Uh, what? If the GUI is just a fancy, specialized program for editing the various dotfiles and stuff crammed in/etc, then it does no harm to the person who actually likes messing around with baretext config files.
Programmers usually make bad GUI designers.
Usually, the interface should depend on what type of user it is targeted at. If the intended user is a professional, the interface should allow him to customize the program as much as possible. If the intended user is a regular user, the interface should be simpler and more explained. Compare a tape deck made for studio use and one made for home use. The studio one has much more functions and capabilities that a professional can use, but they would just confuse home users. The home user usually would not care about bias, eq, tape tension and stuff like that, they would just want to put on the tape and play/record it.
Another example would be the BIOS setup - what does "Gate A20 - Slow|Fast" mean and why would I ever want to set it to slow? But that setup is intended for those who know what they are doing and not a regular user.
Programmers make interfaces for themselves and other programmers, which means that they suck for regular users.
I believe in open-source, not because it is ethically mandated, but because it produces better results. As such, I expect that, eventually, open-source drivers will be better than the proprietary ones, at which point the natural choice would be to use them.
And if/when the open source drivers are created and are better than the proprietary drivers, I'll use them. For now it boils down to "use proprietary drivers" or "not use the device".
I, as a non-programmer do not care about openness of the source, since I would not be able to modify and recompile the driver even i the source was available. I can get the same result if I modified the binary using a hex editor - that is - a no longer working program. I don't care if the source is open, closed or the company makes electricity by burning penguins - if the end product is good and I like the price I'll use it.
You can have Windows directory in a different partition from the boot files (boot.ini, ntldr...). Tested With Windows NT4 and XP. You can even have more than one copy of Windows.
Program files, Documents and Settings can be set to whatever you want. I, for example, have set %TEMP% to C:\Temp instead of C:\documents and settings\user name\Local settings\Temp
Actually, even the Windows directory can be split up. On one PC I have moved "dllcache" to a different hard drive when C:\ was running out of space.
Oh, and no need for links - everything can be set in registry and/or environmental variables.
The global nature of the registry also makes it difficult to maintain application configuration: if you want to isolate the configuration information used by a program, you're essentially reduced to looking at procmon output and seeing what registry keys it touches. While in principle programs should limit themselves to storing information under HKLU\Software\Blah\..., in practice, they scatter stuff all over the registry, especially when they register COM stuff. You can't keep just, say, Word's configuration under version control.
And what prevents an app from scattering its config files everywhere where the user has write permissions. SomeProgram in theory should store the config in/etc/someprogram.conf and/home/user/.someprogram/someprogram.conf, but in practice it can store the config in/home/user/.kde/kde1.conf just as well.
Oh, and
As we all know, design decisions are irrevecorable and eternal (and I'm only half-joking).
Well, you cannot break backward compatibility or the users will not upgrade to the new version. Microsoft found that out with Vista.
The global nature of the registry also makes it difficult to maintain application configuration: if you want to isolate the configuration information used by a program, you're essentially reduced to looking at procmon output and seeing what registry keys it touches. While in principle programs should limit themselves to storing information under HKLU\Software\Blah\..., in practice, they scatter stuff all over the registry, especially when they register COM stuff. You can't keep just, say, Word's configuration under version control.
And what prevents an app from scattering its config files everywhere where the user has write permissions. SomeProgram in theory should store the config in/etc/someprogram.conf and/home/user/.someprogram/someprogram.conf, but in practice it can store the config in/home/user/.kde/kde1.conf just as well.
an application or framework may have settings spread across many keys in different hives
And an application cannot have settings spread across many different files? It seems that the philosophy for Debian Linux is "a file for each config entry" or at least close to it. When I google my problem and find out that I should edit apache.conf of whatever, now I have to hunt down which file the entry is in, since having one config file for each application is somehow bad, you need at least 5.
It's the ABILITY to clear those settings that is the problem. Users don't necessarily need to be exposed to every last setting, but they SHOULD have the ability to wipe all settings related to an application. With the registry, this is nigh impossible.
