Actually, given that the overwhelming majority of RIM's customers are businesses (who then have control over what's installed on the phone), I don't see them selling many fart apps. Like it or not, Blackberries are almost entirely corporate devices anymore.
Except, if you knew anything about Economics, you'd know that Economist vary on what goals society should have (redistributing wealth and such), yet they agree on the EFFECTS of such policies. You can have 100 Economists argue over if it's better to have socialism or capitalism, but they'll all agree that the consequences of socialism are lower economic growth, lower productivity, reduced incentives to work, and reduced incentives to improve your lot in life.
Scientific theories that are harder than anything in economics (and I have no problem admitting that despite having an MBA).
The amount of Economics education required in MBA programs compared to having a degree in Economics is equivalent to the difference between taking physics in high school and getting a bachelor's degree in physics. And I say that as someone who's planning on getting an MBA with a focus in Financial Analysis after I finish my MA in Applied Economics.
Why should teachers be able to enjoy the benefits of the unions (health insurance, retirement benefits) without becoming members themselves?
Because virtually EVERY job (union or not) has those benefits - saying that you're not allowed to get the same benefits everyone else does (regardless of union status) just because you're a teacher and don't want to join the union is bullshit.
I'm all for making it optional to join if they want to go it alone in their bargaining, but if they're not paying dues, nothing except a sense of entitlement says that they should get to take advantage of what the union has bargained for.
See above. There's nothing to stop schools from offering the same insurance that every other non-union employee has access to, except that union thugs got it made so that you MUST bow to the union masters. Unions used to exist to fight corruption and unfair working conditions. Now unions exist to promote corruption and unfair working conditions. The only difference is who's corrupt and getting shafted has changed a bit.
Jesus was a liberal
Depends on your definition of liberal. If you're referring to the modern-day American marxist definition, then no, he absolutely was not. Why? Jesus said you SHOULD voluntarily give money to help the poor. Modern day American liberals want to FORCE you to give up money for the causes they see fit. Jesus never supported forcing people to do anything, which is the polar opposite of liberals in the US.
Otherwise, it's the same 'I've got mine so screw you' attitude that the greedy owners are taking.
Unless you're self-employed, if it wasn't for those "greedy owners", you'd be begging on the streets. That's why the anti-business mentality is so idiotic - without businesses the majority of people would be unemployed.
Yes because there's no good paying jobs that are non union and no one who's not in a union gets benefits packages / insurance....oh wait, over 90% of the workforce is non-union.
It's amazing how so many ordinary working people are actually against organisations looking out for ordinary working people.
And the union propagandists hoodwinked you perfectly. Unions are not about "working people". I have several relatives working for different unions (Teamsters, NEA, UAW, etc). The unions defend lazy workers from getting fired, cause incompetent workers to get paid as much as the hardest working, prevent people from getting raises based on their job performance, etc. Unions are (in general) the savior of the lazy and incompetent. Unions also lobby for economically damaging policies, such as import quotas, tariffs, preventing open trading among countries, etc - all policies that have been proven throughout history to harm everyone in society just for the benefit of the union. People are able to form unions anywhere they want - yet union membership, even in union heavy European countries, continues to drop. There's a reason for that.
Maybe decades of right-wing propaganda has made everyone think they're going to become a millionaire off the backs of their own hard work, sort of why poor people vote for tax cuts for the rich.
Which is funny, because in terms of real income and purchasing power, over the last few decades the poor in the US have increased their income / purchasing power by a larger percentage than the "evil rich". That's also why real median and mean income has increased significantly over the last few decades. As for tax cuts for "the evil rich"? Even with the Bush tax cuts, they're still paying between 50-100% more as a fraction of their income than you do. If they were paying a lower rate than everyone else (though they'd still be paying more in terms of actual dollars), then you could complain about them getting tax cuts. However, when you're paying 20% income tax and they're paying 35%, you have no room to complain if their penalty for being successful drops to only 30%.
But then again, Economics is despised on Slashdot because it frequently contradicts the ideology of the average Slashdotter. It's funny that when science contradicts religion, Slashdotters call out the religious zealots for not basing their views on facts - yet when science contradicts socioeconomic policies / views, Slashdotters scream bloody murder about the "evil" people following the facts instead of the "religion".
