This is the natural outcome of a world where huge conglomerates own nearly everything and have no idea what half their company is up to. Pretty soon we'll have companies suing each other, only to arrive in court to find out that their higher-ups are the same person . . .
Every moving part in an analog system adds noise to your signal. Every connection where the signal is transferred adds distortion. The motor that turns the table, the needle on the surface of the record, the arm of the record itself. That's no doubt why you have to spend so much for a really good sounding system. All the high-quality machining that goes into minimizing that noise costs. And as you note vinyl is highly destructible. Every time you play it it loses a little of its mass, a little definition, whereas a CD recording will be the same quality no matter how many times it's played right up until it's rendered completely useless by a scratch. So your analog system sounds great the day you buy the record. 20 years later the record is trashed.
George Harrison didn't like the Beatles on CD because he missed the scratch of the record. No kidding. He demonstrated in an interview I saw one time by making the scratching noise with his mouth. He said he just couldn't listen to a record without it. The 'richness' you percieve is harmonic distortion. It's unavoidable in an analog system, no matter how much you spend. Distortion provides extra sustain. Recording engineers raised on analog learned to rely on that distortion and expect it. So when it vanishes in a conversion to digital, it sounds weak.
Analog as an audio storage medium is _inherently_ inferior. Analog purists may prefer it because it's what they're used to. But it has technical limitations, and purists are wrong for technical reasons that I can enumerate and describe as I have above. I don't have $10,000 to spend on a stereo, but I can listen to an analog recording and a digital recording of the same sound side by side on the same equipment and I can readily without a smidgeon of effort tell the difference.
Do you have specifics? Are you going to provide an in-depth critical review of the current state of each of those fields? Have you read all the books published in the last 20 years? Have you seen all the movies? Have you heard all the music?
If you haven't, your statement has little validity. But, go ahead. I anxiously await your master thesis on How All Art Stopped in 1980. Annotated. With examples. All of them.
I record music as a hobbby. My chosen medium, if I could afford it, would be digital. Analog recording media adds distortion to the signal. Some people use that to add extra sustain. That's where most people complain about CD's being of 'inferior' quality. The bass usually sounds fatter on an analog recording than when it's transferred to digital. My Rush CD's, for example, just seem to be thinner and quieter than the vinyl used to be. That's because, as it says on the label, the digital recording reveals the inherent limitations of analog tape. But a Pearl Jam CD made 20 years later has a much better bass sound because it's recorded in that medium, for that medium. The extra 10 or so low Hz that's available in digital, which analog equipment simply cannot convey, gets used. It's just not present in the older recordings, but in an all-analog system its absence was made up for by distortion.
And I'll take your double-blind test anytime. I can _always_ tell the digital from the analog. I have the original Star Wars on LD. For some reason they chose to include the original analog sound. The difference is amazing. The bass tones rattle objects off the shelf in digital. In the analog original, they're weak and undefined.
Tell you what. Next time our soil is actually threatened by an enemy, they won't have to draft me. I'll be right there. Otherwise, I don't want to hear about it, OK?
He doesn't know that at all. He's just jaded. Art speaks to a culture and when that culture dies, its adherents proclaim the culture that replaces it to be degraded. He doesn't understand or recognize or care about the issues that the literature, film, and music of the 90's speaks about, he does not care for the tone of voice it speaks in, or the palette of colors it's painted in. Therefore "it's all shit." You notice his date for the death of the good "hi-fi" - 10 years ago. No one uses the term "hi-fi" anymore. Hi-fi died about the time it became impossible to buy new music on vinyl and the CD took over. Digital music completely outdated all of the existing hi-fi equipment of its day. It made the large sums of money invested in cleaning up the inherent distortion and defects of all-analog recording irrelevant. Digital music _does_ sound better. People who are pissed about CD's mostly seem to be pissed that their record collection and the equipment it was meant to be played on are now obsolete.
So what you have here is a retro with his head in his ass. Don't worry about it, pal. The culture of today will go on without your permission or approval . . .