The application does not necessarily need registry to leave permanent mark on the computer. Just create a hidden file somewhere where the user does not look.
Even though you or I may feel that two females raising a child isn't a big deal, there are people who seriously object.
Somebody will object to anything, so how about just putting a warning on the ISPs contract - "The internet is not filtered and may contain objectionable material".
I don't think anyone would drop dead or become insane after seeing goatse or 2girls1cup. The worst that would happen is vomiting.
Anyway, you can monitor your kids, you can also install filters and have a whitelist/blacklist so your kids don't see what you think is bad for them. I don't care about that.
However, you cannot make the whole internet "safe" for your kids so you can stop worrying about installing filters. There is a simple reason for that - there are people other than your kids using the internet. Another reason is that if we allowed every parent to censor the whole internet, there would be nothing left, since hardcore religious people would object to evolution and atheist sites, hardcore atheists would object to religious sites, a lot of people would object to porn and others to violence and so on.
Streets are also unsafe for your kids - a drunk or careless driver can run them over, they can be mugged etc. However, you probably would not like if there was a law that required everyone (except parents) to keep at least 200m distance from a kid or even better - go inside until the kid passes.
Oh and also - the warnings don't work. I don't know about you, but I had no trouble clicking "I'm 18" when I was younger than 18, so I don't see why this warning would protect your kids, unless you monitor then and/or have filters which makes the warning pointless.
Oh and TV Tropes included NSFW warning on links to other sites that were... well... NSFW. I have not seen any NSFW content on the site itself (not that the fact that you have been browsing TV tropes instead of working is SFW).
No, because the lectures were about Autocad, so a cheaper (or even free) alternative would mean that the instructions the lecturer gave me would need to be translated between Autocad and that software (assuming that I was allowed to use that program), unless they both had identical UI and behavior.
And before you say "but then you stole from the university by not using their computer to do your homework" - the computers are free to use, so since I was not using them, someone else could, or the computer could be turned off to save power.
In any case, it's weird to me that you think that I was stealing from someone who I never heard about, had no contact with and did not use their software. What did I stole from them and how much of it? Maybe it materialized somewhere when I downloaded Autocad...
The point is, if the driver hits a lamp post, the damage will be to him, his car and the lamp post. It's his own fault for the damage to him and his car, while the government will take enough money from him to pay for the repairs of the lamp post and then take a little "extra". His loss of money is again, his own fault.
If the traffic is slowed/halted during the investigation it's still a minor annoyance to me.
However, I do not want a drunk driver to injure (or kill) me or someone I care about. If all they do is damage their own and the government's property - I don't really care.
It's really hard to make a $100m movie as it is when you have a mechanism to collect. Try financing it without anyway of forcing people to either pay or not watch it.
Well, most good movies make enough money to cover the costs in the first few days after release. CAM rips also are available during that time, but people still pay to watch the movie in the cinema.
Which means - punish commercial infringement (another cinema playing the CAM rip) but do not punish (or have small fines) non commercial infringement. As for the CAM rips - since a cinema is private property you can disallow video cameras and punish those who bring and use them without having a law specifically for that.
Elvis music is still copyrighted even though Elvis is long since dead as probably are a lot of people who worked in the studio. They should not be paid any more. Or was his time recording the songs so valuable that we will be paying for it until 75 years after his death?
I mostly agree with you. There is a slight difference between piracy and free-riders or parking tickets (there is limited amount of parking spots and places on the bus, if I parked my car (with or without paying), nobody else can park there and pay for the parking; this only comes into play when the parking lot or the bus is full).
Also, regarding parking - when I park my car I usually have 3 options of paying for it 1)Leave somebody in a car to pay the guy when he comes there. If he doesn't in the time that the car was parked there - well, I just saved a bit. 2)Pay using a special card (similar to payphone card). 3)Pay with a SMS message.
Option 1 is useful when the not everyone has to get out of the car.
I can choose how long I am planning to keep the car there and pay accordingly, if I paid using SMS, I would get a reminder when only 15 minutes or so are left. I can send another message to extend the time or drive away.