Exactly - that's why I don't have any respect for unions. If they were what they used to be and were simply a group of people with similar goals working together to improve their conditions, that's all fine and dandy. But so many unions (at least in the US) actively try to prevent people who don't want to be in a union from working, and that's just bullshit. My all time favorite bullshit move by unions against people who don't want to be in a union is that, while teachers don't have to be in the union, they're unable to receive their health insurance or retirement benefits if they don't join the union.
Except that if you move or travel, you're much less likely to have a branch / ATM for your credit union available. With larger banks, it's much easier to access your money when travelling or avoid having to change banks when moving to a new city.
And what went completely over your Marxist head is the fact that people are forced to pay taxes for things that they do not want / benefit from - then there's the added injustice of the more successful you are, the smaller portion of your income you're allowed to keep.
With the tax system, a better analogy is this: You stay at a hotel that's $100 a night. The hotel decides that you have a nice car, so they increase your rate by 30% and use that money to lower everyone else's bill. Then when you refuse to pay the unjust bill, they beat you and lock you in a cell for X years, then forcefully take the money anyways.
Honestly, what slashdot has devolved to makes me have no hope for the future. It used to be a place of intelligent discussion, now it's simply a place for arrogant marxists to get together and support each others delusions that they have a right to someone else's money and that it's wrong to work hard and succeed in life, and if anyone comes along and dares to point out the injustice of forcing one person to pay another persons bills, they get modded troll for daring to THINK instead of just blindly following the delusions of a mad man.
You can mod people down and spout marxist ideology all you want, but it doesn't change that you don't have a right to someone else's money. That's also why you don't practice what you preach and you refuse to spread your wealth to others who have less - you just want to be on the receiving end because you're jealous of those who worked harder and make more (cause and effect people!). Instead of wanting to encourage people to work hard, improve their lives, and improve society, you want laws passed to punish innovation, punish hard work, and support those who are lazy and have nothing of value to contribute to the world.
Don't worry - I know none of you will even actually consider a damn word I wrote - your blind ideology prevents you from considering that you might be wrong and as such, you refuse to even look at other points of view. But, despite the fact that I get so much hate for it, I'll never stop trying to get people to look at the injustice of collectivism and make the world a better place. So go ahead, mod me down some more, call me greedy for saying that people should get to keep what they earn instead of stealing from others, but it won't affect me. One day, one of you might get that big chance and have a great career and realize that when you're on the receiving end of legalized rape that it's not cool. Oh, and before you scream about how I'm "rich", hardly - I grew up poor, worked my ass off, and now I make a whopping $30k a year (though I just started grad school, so hopefully after I graduate in a couple of years, I'll be making more than that). It's utterly sociopathic to think that someone should be punished for working hard and being successful.
And you're obviously from Europe. In the US, we don't have your 60%+ tax rates and we actually *gasp!* pay for the things that benefit us ourselves. Want to sue your company? Why yes, you do have to pay the lawyer because you're the one benefiting from the lawsuit (if it goes your way). Want someone to pick up the trash instead of taking it to the dump yourself? Why yes, you DO have to pay for it!
You're just displaying the typical collectivist mistake of not realizing that regardless of if you pay for it out of your pockets or just pay higher taxes for it, you're still fucking paying for it either way. I bet you also believe in the myth of "free" education or "free" health care. Just because they forcefully take it from your paycheck instead of handing you a bill doesn't mean that you're not paying for it.
What these guys are doing is stealing from the government.
No, they're not. If they opened up government bank accounts and took money, then yes, they would be stealing from the government. That's not what they're doing. Since the government collects taxes by forcefully taking money from citizens (aka stealing), by refusing to let them take your money, you're not stealing anything, but defending your property from thieves. Somehow you have this disconnect in your brain where you think just because an asshole politician with armed thugs (military and police) backing him says he has a right to your money that it actually gives him a right. The law and justice are completely different things.
Yes, because there's never been a successful person in those countries...........oh wait........
Don't worry, collectivists always use lies and bullshit to justify stealing from others so that they can do less work, so I don't hold it against you personally.
Ah, I see. Necessary taxes and programs are those that benefit you directly. Unnecessary welfare taxes and programs are those that you do not benefit from. Nice.
No, if you had an IQ over 5, you'd notice that the necessary programs are ones that are best provided by government (such as roads, because it's too much of a hassle to have priviately owned roads) and ones that everyone equally has access to. Unnecessary ones are ones that serve no purpose but to take money from person A's wallet and put it in person B's wallet. However, you're a greedy bastard who thinks that you should be able to steal all you want from people just because they worked harder and have more money than you.