Re:Its time for a new leader
on
Voteauction.com
·
· Score: 1
Actually that's not bad. Why don't we draft our presidents instead of elect them? Here's the deal: if you want to vote, you put yourself in the lottery for president. You are compensated EXACTLY the salary you had the year you took office. You are GUARANTEED by law to have your job when you come back out. Maybe the terms could be shortened to six months to avoid so much disruption. Legislators and the like are still subject to vote, but the guy with the veto pen has no political party, no campaign contributors, and no swarms of advisors crawling up his ass. He cannot propose any new things (i.e., he cannot nullify elections, make himself dictator for life, declare war, or in some other way fundamentally alter things). He (or she) can only approve or deny legislation brought by a group of elected people. That way he can't screw anything up _too_ badly, and he can't be bought. Attempting to give money to this person during their term would be a life-in-prison sort of crime. Oh it could be done badly, but it could be done right too. More like a jury than an elected leader.
"They should add more criteria to the right to vote than just coming of age. For example, you have to be a tax payer before you can influence any of the tax legislation."
Bullshit. That is exactly the kind of corruption that is already destroying the process. Suppose the 'taxpayer' block votes to stop paying money to a certain class of Medicare patients and take them off life support. Or suspends public education. How would the uneducated then become taxpayers? What you mean is, only people who are important and have money should be able to vote. Why don't you just tear up the constitution while you're at it?
The idea is, and always has been, that each person gets to have a hand in determining the outcome of the government's efforts. Establishing special criteria for who is 'more' or 'less' qualified to decide these things is exactly what our corrupt political parties have done by engaging lobbyists, refusing to reform capaign finance laws, and so on. It's the idea that you should have some special qualifications before you can really sit at the table. Nonsense. The specially qualified (in this case the rich) can then go on to ensure that they remain specially qualified and others do not.
The selling of your vote ought to come with a fairly stiff penalty . . . but then again I think it already has. Your freedom.
It bothers me IMMENSELY that you feel that people who do not share your opinions can be harmful, and should be prevented from exercising them. Who shall you decide is too young? Too idealistic? At what point did you become the arbiter of 'valid' opinion?
Also, your denouncement of communism contains some interesting logic. You state that
1. People are greedy.
2. Communitsts have no incentive to work but that which is given them by the nation state.
3. Therefore communism is a failure.
I don't quite understand how this works. It looks like you've strung a bunch of specious generalizations together in a general denouncement of human nature, not communism. We know people are greedy. What does greed have to do with communism? You can't be greedy in a communist state, can you? It's a 'share the wealth' system, is it not?
What does incentive have to do with it? Are you saying that greed is a good thing to have, because it's an incentive to work? How does this translate into a more productive economy? It seems to me that the capitalist system we use in the US doesn't do a lot for encouraging a productive economy. The beneficiaries of our economic efforts are stockholders, not the people who do the work. For them -- a pittance. For the stockhodlers -- a huge profit. And if no huge profit -- a lawsuit. This fact is gradully dawning on people, and as a result it seems speculation and gambling are the most popular activities of the last few years. Get-rich-quick schemes are all the rage. Everyone wants to win the lottery. Or get stock options. Or in any way avoid actually working for pay.
And what do teachers in government-funded public schools have to do with it? Are they all communists by association with the government? Or with the public funding? Or what? And again your implication that the young cannot think for themselves and should not be allowed to -- where do you get this?
I ought to conclude, in parallel with you, that people who don't understand their own opinions ought not be allowed to express them, but that's not the point of a democracy. The point of a democracy is that you get a say in your own destiny because the power of the government derives from you not the right of kings or by some arbitrary declaration. Your way would have us arbitrarily declaring that certain classes of people do not have the understanding to vote. And it does indeed seem an arbitrary marker you've chosen. You've displayed little better understanding of history or the definition of communism or its consequences than the young idealists you would exclude from voting.
I think the real danger of communism was that the needs of state were declared to be more important than the rights of the individual. This was the same danger of Fascism and in fact every other horrific dictatorship of the century. The economic models were of little to no consequence. Russia's economy failed for multiple and complex reasons; one of those was that we were forcing them into a spending game with our defense budget, another is the fact that their major landmass is a frozen waste and not exactly the world's 'breadbasket.' People ascribe the United State's economic success to our fantastic democratic system. They seem to forget it was based on slavery for the first three hundred years, and that our agricultural resources are some of the richest in the world. We're damn lucky to be in the geographical place we're in, and it's surprising how people can be lucky and not know it.