The point is - they made it easy for me to pay for the parking.
OTOH, paying for music usually requires me to go to a store and buy the CD. It takes me much longer to do that than to download the MP3 file (or CD image) with my up to 200mbps connection. Last time I checked, iTunes was not available in my country.
Even worse is buying movies. I can download a Bluray image or re-encode easily, though not as fast as a 5MB MP3 file. However, if I wanted to buy the movie, I would have to buy a BD-ROM drive or a Bluray player with an adapter to VGA (my monitor is perfectly fine for watching movies). At least for now, they cost a lot of money.
Also, back then, the only people who could make a lot of copies of a book were the ones that had the press - a very expensive piece of equipment designed specifically for making a lot of copies. Each copy required ink, paper and degrades the machine a little bit. Ordinary people did not have printing presses at home. The ones who had them would make a lot of copies and sell them.
This is commercial copyright infringement and today the equivalent would be selling pirated music on CD-Rs, pressed CDs or charging for each download (like iTunes, but without permission). The idea is that if I paid money for the pirated disk I would most likely paid for the legit one (since I went trough all the trouble of going out, finding the seller, paying him etc). In that case, the industry "lost" a sale and the pirate seller made money using the work of another person without his permission*.
What Jammie Thomas did was to download a file and share it with others, allowing them to make copies for free. She did not get paid for it. Arguing that each download is a lost sale is ridiculous because if you take something for free does not mean that you would buy it. For example, if someone offers me a tape deck for free, I will take it assuming I have some empty space to put it. Even if the tape deck has a small problem (I can fix it) or is really broken (usable for parts only). However, if the same person asked $100 for it, the tape deck would have to be high quality, working or with a really small problem. Also, I would not buy a lot of tape decks that match the criteria because I do not have a lot of money.
I downloaded Autocad when I needed it, but I never would have bought it. I would need to rob a bank i I wanted to buy it.
I also listen to the radio and sometimes tape some songs off it. Does it mean that I would pay a monthly fee to hear that radio station or that I am listening to it because it's free after I bought the tuner? I sometimes record TV shows from TV. Does it mean that I would pay for pre-recorded tapes of the same TV shows? Yes, if they were the same price as the blank tapes I'm using, otherwise, I can record them.
Same thing for MP3 files - I download them because it is easier than waiting for that particular song to be played on the radio or finding someone that has a copy of the song and copying it. I can copy records, tapes and CDs just as well when I find someone willing to lend them to me.
So, if I steal half a dozen cars from the local car dealer and give them to people, I get no punishment at all. My "proceeds" are exactly 0.
OK, how about this - you give all of the money you earned ($0 in your case) and the cars back. This can be applied to music - all proceeds and give the files back.
As for damages - what do you think the damages for downloading an MP3 file should be? If I broke into the studio and stole the only copy of the master tape, the damages would be (cost of tape + cost of recording and editing the song); but what about making a copy of that tape? Again, you can say that in doing so I reduced the number of times the tape can be played and I should pay part of the cost of tape and recording. But what about copying an MP3 file? You can't say that the damages are the cost of recording the song - the master tape is still there. Also, the damages should be lower than the cost of a copy of the song on iTunes or on a CD in a store because when I downloaded it, I did not use Apple's bandwidth and I do not have the CD and should not pay for its materials, manufacture and shipping.
You're suggesting rich people should be penalised more on the abstract basis that they happen to be more wealthy? Their wealth has no relevance to the act committed nor the damage done.
I agree, this does not apply to copyright infringement or other civil matters. If you caused me $100 of damage I want that $100 not less and not more.
However, some countries have implemented "% of income" fines for things like drunk driving. The idea is that a drunk rich driver is approximately as dangerous as a drunk poor driver, however, if you fine both $2000, it will be a huge fine for the poor driver and hopefully cause him to think next time before driving drunk. The same $2000 will be small change for the rich driver and he will be able to afford getting fines a lot of times and, as such, is likely to continue driving drunk. So, what can we do to make the rich guy stop driving drunk? Fine him so much that the fine will hut him just like the $2000 fine for the poor guy.
