouldn't get with a shorter term. Effectively, we're all getting ripped off, so breaking copyright law could be justified as a means of resistance.
Personally, I'd favour a drastic reduction in the length of copyright terms; maybe 7 years. It'd make it much easier to respect copyright if I knew it was doing what it was intended for, as opposed to giving a massive industry a near-perpetual line of profit (what other industry gets to continue making money on work that was done decades ago?) as well as the power to sue people indiscriminately, as it seems to be doing today.
Slashdot Mirror
A crappy VB application and an Access database, I'll have you know.
Useful things too, but the "practical" modules were admittedly a bit shit (already said more about them 10 seconds ago up the page). Not sure how much exactly I learned in that class that I wouldn't have picked up on my own pretty easily.
Still, I'm on a good CS course now, so it can't have been all bad. I did the extra maths too though, so who knows which thing it was that convinced them to let me in. (I like to think it was my good looks, quick wit and natural charm, of course).
It's been about a year since I did the exams, and I can already hardly remember what we were taught.
If you asked me questions about things that were on the syllabus, I'd (probably) be able to answer, but it'd all be mentally filed under "Stuff I know" rather than "Stuff I learned at A-level", so it's all mixed up with what I learned at GCSE IT, and to a lesser extent what I've learned in the first year of a Computer Science degree.
I remember we definitely learned about the fetch/execute cycle, which seems relevant here. As a teaching tool there was an emulated model of a simple computer (single CPU, tiny amount of RAM, and a choice of input/output devices controlled via byte-sized registers, pun only partially intended). It ran a generic form of Assembly, and you could slow it down arbitrarily; if you wanted to, you could step through the parts of a single cycle, or step one instruction at a time, or run it at a few Hz or whatever speed.
The rest of the course... a bit of a blur. I remember the two practical projects; programming in VB and some simple database stuff in Access (it wasn't mandated that we use Access, but it was generally the assumed thing). The first one was required to be VB though, since the format was for everyone to produce something to the same spec, write up documentation of everything along the way (design process, screenshots of the program running, all the code, testing records) which you then took into an exam to answer questions about what you'd done to solve problem X. Was a strange, strange means of examination.
It's a bastardly nitpicking point and I think your point is a good one despite it, but any group consisting mostly of adults will show a higher life expectancy than average because it excludes the hump of child mortality. Vegetarians can probably quite honestly claim to live longer than average, since most vegetarians decide to adopt their diet at some point after infancy, but the same could be said of any other adult group.
I don't have any data to hand on Buddhist monks, but I'd guess that they tend to already be adults before they get really devoted to it, so the same effect would be at work. But, the fact that they aren't all horribly unhealthy despite the hours of meditation does challenge the idea that physical inactivity directly correlates with mortality.
Maybe it's the diet; low energy food with a low energy lifestyle has to be better for you than crappy food and 8 hours in an office chair (followed by another hour or two in the car and several more hours sat about at home). Or all the meditation, as against physical inactivity while working; I hear stress can do nasty things to your health.
For a second there I thought you were talking about quantum immortality (using the multiple world's interpretation, so long as there's a non-zero chance of you surviving any particularly situation, there must exist a world where you do survive it, and you can only experience one where you did survive, so as an observer you will miraculously find yourself in the universe where you never die, even while all the other versions of you perish in the other universes).
Then I read a few more lines and realised you just think you have a soul. You called it a true self, but that seems to just be a point of semantics. Add a little pantheism ("we are all God") to taste, but otherwise pretty much just a standard belief in some immortal thing that allows your personality to exist past the death of your body.
Question: what's your reasoning for "My belief is that the process of experiencing an existance is not something that can end."? My experience of my own existence is temporarily suspended every time I fall asleep (excepting dreams), so what exactly makes it so inconceivable for experience to come to a permanent end?
And yet, annoying advertising still works. Call it a psychological flaw, but most people will prefer a brand name that seems sort of familiar, even if their association is "that annoying ad" over a brand name they've never heard of. They really have to be very conspicuously annoying with their advertising before there's going to be a negative effect, even if there are some of us making a point to remember who they are and pointedly avoid buying from them.
Makes sense in a way; if a company's managed to advertise well enough that I recognise their name, they're probably big enough to not be complete crooks or outright screwing over their customers. Well... mostly.
I'm just going to put this here, near to the top, to voice disappointment in the collective masses of /. for failing to make the joke I expected them to
*ahem*
HOLY CRAP DID THEY SAY RESONANCE CASCADE?
Everyone grab a crowbar and meet me in the upcoming gloomy post-apocalyptic future.
Those would actually be more prevention than cure. They're not 100% effective prevention, which is why no-one calls a low-carb diet a vaccine against cancer (unless of course they're trying to sell books about their patented low-carb diet).