I hope you die from some really rare and painful disease after your medical coverage is terminated because it hit its lifetime maximum.
Already got said horrible disease. I was born with it and there's no cure. However, unlike you, I understand that just because my life sucks it doesn't give me the right to steal money from other people to get treatment.
No, I pay taxes to maintain roads, public schools, etc. The issue is the things of "Oh, Bill Gates makes more money, so we'll take some of his and give it to AC so that AC can buy the things he wants without working to earn the money for them" programs / taxes.
I have never seen anyone say the above, and actually practice what they preach.
That's because you mix two separate issues (necessary taxes / programs vs unnecessary welfare state taxes / programs to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to those who didn't) to create a tautology where if someone exists, they're "using something they didn't pay for".
No, it's about justice. Everyone has the right to the money they earn, regardless of if they earn $1 a year or $1 billion a year. Ethics - you should look it up.
First off, by "working class" you mean "unskilled working class". Everyone with a job works (well, except those union guys you always see standing at construction sites not working...). The difference is that those with education and skills make a lot more because they can do things the unskilled workers can't. Secondly, if it wasn't for the biased tax system, there wouldn't be a demand for finding tax loopholes, lobbying for tax changes, or shipping your money out of the country.
Actually, if you understood the theory behind money and had some knowledge of economic history, you'd know that governments have zero control over money. There have been plenty of instances where the citizens of a country refused to use the governments official currency and either used the currency of another country or used things such as cigarettes instead. Money only has the value that people decide it has.
But they do enough good to make it worth it.
That's extremely debatable, especially since pretty much every government these days are on the fast track to being an Orwellian style police state. I don't think I've read a single news article about a country gaining more freedoms (well, outside of Cuba allowing cell phones now), yet there's countless ones from every "free" country about people losing their rights.
That's why all first world countries with high standards of living have large governments that collect taxes
They may currently, but they didn't always. For a long time the US had both the highest standard of living AND the lowest taxes and smallest government. It's actually been proven several times throughout history that higher taxes and bigger government almost always leads to lower quality of life (there have been the rare exceptions, such as Sweden, but even Sweden is changing now and shrinking the government and lowering taxes).
So no they are not trying to keep their hard earned money, they are stealing from everyone else.
*sigh* You're one of those people who don't understand property rights. You do NOT have the right to someone else's money. It doesn't matter if a politician passes a law saying it's ok for person X to steal a certain amount from person Y because person Y makes more money - it's still person Y's money and no one else has the right to it.
Necessary taxes are fine. Taxes that are evenly distributed are fine. However, we lived in a fucked up world where the harder you work and the more successful you are, the more you're punished and you lose an ever increasing percentage of your income. THAT leads to people doing just this - trying to keep what they rightfully earned instead of having it forcefully taken and given to people who didn't earn it. There was an 19th century Economist who had a term for those types of taxes - "legalized plunder".
Sorry, but I'll never view someone trying to keep their hard earned money as "wrong", just like I'd never say it's wrong for a person to physically defend themselves from an attacker.
Sorry, but a warrior is someone such as Drizzt - a person who fights when they have to and to serve justice. A soldier is someone who fights because they're someone else's bitch and were ordered to. Everyone in the military is a soldier, because they don't do what they believe is right, they merely do what they're told.
They can do tiers the same way that (most - at least in the US) ISP's do - you base tiers on bandwidth (which inherently caps data usage). If you want the $15 a month data plan, you get say 75 KB/s, $25 a month will get you 150 KB/s, $35 gets you 300 KB/s, etc. It's fully workable, keeps people from ending up with no data / insane extra fees, and allows the phone companies to not use as much bandwidth.
A Bluray holds 50 gigabytes of data. Downloading that over my 750k DSL connection would take 7 days
Downloading over my connection would take... 19 hours, less than a day. There's no reason for me to lose even 15 minutes going to the store instead of 15 seconds setting up the download in my computer.
Are you kidding? How in the hell do you find 19 hours to take less time than 15 minutes?
I'll want to store it somewhere permanent
I won't. I can redownload it whenever I want.