OTOH, fine for riding the bus without a ticket should be the same to everyone. It should be high enough (and inspections frequent enough) that, on average, the free-riders pay more than the honest people. If a rich guy likes paying the fine instead of buying the ticket - let him, as this does not cause any non-financial damage, unlike drunk driving.
P.S. I don't have a problem with drunk drivers (as long as they hit a tree or a lamp post instead of hitting me or my car), I just chose this as an example of an activity that does more damage than just money.
Too bad all I have is the computer - no service manual, no circuit diagrams, no datasheets for the components, no source code of the software inside it. How do I find out how the computer works and what do the registry or CMOS settings do?
Let's say a CD is set at a market value of $12 and you have $50.
Instead of buying that CD you instead download the songs from that CD.
You now have $50 cash and $12 worth of music for a total of $62 of value. You are now effectively $12 richer than you were since you have the music and you retained the $12.
Can I sell the files and get the $12? If not, then I do not "have $12 worth of music", just like my PC that I paid $2000 for is no longer worth $2000. Worth is determined by how much you can get by selling it and not by how much someone else asks for it (in this case, someone might pay $12 for the retail CD, but would not pay the same $12 for the same songs on a CD-R).
Also, you do not know if I would have bought the CD for $12 if the songs were not available for download. I could probably have taped the songs off the radio. Or borrowed the CD from a friend and copied it. Or downloaded some other songs.
Yea, my Psion 5mx can be used for that too (with an appropriate adapter on the PC to Psion RS232 cable), but I imagine this would be useful for those who have an iPad but do not have a netbook or Psion 5mx - they can use the device they have instead of buying another one.
And Mozilla can make Firefox use the codecs (DirectShow on Windows, gstreamer on Linux and whatever OSX has) already in the system, just like Windows Media Player or ZoomPlayer or a lot of other media players do. There is no technological problem in doing this.
The fact that they do no do it citing their philosophy makes it Mozilla's stand.
I think that we should use the available colors. Make a "+" that has color (128,128,128) do something different than "+" with color (128,128,129).
Also, as I program in Delphi (and am not a good programmer at that - but I can write simple tools for myself) - case sensitive variable and funtion names in C++ seem weird to me - it's harder to write, because you need to remember the case. Or do C/C++/PHP programmers write something like this:
VAR = var *vaR + vAr/(vAR+Var)-VAr;// where each of them is a different variable?
Same thing about file names in file systems used by Linux.
Chinese or Japanese are hard to learn because of the writing system. At least for me, (English is not my native language,though I know it quite well, I know only a few Japanese words), Japanese is quite easy to pronounce, except the R/L thing. However, the writing system is hard. There are a lot of characters to memorize (and they also usually have specific stroke order too). Also, AFAIK, if you don't know the word, you don't know how many symbols it takes and consequently, where the next word begins.
Compare that to Russian - while the letters are different from those of my native language, there are only 26 or so of them, so I can read a text aloud (slowly) even though I don't understand the words. Now, when I am trying reading a technical text, like a datasheet of a vacuum tube or explanation of some circuit, i can sort-of get what the text is about based on words I already know (including international words) and my general knowledge of electronics and as such, I don't have to type* the whole text into google's translator. Also, Russian text uses spaces, so I can skip a word I don't know and try to deduce its meaning based on the other words.
*typing is also a problem with huge character sets - I downloaded a keyboard layout that maps most of the Cyrillic letters to the similar sounding Latin letters (well, except those that don't have a Latin equivalent) instead of the normal "Russian typewriter" layout where "F" (which looks like Greek letter phi) is on "A" and "A" (which looks like Latin "A") is on "F". Now, how do I type a kanji symbol when I don't know how it sounds and without looking it up on a paper dictionary?
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But those places are known, so it's not really all over the place.
Linux (or KDE) probably has file associations and what runs automatically defined somewhere too.
Uh, what? If the GUI is just a fancy, specialized program for editing the various dotfiles and stuff crammed in /etc, then it does no harm to the person who actually likes messing around with baretext config files.