If you've already got cancer, it's really much too late to start limiting your radiation exposure. The other things are probably a good idea in any case but seem rather insignificant in the face of that cancer you hypothetically already have.
The standard cures for cancer at the moment would be surgery, chemo and radiotherapy. The research ongoing is into more effective means of killing cancer that include a smaller side-component of killing things that aren't cancer (it's really very easy to kill a cancerous cell, doing so without killing the patient is the challenge)
Who said I didn't analyse or reconcile anything?
I was kind of hurrying because I'd foolishly opened a bunch of /. tabs, this one happened to have no comments on it at the time of opening, and I thought I had some kind of chance at a first post (didn't realise I was already way too late until after I'd posted).
For the record, I think phoning home isn't a problem so much as undesired/malicious phoning home. So if this was opt-in I'd be perfectly OK with it, if it's on by default with an option to disable it then it gets a mild frowny face, and if there's no easy way to stop it then there really ought to be.
Is that reconciled enough?
There's a sensible point hiding under the hyperbole about slavery though; sometimes a company can turn a better profit by doing something unethical, so commitment purely to the bottom line will fail to produce businesses that do good things.
Doing something unethical (of the type that your customers care about) then getting publicly busted for it... that's where ethical behaviour is a more attractive option for the profit-chaser. But too often companies are able to slide along despite unethical practice by being so big (and the bad stuff so remote) that people just buy from them out of habit, without giving a lot of thought to exactly what they might be supporting.
Is this a good thing for creating verifiable stats on the number of users, or a bad thing because of the "phone home" behaviour.
At least it's not doing this secretly...
I've not played, but people keep saying that you can agree a sale on the thing from anywhere you like; couldn't he just have flown himself over to another station to make the trade, and left the item safely at home?
Some players play enough and make enough in-game profit that they buy PLEXes in-game and don't pay real money for their subscriptions, at least not every month. Those are the players CCP wants to keep around anyway, as they make the high-level PvP game interesting for the other players.
That, and the fact that their subscription fees have still been paid, even if they bought PLEX with in-game currency.
If you could mine or craft PLEX without anyone paying real money, I think CCP would be less keen on that (hence why that isn't an option)
As I understand it, game time exists as an in-game item so that it can be traded between players. So if you're good at accumulating the game's currency you can buy extra game time with it, and the legal (not TOS-breaking) way to pay real-world money for game currency is to buy extra game time and sell it to the aforementioned group.
"It's a problem that can't be prevented" and "it's a problem that can't be solved" are two rather different things. So it's caused by undesirable mutations as a result of radiation/chemicals/viruses... doesn't mean we can't fix it once it happens. That being more or less the definition of a cure - a fix you apply to a disease after you already have that disease.
I doubt we'll ever have a vaccine for cancer, for the reasons you mentioned, but a cure... a cure could be achieved.
Although rather than 1 cure for all cancer, it'd be more like hundreds of cures for all the different ways a cell can malfunction in a cancerous way. There may be a similar end result, but there's a lot more than 3 specific mutations that can produce a cancer.
The Earth, and the Solar System, is liable to become uninhabitable quite a lot sooner than the universe as a whole. We might not be able to beat entropy forever, but we can feasibly imagine moving onto some other planets or away from the Sun when it turns into a red giant.
Given that people are fairly unlikely to actually die/not reproduce because of a gluten intolerance, the pressure exerted will be small, but even if the rate of reproduction is only a little under the norm in sufferers then (over a sufficient span of time) it'll exert a selective pressure.
That 'sufficient' span of time might well be quite a lot longer than what has already passed though, in which case we wouldn't expect to be seeing the effects yet.
The coming of the digital era hasn't exactly eliminated paper; maybe someone sent actual physical documents to Wikileaks.
What I'm not seeing, is why they can't just add a "sod the energy changes, get the hydrophobic proteins inside the structure first" rule.
Fees for UK students at UK universities are capped at about half that (~5000 USD). You crazy foreigners would pay a lot more to come to uni here though.
Works for me, I'm at Cambridge. Going by the lists I see online, it's second only to Harvard out of any university in the world, and I should be able to come out the other side with a non-ridiculous amount of debt. Not to sound smug or anything but... actually, no, I do want to sound smug.
Hate to be "that guy", but I don't think drug is the past tense of drag.
Interestingly enough, I think music would be the one realm where a solid 70-year copyright term (with NO allowable extensions) is acceptable. New compilations of the old Jazz and BeBop guys from the 1920's are being released and performed to this very day - quite a few by rather famous musicians. The stuff by The Beatles is fast approaching the 50 year release mark for some of the early material, and it still turns a vast profit, and with two of the authors still living, and the spouses of the other two still living, I would say it's very acceptable for copyright to still cover their materials.