No, you can redownload it whenever you want as long as the company still exists / still lets you. They can revoke your ability to download it at any time. People have already seen this happen with download-only services, what makes you think once people have no choice but to use download-only services that this will change?
Bottom Line - Blurays are not disappearing yet. People like the convenience and instant gratification.
Downloading IS the instant gratification. Bluray disappears with high speed download which, aparently you don't have but lots of people have already.
Blueray will only live for those who live with five year old technology, which is fine and reasonable, for five years.
Again, you somehow think that 19 hours is instant as opposed to taking 15 minutes to run to the store. You also admitted that you wouldn't store it and would redownload it each time - so how is 19 hours more instant than pulling a disc off a shelf and popping it in the drive?
I've only ever heard this "100% cpu" claim from people who run OS X......I've certainly never seen it on a Window system or on any of my linux systems. Perhaps the problem isn't Flash, but with how OS X interacts with Flash?
People view it as whining because you made it sound like the game had ridiculous hardware requirements - it doesn't. The hardware requirements are from a mid-range system from 4 years ago. You could probably go on Craigslist and find someone selling a system that meets those requirements for around $150.
What else is there, for contemporary desktop usage, that I'm missing out on?
Running them at the same time. Running newer versions of said programs with newer features. Not having to wait a few hours for a virus scan. Not having to wait a few minutes just to reboot your computer. Being able to run new software (which you just wrote a post above bitching about how you cant do it), especially when that new software has very low requirements.
If you want to run an old computer and say "It still runs, why upgrade?" - that's fine, you have that right. However, you don't have the right to bitch that new software doesn't run on your antique paperweight.
I think that there should be a 10 year maximum on a copyright - from the last original work created using said copyright. For example - if J K Rowling had only published the first Harry Potter back in 1997, then her copyright would have ended in 2007, but since she kept writing books in the series until 2007, her copyright would last until 2017. Anthologies, 'collector's editions', or any other re-packaging of previous work would NOT count towards extending the copyright expiration. That leaves plenty of time for someone to make a profit and it keeps someone from creating one work and living off the royalties for the next 60 years. Work should be rewarded, but people have gotten this insane idea that you should be able to do work once in your life and get paid for it continually until you die.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, given that the overwhelming majority of RIM's customers are businesses (who then have control over what's installed on the phone), I don't see them selling many fart apps. Like it or not, Blackberries are almost entirely corporate devices anymore.
Except, if you knew anything about Economics, you'd know that Economist vary on what goals society should have (redistributing wealth and such), yet they agree on the EFFECTS of such policies. You can have 100 Economists argue over if it's better to have socialism or capitalism, but they'll all agree that the consequences of socialism are lower economic growth, lower productivity, reduced incentives to work, and reduced incentives to improve your lot in life.
Scientific theories that are harder than anything in economics (and I have no problem admitting that despite having an MBA).
The amount of Economics education required in MBA programs compared to having a degree in Economics is equivalent to the difference between taking physics in high school and getting a bachelor's degree in physics. And I say that as someone who's planning on getting an MBA with a focus in Financial Analysis after I finish my MA in Applied Economics.
Why should teachers be able to enjoy the benefits of the unions (health insurance, retirement benefits) without becoming members themselves?
Because virtually EVERY job (union or not) has those benefits - saying that you're not allowed to get the same benefits everyone else does (regardless of union status) just because you're a teacher and don't want to join the union is bullshit.
I'm all for making it optional to join if they want to go it alone in their bargaining, but if they're not paying dues, nothing except a sense of entitlement says that they should get to take advantage of what the union has bargained for.
See above. There's nothing to stop schools from offering the same insurance that every other non-union employee has access to, except that union thugs got it made so that you MUST bow to the union masters. Unions used to exist to fight corruption and unfair working conditions. Now unions exist to promote corruption and unfair working conditions. The only difference is who's corrupt and getting shafted has changed a bit.
Jesus was a liberal
Depends on your definition of liberal. If you're referring to the modern-day American marxist definition, then no, he absolutely was not. Why? Jesus said you SHOULD voluntarily give money to help the poor. Modern day American liberals want to FORCE you to give up money for the causes they see fit. Jesus never supported forcing people to do anything, which is the polar opposite of liberals in the US.
Otherwise, it's the same 'I've got mine so screw you' attitude that the greedy owners are taking.