Boiling the failure of Communism down into the simple syllogism you describe above is not only shunning the issues but it's painfully ignorant as well. The real failure -- well, I can think of few things more destructive to a society than suppressing conflicting opinions. When a citizen fails to benefit from his implicit contract with society, he has little incentive to hold up his end of it.
And for the record, I think the Holocaust still stands as a more important historical lesson. Not because the Nazis did it. Because the rest of the world stood idly by and let them for so long.
I am reminded of a quote by Issac Asimov. I'll have to dig it up, but paraphrased, it essentially runs like this: "Someday in the next hundred years we will wake up and realize that, without really trying to do so, we have created a world government." I think the implication of the context was, this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who defined the role of that government. But I agree with Asimov. It WILL happen. Having some input from the actual inhabitants of the planet would help. Otherwise it's going to look like one of those dreary futuristic worlds where corporations own everything and governments don't really matter.
Is hooking up the Schrodinger's Cat to my computer. Will it use Cat 5 cable? Or will there be a higher class for Quantum PC / Quantum Cat interface? And then of course whenever an operation fails or the computer crashes, I have to change the cat, and dispose of the dead one. What a pain in the ass. . .
Let's not also forget that they while "they laughed at Newton, and they laughed at Einstein, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Just because you're a rebel and your views are rejected by the establishment, that does not automatically make them wrong and you right. Einstein turned out to be a greater mind than the greatest. But he had to prove it first.
I just keep thinking about all those guys with Tesla-fied perpetual motion machines (and patents for them, I think!) that you will find if you creep along the underbelly of the internet. . .
What they mean by information disappearing is that we would never be able to find out about what's in the black hole again. It would cease having an effect on the universe. Particles lost in a black hole take their history with them. You have to be realistic about this; how much information would anyone have spent time extracting from those particles anyway?
But the point is that the singularity means, for all we can tell, the complete destruction of everything except the raw mass of the particles that fall into it.
Using the encyclopedia is a bad pun; imagine dropping something simpler, like a salt grain down instead. The salt grain contains information about its structure and if you were clever enough you could figure out where it came from and how long ago. That information vanishes in a black hole.
Because he does not own the letters JT. No one does. Two awkward consonants stuck together are not even enough to make a phoneme, let alone a full word. As such it should not qualify as intellectual property of any kind. Anything below a sentence should not qualify as intellectual property.
Anyone could randomly assemble letters and register domain names, and then wait for someone to come along wanting to use that domain and offer to 'sell' it to them. As if they owned it in the first place. Selling a domain name is in my mind a lot like selling electromagnetic frequencies, or the rights to use certain musical notes. As individual units of communication they are not, and should not be, viewed as property. They are tools and building blocks; creative people use them to make genuine intellectual property. Parasites use them to make money. There is a qualified difference. One of those activities benefits society. The other benefits no one but the parasite.
At the end of this year, Microsoft will drop all support for Windows 95. You will no longer be able to get upgrades or patches. Calls to their support line on Windows 95 related issues will no longer be answered. In my humble opinion, that is abandonment. My company has 8,000 users of Windows 95. We cannot possibly upgrade them all in five months. Even if we could, it's going to be very expensive. $80-some times 8,000 . . .
If they're going to do it, this action ought to null and void the copyright. After all, we the consumers paid something for this shit. We are entitled to value for what we bought, and forcing us onto the upgrade treadmill ought to put them in court as surely as if they were running a price-fixing scheme. But as the clueless posts of "it's the law" continue to mount, it becomes clear to me that the consumer in this country is no longer entitled to a pot to piss in a pay toilet. Only the corporation is entitled to a profit.
You, sir, have found the very nub of the gist. Using abandonware and old computer parts enables people^H^H^H^H^H^Hpirates to gouge software companies for untold sums of lost revenue because they are gaining the exact same benefits of the modern technology from using the older, obsolete technology.