Couldn't disagree more. If music is still relevant and popular enough to be profitable after 50 or 70 years then it's an important part of our culture and it's high time for it to go into the public domain.
That's exactly my point about the trade we're making - we give away the right to (legally) copy, share and build on these works, despite them being cornerstones of our own culture. They're the modern equivalent of folk songs or tribal chants, but they're privately owned. It's a not-quite tangible cost to our society that these works remain in private hands, and that's only off-set by the gain from new creations that wouldn't exist if copyright terms were shorter. I contend that we're paying too high a price in terms of an impoverished public domain for too little benefit in the form of new creative work.
Whether or not the original owner is still making money is entirely irrelevant; the purpose of giving up that right was to encourage new works, not guarantee the author of important works a paycheck forever. Taking The Beatles as an example, I would say they've been fairly well compensated for their creations. They don't need to continue making money on work they did 50 years ago, but they can so they will (I don't blame them for that, who wouldn't keeping making money if they could).
That Hollywood is being bled dry of good ideas by the length of copyright is (ironically enough, given their role in the massive extension of copyright) another example of how copyright is costing us more than it's worth. Film-makers are a form of artist, but there's a vast wealth in our culture that's off limits to them when they try to make a film because its all under the lock and key of copyright. If it means they end up rehashing the same old shit, or they're forced to adapt inferior works, then it's indirectly a cost to us all, in that we end up watching dross instead of decent films.
The counter-argument that springs to mind is that it's good that authors get to control their work, and prevent hack directors making crappy adaptations, but does a crappy adaptation diminish the original work in any way? And what of the good adaptations that we're missing out on because the authors don't trust Hollywood? I suppose you could argue that the author of an old work should still see a cut of the movie's profits, but that returns to my point about why anyone should continue to profit on work they did decades ago.
I agree that the proper purpose of a state is to protect its citizens from tyranny, from having their rights taken away by the man with the biggest gun.
I don't agree that this means those rights are meaningless without that government. In the absence of a police force/justice system it would be much easier to infringe someone's rights without suffering any ill consequence, but I think that even if we were in a state of complete anarchy we'd still see it as being wrong for "the chap with a gun" to go on a killing spree.
Copyright is a legal construct granting an artist (or their employer, or a corporation, or whoever) exclusive control over the making of copies of a work, and hence also denying everyone else that right unless they have authorisation from the copyright owner. In theory that legally granted monopoly eventually expires and the work enters the public domain, allowing everyone to copy it however they please (except it doesn't any more... whenever something old but profitable comes close to going public the industry lobbies for another extension).
In the absence of copyright law, everything would be public domain, everyone would have a natural right to share, to copy, to trade, to make derivative works, to do whatever they want with whatever information they have (I'm using information for want of a better term to describe all the possible copyrightable works). I think the original point was that this natural right should be given primacy, rather than everyone accepting copyright law and giving up their right to copy.
The original idea of copyright law was that, as a society, we temporarily give up the right to make copies of a new work, so that the creative types will be able to make a profit from a short period of monopoly, hence have the motive to make more nice things, and the public domain would be enriched by that when the copyrights expire. Unfortunately the length of that temporary period has grown ever longer, and the law no longer serves its original purpose. Now, instead of serving to enrich the public domain it serves only to enrich copyright owners. Maybe that does mean more creative works, a gain for society, but it also means a corresponding loss from the public domain. The question is whether that trade is fair; whether the assumed increase in creative output from longer copyright terms justifies us giving away our right to make copies.
Honestly, I doubt that there's any great difference in the number of things that would be made between, say a 50 year copyright term and a 70 year one (extend that logic back to as short a copyright term as you think sensible... I doubt it makes much difference to the number of works being made past 20 years) and given that copyright also serves to stifle creative output (any creative work that would be infringing on earlier work can be blocked by means of copyright) I think its fair to say that the trade is not fair at all - we're giving away the right to make copies for decades and getting very little back for it that we wouldn't get with a shorter term. Effectively, we're all getting ripped off, so breaking copyright law could be justified as a means of resistance.
Personally, I'd favour a drastic reduction in the length of copyright terms; maybe 7 years. It'd make it much easier to respect copyright if I knew it was doing what it was intended for, as opposed to giving a massive industry a near-perpetual line of profit (what other industry gets to continue making money on work that was done decades ago?) as well as the power to sue people indiscriminately, as it seems to be doing today.
If I ever need to refer to 1024 seconds, I'll be sure to do so when you're not around.
Our conservatives are further to the left than either of the American options.