Programmers usually make bad GUI designers.
Usually, the interface should depend on what type of user it is targeted at. If the intended user is a professional, the interface should allow him to customize the program as much as possible. If the intended user is a regular user, the interface should be simpler and more explained. Compare a tape deck made for studio use and one made for home use. The studio one has much more functions and capabilities that a professional can use, but they would just confuse home users. The home user usually would not care about bias, eq, tape tension and stuff like that, they would just want to put on the tape and play/record it.
Another example would be the BIOS setup - what does "Gate A20 - Slow|Fast" mean and why would I ever want to set it to slow? But that setup is intended for those who know what they are doing and not a regular user.
Programmers make interfaces for themselves and other programmers, which means that they suck for regular users.
I believe in open-source, not because it is ethically mandated, but because it produces better results. As such, I expect that, eventually, open-source drivers will be better than the proprietary ones, at which point the natural choice would be to use them.
And if/when the open source drivers are created and are better than the proprietary drivers, I'll use them. For now it boils down to "use proprietary drivers" or "not use the device".
I, as a non-programmer do not care about openness of the source, since I would not be able to modify and recompile the driver even i the source was available. I can get the same result if I modified the binary using a hex editor - that is - a no longer working program. I don't care if the source is open, closed or the company makes electricity by burning penguins - if the end product is good and I like the price I'll use it.
You can have Windows directory in a different partition from the boot files (boot.ini, ntldr...). Tested With Windows NT4 and XP. You can even have more than one copy of Windows.
Program files, Documents and Settings can be set to whatever you want. I, for example, have set %TEMP% to C:\Temp instead of C:\documents and settings\user name\Local settings\Temp
Actually, even the Windows directory can be split up. On one PC I have moved "dllcache" to a different hard drive when C:\ was running out of space.
Oh, and no need for links - everything can be set in registry and/or environmental variables.
The global nature of the registry also makes it difficult to maintain application configuration: if you want to isolate the configuration information used by a program, you're essentially reduced to looking at procmon output and seeing what registry keys it touches. While in principle programs should limit themselves to storing information under HKLU\Software\Blah\..., in practice, they scatter stuff all over the registry, especially when they register COM stuff. You can't keep just, say, Word's configuration under version control.
And what prevents an app from scattering its config files everywhere where the user has write permissions. SomeProgram in theory should store the config in /etc/someprogram.conf and /home/user/.someprogram/someprogram.conf, but in practice it can store the config in /home/user/.kde/kde1.conf just as well.
Oh, and
As we all know, design decisions are irrevecorable and eternal (and I'm only half-joking).
Well, you cannot break backward compatibility or the users will not upgrade to the new version. Microsoft found that out with Vista.
The global nature of the registry also makes it difficult to maintain application configuration: if you want to isolate the configuration information used by a program, you're essentially reduced to looking at procmon output and seeing what registry keys it touches. While in principle programs should limit themselves to storing information under HKLU\Software\Blah\..., in practice, they scatter stuff all over the registry, especially when they register COM stuff. You can't keep just, say, Word's configuration under version control.
And what prevents an app from scattering its config files everywhere where the user has write permissions. SomeProgram in theory should store the config in /etc/someprogram.conf and /home/user/.someprogram/someprogram.conf, but in practice it can store the config in /home/user/.kde/kde1.conf just as well.
an application or framework may have settings spread across many keys in different hives
And an application cannot have settings spread across many different files? It seems that the philosophy for Debian Linux is "a file for each config entry" or at least close to it. When I google my problem and find out that I should edit apache.conf of whatever, now I have to hunt down which file the entry is in, since having one config file for each application is somehow bad, you need at least 5.
It's the ABILITY to clear those settings that is the problem. Users don't necessarily need to be exposed to every last setting, but they SHOULD have the ability to wipe all settings related to an application. With the registry, this is nigh impossible.
The application does not necessarily need registry to leave permanent mark on the computer. Just create a hidden file somewhere where the user does not look.