Unless you're self-employed, if it wasn't for those "greedy owners", you'd be begging on the streets. That's why the anti-business mentality is so idiotic - without businesses the majority of people would be unemployed.
Yes because there's no good paying jobs that are non union and no one who's not in a union gets benefits packages / insurance....oh wait, over 90% of the workforce is non-union.
It's amazing how so many ordinary working people are actually against organisations looking out for ordinary working people.
And the union propagandists hoodwinked you perfectly. Unions are not about "working people". I have several relatives working for different unions (Teamsters, NEA, UAW, etc). The unions defend lazy workers from getting fired, cause incompetent workers to get paid as much as the hardest working, prevent people from getting raises based on their job performance, etc. Unions are (in general) the savior of the lazy and incompetent. Unions also lobby for economically damaging policies, such as import quotas, tariffs, preventing open trading among countries, etc - all policies that have been proven throughout history to harm everyone in society just for the benefit of the union. People are able to form unions anywhere they want - yet union membership, even in union heavy European countries, continues to drop. There's a reason for that.
Maybe decades of right-wing propaganda has made everyone think they're going to become a millionaire off the backs of their own hard work, sort of why poor people vote for tax cuts for the rich.
Which is funny, because in terms of real income and purchasing power, over the last few decades the poor in the US have increased their income / purchasing power by a larger percentage than the "evil rich". That's also why real median and mean income has increased significantly over the last few decades. As for tax cuts for "the evil rich"? Even with the Bush tax cuts, they're still paying between 50-100% more as a fraction of their income than you do. If they were paying a lower rate than everyone else (though they'd still be paying more in terms of actual dollars), then you could complain about them getting tax cuts. However, when you're paying 20% income tax and they're paying 35%, you have no room to complain if their penalty for being successful drops to only 30%.
But then again, Economics is despised on Slashdot because it frequently contradicts the ideology of the average Slashdotter. It's funny that when science contradicts religion, Slashdotters call out the religious zealots for not basing their views on facts - yet when science contradicts socioeconomic policies / views, Slashdotters scream bloody murder about the "evil" people following the facts instead of the "religion".
Exactly - that's why I don't have any respect for unions. If they were what they used to be and were simply a group of people with similar goals working together to improve their conditions, that's all fine and dandy. But so many unions (at least in the US) actively try to prevent people who don't want to be in a union from working, and that's just bullshit. My all time favorite bullshit move by unions against people who don't want to be in a union is that, while teachers don't have to be in the union, they're unable to receive their health insurance or retirement benefits if they don't join the union.
Except that if you move or travel, you're much less likely to have a branch / ATM for your credit union available. With larger banks, it's much easier to access your money when travelling or avoid having to change banks when moving to a new city.
And what went completely over your Marxist head is the fact that people are forced to pay taxes for things that they do not want / benefit from - then there's the added injustice of the more successful you are, the smaller portion of your income you're allowed to keep.
With the tax system, a better analogy is this: You stay at a hotel that's $100 a night. The hotel decides that you have a nice car, so they increase your rate by 30% and use that money to lower everyone else's bill. Then when you refuse to pay the unjust bill, they beat you and lock you in a cell for X years, then forcefully take the money anyways.
Honestly, what slashdot has devolved to makes me have no hope for the future. It used to be a place of intelligent discussion, now it's simply a place for arrogant marxists to get together and support each others delusions that they have a right to someone else's money and that it's wrong to work hard and succeed in life, and if anyone comes along and dares to point out the injustice of forcing one person to pay another persons bills, they get modded troll for daring to THINK instead of just blindly following the delusions of a mad man.
You can mod people down and spout marxist ideology all you want, but it doesn't change that you don't have a right to someone else's money. That's also why you don't practice what you preach and you refuse to spread your wealth to others who have less - you just want to be on the receiving end because you're jealous of those who worked harder and make more (cause and effect people!). Instead of wanting to encourage people to work hard, improve their lives, and improve society, you want laws passed to punish innovation, punish hard work, and support those who are lazy and have nothing of value to contribute to the world.