Just think back to what your brand-new Pentium 75 with 32 MB of RAM and a 1 GB HD would have cost you in 1994. Would $3,000 be too much? Or too little? And all the software installed, just imagine!! Windows, an office suite, maybe some accounting packages, some games. Why that's $4,000 in revenue that the Wintel Cartel is not getting because you are using their now-obsolete equipment.
Which begs me to ask the question: was that shit ever worth $4,000 in the first place? Or is the upgrade treadmill not what we thought it was, a path to ever greater speed and performance? After all, you can boot up a P75 with Win31 and watch it scream!! Right into a wall, to be sure . . .
At what point is a company entitled to a profit? If they are no longer actively seeking that profit, from that product, they cannot claim that you or I are taking it away from them by this kind of activity.
The entire idea that our governmental system exists to further corporate profits is revolting. Those companies take a risk when they do anything, and it is their risk, not the government's, not the public's. I do not believe our system was founded to protect huge corporations from risk.
I wonder if Paul McCartney would cry if he read this. After all, he never _abandoned_ the original Beatles songs. They were just removed from his possession by a bizzare quirk of American copyright laws. Or for that matter, the copyright to "Happy Birthday" should have expired years ago (102, to be exact) but for some reason the Disney Corporation still can bill people for its use. Copyright law is fundamentally fucked up. There are so many loopholes and side passages; the rule should be, you own it till you die, then it's public domain. If "you" are a coroporation, you own it for a what a human being would reasonably own it for (say 60 years) and then it becomes public domain. No bribing of senators or congressmen to extend it . . .
Please explain this to JRR Tolkien (or at least his descendants). Whose trilogy was reprinted without permission in the millions of copies over here in the States. Who had to eventually plead with his readers to buy the authorised version on the Ballentine edition that I've got. And you don't even have to go back to the 1800's for that example. It happened only 30 years ago. So there.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in the USA, pal. They are one and the same.
This is the natural outcome of a world where huge conglomerates own nearly everything and have no idea what half their company is up to. Pretty soon we'll have companies suing each other, only to arrive in court to find out that their higher-ups are the same person . . .
It can't be "of all time." The least essential movies made more than 25 years ago were so inessential that they've been forgotten.
Sadly, I do not see any evidence of "Cool World" on this list. Maybe it made #51 . . .
Ah. To be lucky and not even know it. 28.8 all day long . . .
Every moving part in an analog system adds noise to your signal. Every connection where the signal is transferred adds distortion. The motor that turns the table, the needle on the surface of the record, the arm of the record itself. That's no doubt why you have to spend so much for a really good sounding system. All the high-quality machining that goes into minimizing that noise costs. And as you note vinyl is highly destructible. Every time you play it it loses a little of its mass, a little definition, whereas a CD recording will be the same quality no matter how many times it's played right up until it's rendered completely useless by a scratch. So your analog system sounds great the day you buy the record. 20 years later the record is trashed.
George Harrison didn't like the Beatles on CD because he missed the scratch of the record. No kidding. He demonstrated in an interview I saw one time by making the scratching noise with his mouth. He said he just couldn't listen to a record without it. The 'richness' you percieve is harmonic distortion. It's unavoidable in an analog system, no matter how much you spend. Distortion provides extra sustain. Recording engineers raised on analog learned to rely on that distortion and expect it. So when it vanishes in a conversion to digital, it sounds weak.
Analog as an audio storage medium is _inherently_ inferior. Analog purists may prefer it because it's what they're used to. But it has technical limitations, and purists are wrong for technical reasons that I can enumerate and describe as I have above. I don't have $10,000 to spend on a stereo, but I can listen to an analog recording and a digital recording of the same sound side by side on the same equipment and I can readily without a smidgeon of effort tell the difference.
Do you have specifics? Are you going to provide an in-depth critical review of the current state of each of those fields? Have you read all the books published in the last 20 years? Have you seen all the movies? Have you heard all the music?
If you haven't, your statement has little validity. But, go ahead. I anxiously await your master thesis on How All Art Stopped in 1980. Annotated. With examples. All of them.