Even though you or I may feel that two females raising a child isn't a big deal, there are people who seriously object.
Somebody will object to anything, so how about just putting a warning on the ISPs contract - "The internet is not filtered and may contain objectionable material".
I don't think anyone would drop dead or become insane after seeing goatse or 2girls1cup. The worst that would happen is vomiting.
Anyway, you can monitor your kids, you can also install filters and have a whitelist/blacklist so your kids don't see what you think is bad for them. I don't care about that.
However, you cannot make the whole internet "safe" for your kids so you can stop worrying about installing filters. There is a simple reason for that - there are people other than your kids using the internet. Another reason is that if we allowed every parent to censor the whole internet, there would be nothing left, since hardcore religious people would object to evolution and atheist sites, hardcore atheists would object to religious sites, a lot of people would object to porn and others to violence and so on.
Streets are also unsafe for your kids - a drunk or careless driver can run them over, they can be mugged etc. However, you probably would not like if there was a law that required everyone (except parents) to keep at least 200m distance from a kid or even better - go inside until the kid passes.
Oh and also - the warnings don't work. I don't know about you, but I had no trouble clicking "I'm 18" when I was younger than 18, so I don't see why this warning would protect your kids, unless you monitor then and/or have filters which makes the warning pointless.
Oh and TV Tropes included NSFW warning on links to other sites that were... well... NSFW. I have not seen any NSFW content on the site itself (not that the fact that you have been browsing TV tropes instead of working is SFW).
No, because the lectures were about Autocad, so a cheaper (or even free) alternative would mean that the instructions the lecturer gave me would need to be translated between Autocad and that software (assuming that I was allowed to use that program), unless they both had identical UI and behavior.
And before you say "but then you stole from the university by not using their computer to do your homework" - the computers are free to use, so since I was not using them, someone else could, or the computer could be turned off to save power.
In any case, it's weird to me that you think that I was stealing from someone who I never heard about, had no contact with and did not use their software. What did I stole from them and how much of it? Maybe it materialized somewhere when I downloaded Autocad...
The point is, if the driver hits a lamp post, the damage will be to him, his car and the lamp post. It's his own fault for the damage to him and his car, while the government will take enough money from him to pay for the repairs of the lamp post and then take a little "extra". His loss of money is again, his own fault.
If the traffic is slowed/halted during the investigation it's still a minor annoyance to me.
However, I do not want a drunk driver to injure (or kill) me or someone I care about. If all they do is damage their own and the government's property - I don't really care.
It's really hard to make a $100m movie as it is when you have a mechanism to collect. Try financing it without anyway of forcing people to either pay or not watch it.
Well, most good movies make enough money to cover the costs in the first few days after release. CAM rips also are available during that time, but people still pay to watch the movie in the cinema.
Which means - punish commercial infringement (another cinema playing the CAM rip) but do not punish (or have small fines) non commercial infringement. As for the CAM rips - since a cinema is private property you can disallow video cameras and punish those who bring and use them without having a law specifically for that.
Elvis music is still copyrighted even though Elvis is long since dead as probably are a lot of people who worked in the studio. They should not be paid any more. Or was his time recording the songs so valuable that we will be paying for it until 75 years after his death?
What if I make $100 per song selling your songs, and you lose $500 in sales because I undersold you? Still $50/song then?
This can be easily updated:
$50 per song and all profit you made from it. Or even better:
$50 per song + profit*x, if profit >0;
$50 per song, if profit <0
x should be somewhere between 1 ant 10.
It is difficult if not impossible to calculate how much I "lost" in sales because of you.
I mostly agree with you. There is a slight difference between piracy and free-riders or parking tickets (there is limited amount of parking spots and places on the bus, if I parked my car (with or without paying), nobody else can park there and pay for the parking; this only comes into play when the parking lot or the bus is full).
Also, regarding parking - when I park my car I usually have 3 options of paying for it
1)Leave somebody in a car to pay the guy when he comes there. If he doesn't in the time that the car was parked there - well, I just saved a bit.
2)Pay using a special card (similar to payphone card).