Don't worry - I know none of you will even actually consider a damn word I wrote - your blind ideology prevents you from considering that you might be wrong and as such, you refuse to even look at other points of view. But, despite the fact that I get so much hate for it, I'll never stop trying to get people to look at the injustice of collectivism and make the world a better place. So go ahead, mod me down some more, call me greedy for saying that people should get to keep what they earn instead of stealing from others, but it won't affect me. One day, one of you might get that big chance and have a great career and realize that when you're on the receiving end of legalized rape that it's not cool. Oh, and before you scream about how I'm "rich", hardly - I grew up poor, worked my ass off, and now I make a whopping $30k a year (though I just started grad school, so hopefully after I graduate in a couple of years, I'll be making more than that). It's utterly sociopathic to think that someone should be punished for working hard and being successful.
And you're obviously from Europe. In the US, we don't have your 60%+ tax rates and we actually *gasp!* pay for the things that benefit us ourselves. Want to sue your company? Why yes, you do have to pay the lawyer because you're the one benefiting from the lawsuit (if it goes your way). Want someone to pick up the trash instead of taking it to the dump yourself? Why yes, you DO have to pay for it!
You're just displaying the typical collectivist mistake of not realizing that regardless of if you pay for it out of your pockets or just pay higher taxes for it, you're still fucking paying for it either way. I bet you also believe in the myth of "free" education or "free" health care. Just because they forcefully take it from your paycheck instead of handing you a bill doesn't mean that you're not paying for it.
What these guys are doing is stealing from the government.
No, they're not. If they opened up government bank accounts and took money, then yes, they would be stealing from the government. That's not what they're doing. Since the government collects taxes by forcefully taking money from citizens (aka stealing), by refusing to let them take your money, you're not stealing anything, but defending your property from thieves. Somehow you have this disconnect in your brain where you think just because an asshole politician with armed thugs (military and police) backing him says he has a right to your money that it actually gives him a right. The law and justice are completely different things.
Yes, because there's never been a successful person in those countries...........oh wait........
Don't worry, collectivists always use lies and bullshit to justify stealing from others so that they can do less work, so I don't hold it against you personally.
Ah, I see. Necessary taxes and programs are those that benefit you directly. Unnecessary welfare taxes and programs are those that you do not benefit from. Nice.
No, if you had an IQ over 5, you'd notice that the necessary programs are ones that are best provided by government (such as roads, because it's too much of a hassle to have priviately owned roads) and ones that everyone equally has access to. Unnecessary ones are ones that serve no purpose but to take money from person A's wallet and put it in person B's wallet. However, you're a greedy bastard who thinks that you should be able to steal all you want from people just because they worked harder and have more money than you.
I hope you die from some really rare and painful disease after your medical coverage is terminated because it hit its lifetime maximum.
Already got said horrible disease. I was born with it and there's no cure. However, unlike you, I understand that just because my life sucks it doesn't give me the right to steal money from other people to get treatment.
No, I pay taxes to maintain roads, public schools, etc. The issue is the things of "Oh, Bill Gates makes more money, so we'll take some of his and give it to AC so that AC can buy the things he wants without working to earn the money for them" programs / taxes.
I have never seen anyone say the above, and actually practice what they preach.
That's because you mix two separate issues (necessary taxes / programs vs unnecessary welfare state taxes / programs to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to those who didn't) to create a tautology where if someone exists, they're "using something they didn't pay for".
No, it's about justice. Everyone has the right to the money they earn, regardless of if they earn $1 a year or $1 billion a year. Ethics - you should look it up.
First off, by "working class" you mean "unskilled working class". Everyone with a job works (well, except those union guys you always see standing at construction sites not working...). The difference is that those with education and skills make a lot more because they can do things the unskilled workers can't. Secondly, if it wasn't for the biased tax system, there wouldn't be a demand for finding tax loopholes, lobbying for tax changes, or shipping your money out of the country.
Actually, if you understood the theory behind money and had some knowledge of economic history, you'd know that governments have zero control over money. There have been plenty of instances where the citizens of a country refused to use the governments official currency and either used the currency of another country or used things such as cigarettes instead. Money only has the value that people decide it has.
But they do enough good to make it worth it.
That's extremely debatable, especially since pretty much every government these days are on the fast track to being an Orwellian style police state. I don't think I've read a single news article about a country gaining more freedoms (well, outside of Cuba allowing cell phones now), yet there's countless ones from every "free" country about people losing their rights.
That's why all first world countries with high standards of living have large governments that collect taxes
They may currently, but they didn't always. For a long time the US had both the highest standard of living AND the lowest taxes and smallest government. It's actually been proven several times throughout history that higher taxes and bigger government almost always leads to lower quality of life (there have been the rare exceptions, such as Sweden, but even Sweden is changing now and shrinking the government and lowering taxes).