I record music as a hobbby. My chosen medium, if I could afford it, would be digital. Analog recording media adds distortion to the signal. Some people use that to add extra sustain. That's where most people complain about CD's being of 'inferior' quality. The bass usually sounds fatter on an analog recording than when it's transferred to digital. My Rush CD's, for example, just seem to be thinner and quieter than the vinyl used to be. That's because, as it says on the label, the digital recording reveals the inherent limitations of analog tape. But a Pearl Jam CD made 20 years later has a much better bass sound because it's recorded in that medium, for that medium. The extra 10 or so low Hz that's available in digital, which analog equipment simply cannot convey, gets used. It's just not present in the older recordings, but in an all-analog system its absence was made up for by distortion.
And I'll take your double-blind test anytime. I can _always_ tell the digital from the analog. I have the original Star Wars on LD. For some reason they chose to include the original analog sound. The difference is amazing. The bass tones rattle objects off the shelf in digital. In the analog original, they're weak and undefined.
Tell you what. Next time our soil is actually threatened by an enemy, they won't have to draft me. I'll be right there. Otherwise, I don't want to hear about it, OK?
He doesn't know that at all. He's just jaded. Art speaks to a culture and when that culture dies, its adherents proclaim the culture that replaces it to be degraded. He doesn't understand or recognize or care about the issues that the literature, film, and music of the 90's speaks about, he does not care for the tone of voice it speaks in, or the palette of colors it's painted in. Therefore "it's all shit." You notice his date for the death of the good "hi-fi" - 10 years ago. No one uses the term "hi-fi" anymore. Hi-fi died about the time it became impossible to buy new music on vinyl and the CD took over. Digital music completely outdated all of the existing hi-fi equipment of its day. It made the large sums of money invested in cleaning up the inherent distortion and defects of all-analog recording irrelevant. Digital music _does_ sound better. People who are pissed about CD's mostly seem to be pissed that their record collection and the equipment it was meant to be played on are now obsolete.
So what you have here is a retro with his head in his ass. Don't worry about it, pal. The culture of today will go on without your permission or approval . . .
Actually that's not bad. Why don't we draft our presidents instead of elect them? Here's the deal: if you want to vote, you put yourself in the lottery for president. You are compensated EXACTLY the salary you had the year you took office. You are GUARANTEED by law to have your job when you come back out. Maybe the terms could be shortened to six months to avoid so much disruption. Legislators and the like are still subject to vote, but the guy with the veto pen has no political party, no campaign contributors, and no swarms of advisors crawling up his ass. He cannot propose any new things (i.e., he cannot nullify elections, make himself dictator for life, declare war, or in some other way fundamentally alter things). He (or she) can only approve or deny legislation brought by a group of elected people. That way he can't screw anything up _too_ badly, and he can't be bought. Attempting to give money to this person during their term would be a life-in-prison sort of crime. Oh it could be done badly, but it could be done right too. More like a jury than an elected leader.
"They should add more criteria to the right to vote than just coming of age. For example, you have to be a tax payer before you can influence any of the tax legislation."
Bullshit. That is exactly the kind of corruption that is already destroying the process. Suppose the 'taxpayer' block votes to stop paying money to a certain class of Medicare patients and take them off life support. Or suspends public education. How would the uneducated then become taxpayers? What you mean is, only people who are important and have money should be able to vote. Why don't you just tear up the constitution while you're at it?
The idea is, and always has been, that each person gets to have a hand in determining the outcome of the government's efforts. Establishing special criteria for who is 'more' or 'less' qualified to decide these things is exactly what our corrupt political parties have done by engaging lobbyists, refusing to reform capaign finance laws, and so on. It's the idea that you should have some special qualifications before you can really sit at the table. Nonsense. The specially qualified (in this case the rich) can then go on to ensure that they remain specially qualified and others do not.
The selling of your vote ought to come with a fairly stiff penalty . . . but then again I think it already has. Your freedom.
It bothers me IMMENSELY that you feel that people who do not share your opinions can be harmful, and should be prevented from exercising them. Who shall you decide is too young? Too idealistic? At what point did you become the arbiter of 'valid' opinion?