3)Pay with a SMS message.
Option 1 is useful when the not everyone has to get out of the car.
I can choose how long I am planning to keep the car there and pay accordingly, if I paid using SMS, I would get a reminder when only 15 minutes or so are left. I can send another message to extend the time or drive away.
The point is - they made it easy for me to pay for the parking.
OTOH, paying for music usually requires me to go to a store and buy the CD. It takes me much longer to do that than to download the MP3 file (or CD image) with my up to 200mbps connection. Last time I checked, iTunes was not available in my country.
Even worse is buying movies. I can download a Bluray image or re-encode easily, though not as fast as a 5MB MP3 file. However, if I wanted to buy the movie, I would have to buy a BD-ROM drive or a Bluray player with an adapter to VGA (my monitor is perfectly fine for watching movies). At least for now, they cost a lot of money.
Also, back then, the only people who could make a lot of copies of a book were the ones that had the press - a very expensive piece of equipment designed specifically for making a lot of copies. Each copy required ink, paper and degrades the machine a little bit. Ordinary people did not have printing presses at home. The ones who had them would make a lot of copies and sell them.
This is commercial copyright infringement and today the equivalent would be selling pirated music on CD-Rs, pressed CDs or charging for each download (like iTunes, but without permission). The idea is that if I paid money for the pirated disk I would most likely paid for the legit one (since I went trough all the trouble of going out, finding the seller, paying him etc). In that case, the industry "lost" a sale and the pirate seller made money using the work of another person without his permission*.
What Jammie Thomas did was to download a file and share it with others, allowing them to make copies for free. She did not get paid for it. Arguing that each download is a lost sale is ridiculous because if you take something for free does not mean that you would buy it.
For example, if someone offers me a tape deck for free, I will take it assuming I have some empty space to put it. Even if the tape deck has a small problem (I can fix it) or is really broken (usable for parts only). However, if the same person asked $100 for it, the tape deck would have to be high quality, working or with a really small problem. Also, I would not buy a lot of tape decks that match the criteria because I do not have a lot of money.
I downloaded Autocad when I needed it, but I never would have bought it. I would need to rob a bank i I wanted to buy it.
I also listen to the radio and sometimes tape some songs off it. Does it mean that I would pay a monthly fee to hear that radio station or that I am listening to it because it's free after I bought the tuner? I sometimes record TV shows from TV. Does it mean that I would pay for pre-recorded tapes of the same TV shows? Yes, if they were the same price as the blank tapes I'm using, otherwise, I can record them.
Same thing for MP3 files - I download them because it is easier than waiting for that particular song to be played on the radio or finding someone that has a copy of the song and copying it. I can copy records, tapes and CDs just as well when I find someone willing to lend them to me.
So, if I steal half a dozen cars from the local car dealer and give them to people, I get no punishment at all. My "proceeds" are exactly 0.
OK, how about this - you give all of the money you earned ($0 in your case) and the cars back.
This can be applied to music - all proceeds and give the files back.
As for damages - what do you think the damages for downloading an MP3 file should be? If I broke into the studio and stole the only copy of the master tape, the damages would be (cost of tape + cost of recording and editing the song); but what about making a copy of that tape? Again, you can say that in doing so I reduced the number of times the tape can be played and I should pay part of the cost of tape and recording. But what about copying an MP3 file? You can't say that the damages are the cost of recording the song - the master tape is still there. Also, the damages should be lower than the cost of a copy of the song on iTunes or on a CD in a store because when I downloaded it, I did not use Apple's bandwidth and I do not have the CD and should not pay for its materials, manufacture and shipping.
You're suggesting rich people should be penalised more on the abstract basis that they happen to be more wealthy? Their wealth has no relevance to the act committed nor the damage done.
I agree, this does not apply to copyright infringement or other civil matters. If you caused me $100 of damage I want that $100 not less and not more.