So no they are not trying to keep their hard earned money, they are stealing from everyone else.
*sigh* You're one of those people who don't understand property rights. You do NOT have the right to someone else's money. It doesn't matter if a politician passes a law saying it's ok for person X to steal a certain amount from person Y because person Y makes more money - it's still person Y's money and no one else has the right to it.
Necessary taxes are fine. Taxes that are evenly distributed are fine. However, we lived in a fucked up world where the harder you work and the more successful you are, the more you're punished and you lose an ever increasing percentage of your income. THAT leads to people doing just this - trying to keep what they rightfully earned instead of having it forcefully taken and given to people who didn't earn it. There was an 19th century Economist who had a term for those types of taxes - "legalized plunder".
Sorry, but I'll never view someone trying to keep their hard earned money as "wrong", just like I'd never say it's wrong for a person to physically defend themselves from an attacker.
Sorry, but a warrior is someone such as Drizzt - a person who fights when they have to and to serve justice. A soldier is someone who fights because they're someone else's bitch and were ordered to. Everyone in the military is a soldier, because they don't do what they believe is right, they merely do what they're told.
They can do tiers the same way that (most - at least in the US) ISP's do - you base tiers on bandwidth (which inherently caps data usage). If you want the $15 a month data plan, you get say 75 KB/s, $25 a month will get you 150 KB/s, $35 gets you 300 KB/s, etc. It's fully workable, keeps people from ending up with no data / insane extra fees, and allows the phone companies to not use as much bandwidth.
A Bluray holds 50 gigabytes of data. Downloading that over my 750k DSL connection would take 7 days
Downloading over my connection would take... 19 hours, less than a day. There's no reason for me to lose even 15 minutes going to the store instead of 15 seconds setting up the download in my computer.
Are you kidding? How in the hell do you find 19 hours to take less time than 15 minutes?
I'll want to store it somewhere permanent
I won't. I can redownload it whenever I want.
No, you can redownload it whenever you want as long as the company still exists / still lets you. They can revoke your ability to download it at any time. People have already seen this happen with download-only services, what makes you think once people have no choice but to use download-only services that this will change?
Bottom Line - Blurays are not disappearing yet. People like the convenience and instant gratification.
Downloading IS the instant gratification. Bluray disappears with high speed download which, aparently you don't have but lots of people have already.
Blueray will only live for those who live with five year old technology, which is fine and reasonable, for five years.
Again, you somehow think that 19 hours is instant as opposed to taking 15 minutes to run to the store. You also admitted that you wouldn't store it and would redownload it each time - so how is 19 hours more instant than pulling a disc off a shelf and popping it in the drive?
I've only ever heard this "100% cpu" claim from people who run OS X......I've certainly never seen it on a Window system or on any of my linux systems. Perhaps the problem isn't Flash, but with how OS X interacts with Flash?
People view it as whining because you made it sound like the game had ridiculous hardware requirements - it doesn't. The hardware requirements are from a mid-range system from 4 years ago. You could probably go on Craigslist and find someone selling a system that meets those requirements for around $150.
Wait........people finish grad school?? I know getting my bachelor's was the best 7 years of my life.....
What else is there, for contemporary desktop usage, that I'm missing out on?
Running them at the same time. Running newer versions of said programs with newer features. Not having to wait a few hours for a virus scan. Not having to wait a few minutes just to reboot your computer. Being able to run new software (which you just wrote a post above bitching about how you cant do it), especially when that new software has very low requirements.
If you want to run an old computer and say "It still runs, why upgrade?" - that's fine, you have that right. However, you don't have the right to bitch that new software doesn't run on your antique paperweight.
I think that there should be a 10 year maximum on a copyright - from the last original work created using said copyright. For example - if J K Rowling had only published the first Harry Potter back in 1997, then her copyright would have ended in 2007, but since she kept writing books in the series until 2007, her copyright would last until 2017. Anthologies, 'collector's editions', or any other re-packaging of previous work would NOT count towards extending the copyright expiration. That leaves plenty of time for someone to make a profit and it keeps someone from creating one work and living off the royalties for the next 60 years. Work should be rewarded, but people have gotten this insane idea that you should be able to do work once in your life and get paid for it continually until you die.