Also, your denouncement of communism contains some interesting logic. You state that
1. People are greedy.
2. Communitsts have no incentive to work but that which is given them by the nation state.
3. Therefore communism is a failure.
I don't quite understand how this works. It looks like you've strung a bunch of specious generalizations together in a general denouncement of human nature, not communism. We know people are greedy. What does greed have to do with communism? You can't be greedy in a communist state, can you? It's a 'share the wealth' system, is it not?
What does incentive have to do with it? Are you saying that greed is a good thing to have, because it's an incentive to work? How does this translate into a more productive economy? It seems to me that the capitalist system we use in the US doesn't do a lot for encouraging a productive economy. The beneficiaries of our economic efforts are stockholders, not the people who do the work. For them -- a pittance. For the stockhodlers -- a huge profit. And if no huge profit -- a lawsuit. This fact is gradully dawning on people, and as a result it seems speculation and gambling are the most popular activities of the last few years. Get-rich-quick schemes are all the rage. Everyone wants to win the lottery. Or get stock options. Or in any way avoid actually working for pay.
And what do teachers in government-funded public schools have to do with it? Are they all communists by association with the government? Or with the public funding? Or what? And again your implication that the young cannot think for themselves and should not be allowed to -- where do you get this?
I ought to conclude, in parallel with you, that people who don't understand their own opinions ought not be allowed to express them, but that's not the point of a democracy. The point of a democracy is that you get a say in your own destiny because the power of the government derives from you not the right of kings or by some arbitrary declaration. Your way would have us arbitrarily declaring that certain classes of people do not have the understanding to vote. And it does indeed seem an arbitrary marker you've chosen. You've displayed little better understanding of history or the definition of communism or its consequences than the young idealists you would exclude from voting.
I think the real danger of communism was that the needs of state were declared to be more important than the rights of the individual. This was the same danger of Fascism and in fact every other horrific dictatorship of the century. The economic models were of little to no consequence. Russia's economy failed for multiple and complex reasons; one of those was that we were forcing them into a spending game with our defense budget, another is the fact that their major landmass is a frozen waste and not exactly the world's 'breadbasket.' People ascribe the United State's economic success to our fantastic democratic system. They seem to forget it was based on slavery for the first three hundred years, and that our agricultural resources are some of the richest in the world. We're damn lucky to be in the geographical place we're in, and it's surprising how people can be lucky and not know it.
Boiling the failure of Communism down into the simple syllogism you describe above is not only shunning the issues but it's painfully ignorant as well. The real failure -- well, I can think of few things more destructive to a society than suppressing conflicting opinions. When a citizen fails to benefit from his implicit contract with society, he has little incentive to hold up his end of it.
And for the record, I think the Holocaust still stands as a more important historical lesson. Not because the Nazis did it. Because the rest of the world stood idly by and let them for so long.
"Could we tax, uh, thingy? You know?"
I am reminded of a quote by Issac Asimov. I'll have to dig it up, but paraphrased, it essentially runs like this: "Someday in the next hundred years we will wake up and realize that, without really trying to do so, we have created a world government." I think the implication of the context was, this could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who defined the role of that government. But I agree with Asimov. It WILL happen. Having some input from the actual inhabitants of the planet would help. Otherwise it's going to look like one of those dreary futuristic worlds where corporations own everything and governments don't really matter.
Wait a minute . . .
Is hooking up the Schrodinger's Cat to my computer. Will it use Cat 5 cable? Or will there be a higher class for Quantum PC / Quantum Cat interface? And then of course whenever an operation fails or the computer crashes, I have to change the cat, and dispose of the dead one. What a pain in the ass. . .
Just make the case reeeeal spacious; and by all that's sane don't put a fan in it.
Let's not also forget that they while "they laughed at Newton, and they laughed at Einstein, they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
.sig, btw.
Just because you're a rebel and your views are rejected by the establishment, that does not automatically make them wrong and you right. Einstein turned out to be a greater mind than the greatest. But he had to prove it first.
I just keep thinking about all those guys with Tesla-fied perpetual motion machines (and patents for them, I think!) that you will find if you creep along the underbelly of the internet. . .
Quoted material by the same guy in my
What they mean by information disappearing is that we would never be able to find out about what's in the black hole again. It would cease having an effect on the universe. Particles lost in a black hole take their history with them. You have to be realistic about this; how much information would anyone have spent time extracting from those particles anyway?