However, some countries have implemented "% of income" fines for things like drunk driving. The idea is that a drunk rich driver is approximately as dangerous as a drunk poor driver, however, if you fine both $2000, it will be a huge fine for the poor driver and hopefully cause him to think next time before driving drunk. The same $2000 will be small change for the rich driver and he will be able to afford getting fines a lot of times and, as such, is likely to continue driving drunk. So, what can we do to make the rich guy stop driving drunk? Fine him so much that the fine will hut him just like the $2000 fine for the poor guy.
OTOH, fine for riding the bus without a ticket should be the same to everyone. It should be high enough (and inspections frequent enough) that, on average, the free-riders pay more than the honest people. If a rich guy likes paying the fine instead of buying the ticket - let him, as this does not cause any non-financial damage, unlike drunk driving.
P.S. I don't have a problem with drunk drivers (as long as they hit a tree or a lamp post instead of hitting me or my car), I just chose this as an example of an activity that does more damage than just money.
Too bad all I have is the computer - no service manual, no circuit diagrams, no datasheets for the components, no source code of the software inside it. How do I find out how the computer works and what do the registry or CMOS settings do?
Let's say a CD is set at a market value of $12 and you have $50.
Instead of buying that CD you instead download the songs from that CD.
You now have $50 cash and $12 worth of music for a total of $62 of value. You are now effectively $12 richer than you were since you have the music and you retained the $12.
Can I sell the files and get the $12? If not, then I do not "have $12 worth of music", just like my PC that I paid $2000 for is no longer worth $2000. Worth is determined by how much you can get by selling it and not by how much someone else asks for it (in this case, someone might pay $12 for the retail CD, but would not pay the same $12 for the same songs on a CD-R).
Also, you do not know if I would have bought the CD for $12 if the songs were not available for download. I could probably have taped the songs off the radio. Or borrowed the CD from a friend and copied it. Or downloaded some other songs.
Yea, my Psion 5mx can be used for that too (with an appropriate adapter on the PC to Psion RS232 cable), but I imagine this would be useful for those who have an iPad but do not have a netbook or Psion 5mx - they can use the device they have instead of buying another one.
And Mozilla can make Firefox use the codecs (DirectShow on Windows, gstreamer on Linux and whatever OSX has) already in the system, just like Windows Media Player or ZoomPlayer or a lot of other media players do. There is no technological problem in doing this.
The fact that they do no do it citing their philosophy makes it Mozilla's stand.
I think that we should use the available colors. Make a "+" that has color (128,128,128) do something different than "+" with color (128,128,129).
Also, as I program in Delphi (and am not a good programmer at that - but I can write simple tools for myself) - case sensitive variable and funtion names in C++ seem weird to me - it's harder to write, because you need to remember the case. Or do C/C++/PHP programmers write something like this:
VAR = var *vaR + vAr/(vAR+Var)-VAr; // where each of them is a different variable?
Same thing about file names in file systems used by Linux.
Chinese or Japanese are hard to learn because of the writing system. At least for me, (English is not my native language,though I know it quite well, I know only a few Japanese words), Japanese is quite easy to pronounce, except the R/L thing. However, the writing system is hard. There are a lot of characters to memorize (and they also usually have specific stroke order too). Also, AFAIK, if you don't know the word, you don't know how many symbols it takes and consequently, where the next word begins.
Compare that to Russian - while the letters are different from those of my native language, there are only 26 or so of them, so I can read a text aloud (slowly) even though I don't understand the words. Now, when I am trying reading a technical text, like a datasheet of a vacuum tube or explanation of some circuit, i can sort-of get what the text is about based on words I already know (including international words) and my general knowledge of electronics and as such, I don't have to type* the whole text into google's translator. Also, Russian text uses spaces, so I can skip a word I don't know and try to deduce its meaning based on the other words.
*typing is also a problem with huge character sets - I downloaded a keyboard layout that maps most of the Cyrillic letters to the similar sounding Latin letters (well, except those that don't have a Latin equivalent) instead of the normal "Russian typewriter" layout where "F" (which looks like Greek letter phi) is on "A" and "A" (which looks like Latin "A") is on "F". Now, how do I type a kanji symbol when I don't know how it sounds and without looking it up on a paper dictionary?