But the point is that the singularity means, for all we can tell, the complete destruction of everything except the raw mass of the particles that fall into it.
Using the encyclopedia is a bad pun; imagine dropping something simpler, like a salt grain down instead. The salt grain contains information about its structure and if you were clever enough you could figure out where it came from and how long ago. That information vanishes in a black hole.
Because he does not own the letters JT. No one does. Two awkward consonants stuck together are not even enough to make a phoneme, let alone a full word. As such it should not qualify as intellectual property of any kind. Anything below a sentence should not qualify as intellectual property.
Anyone could randomly assemble letters and register domain names, and then wait for someone to come along wanting to use that domain and offer to 'sell' it to them. As if they owned it in the first place. Selling a domain name is in my mind a lot like selling electromagnetic frequencies, or the rights to use certain musical notes. As individual units of communication they are not, and should not be, viewed as property. They are tools and building blocks; creative people use them to make genuine intellectual property. Parasites use them to make money. There is a qualified difference. One of those activities benefits society. The other benefits no one but the parasite.
Please do not compare Mozart to 'N Sync. There _is_ a difference. For example, Mozart was a musician.
On a side note, is there any way we can get all those guys on a small chartered plane somewhere?
At the end of this year, Microsoft will drop all support for Windows 95. You will no longer be able to get upgrades or patches. Calls to their support line on Windows 95 related issues will no longer be answered. In my humble opinion, that is abandonment. My company has 8,000 users of Windows 95. We cannot possibly upgrade them all in five months. Even if we could, it's going to be very expensive. $80-some times 8,000 . . .
If they're going to do it, this action ought to null and void the copyright. After all, we the consumers paid something for this shit. We are entitled to value for what we bought, and forcing us onto the upgrade treadmill ought to put them in court as surely as if they were running a price-fixing scheme. But as the clueless posts of "it's the law" continue to mount, it becomes clear to me that the consumer in this country is no longer entitled to a pot to piss in a pay toilet. Only the corporation is entitled to a profit.
You, sir, have found the very nub of the gist. Using abandonware and old computer parts enables people^H^H^H^H^H^Hpirates to gouge software companies for untold sums of lost revenue because they are gaining the exact same benefits of the modern technology from using the older, obsolete technology.
Just think back to what your brand-new Pentium 75 with 32 MB of RAM and a 1 GB HD would have cost you in 1994. Would $3,000 be too much? Or too little? And all the software installed, just imagine!! Windows, an office suite, maybe some accounting packages, some games. Why that's $4,000 in revenue that the Wintel Cartel is not getting because you are using their now-obsolete equipment.
Which begs me to ask the question: was that shit ever worth $4,000 in the first place? Or is the upgrade treadmill not what we thought it was, a path to ever greater speed and performance? After all, you can boot up a P75 with Win31 and watch it scream!! Right into a wall, to be sure . . .
At what point is a company entitled to a profit? If they are no longer actively seeking that profit, from that product, they cannot claim that you or I are taking it away from them by this kind of activity.
The entire idea that our governmental system exists to further corporate profits is revolting. Those companies take a risk when they do anything, and it is their risk, not the government's, not the public's. I do not believe our system was founded to protect huge corporations from risk.
I wonder if Paul McCartney would cry if he read this. After all, he never _abandoned_ the original Beatles songs. They were just removed from his possession by a bizzare quirk of American copyright laws. Or for that matter, the copyright to "Happy Birthday" should have expired years ago (102, to be exact) but for some reason the Disney Corporation still can bill people for its use. Copyright law is fundamentally fucked up. There are so many loopholes and side passages; the rule should be, you own it till you die, then it's public domain. If "you" are a coroporation, you own it for a what a human being would reasonably own it for (say 60 years) and then it becomes public domain. No bribing of senators or congressmen to extend it . . .
Please explain this to JRR Tolkien (or at least his descendants). Whose trilogy was reprinted without permission in the millions of copies over here in the States. Who had to eventually plead with his readers to buy the authorised version on the Ballentine edition that I've got. And you don't even have to go back to the 1800's for that example. It happened only 30 years ago. So there.