The reason that our more recent ideas aren't on the list is because we don't know which are the good ones yet. Hindsight is needed to appreciate what we've been doing.
Case in point: the article talks about The Modem: 1962. You really think a list compiled in 1972 would include that?
It really does make me wonder about the galaxy of technology that has already been invented, has a functional prototype, and which no member of the public will ever see until the year 2045. If you had the means to seek out all that stuff, you'd probably find that our society is 50 years more advanced than it appears.
For example, some of what I've read has indicated that recent revolutions in turbine technology (within the last 3 years) make it possible to run the world's power grid entirely with windmills on farms and hydroelectric power. How long do you think it'll take that innovation to become significant to our lives?
So why would we chose not to protect the weakest among us? Why should we be allowed to perform experiments on a human being just because he can't talk yet, or doesn't look like one yet? Why should a human being be denied a chance at living a full life, simply because her parents find her inconvenient?
You make it sound like someone's experimenting on babies. No one's experimenting on humans who can't talk yet; they're experimenting on humans who will never talk, because they are dead. I strongly support research on the dead; without it, most freshman doctors would have to try to find your appendix from a chart. Failure rates would skyrocket.
Your secondary question is:
Why should a human being be denied a chance at living a full life, simply because her parents find her inconvenient?
The short answer is that (s)he should not be denied that chance. But there are, of course, dozens of other reasons for abortion. For example, women with reproductive problems may be faced with a terrible choice: abort the baby, or die in childbirth. Who are you to make that choice for her?
And there are dozens of grey areas - what about a woman raped by a man whose family has a history of cystic fibrosis? Are you going to tell her it's her moral duty to watch the child of her rapist grow to his teenage years, only to choke to death on his own liquefied lungs? Maybe that's the choice you'd make, but it's not a choice I can accept being imposed on someone else.
Although abortion shouldn't be used casually, as an alternate to birth control, there are situations where it is absolutely necessary. Life isn't so black-and-white as you're trying to make it out to be. And when a pregnancy is tragically required to be aborted, why waste the stem cells from that fetus? In my mind, that's a far greater waste of life than simply throwing the fetus in a container of biohazardous waste and shipping it somewhere to be incinerated.
while I don't like Bush's take on stem cell research any more than you do, I don't believe he banned it. He just cut off federal funding. Private companies can still partake
That's.. sort of right, and sort of wrong.
Bush didn't ban stem cell research - he banned the creation of new lines of stem cells for research. Thus, all research must proceed from existing lines. There are only a couple dozen in existence, and worries that only a handful of those are viable.
In other words, he didn't stop stem cell research, but it certainly made it more difficult and expensive for everyone.
Musicians, CD-Rs, and the RIAA boycott
on
Ebay vs. Musician
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm a (not terribly good) independent musician (if you have any interest in hearing my stuff, you can navigate over to the URL on my user page).
In 1999, at the height of the Napster furor, I decided I was going to boycott the entire RIAA until further notice; the implications of their copyright fanaticism on free speech are staggering, and I feel like I would be remiss in supporting it.
You can't really base a boycott on piracy, so I've stopped listening to RIAA recordings altogether; 99% of what I hear is stuff I download from other musicians' sites and burn to CD-R. And although you have to search a little harder, I think some of my CD-Rs are plain and simply *better* than anything the Big Four have put out since, say, 1985.
Here's two of the primary problems I encouter:
1. That fucking CD-R tax. Every time I buy a CD-R, Congress assumes I'm a pirate, and I have to pay a nickel to mega-acts like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. That's exactly the kind of shit I'm trying to boycott in the first place; it infuriates me that they've circumvented some of my boycott through Congressional lobbying. In a way, I feel like I'd be justified in stealing a Britney CD and microwaving it; I'm paying for it, right? But I don't.
2. This eBay policy, and the dozens of similar policies, that assume that legitimate music cannot be packaged as a CD-R. News flash: it can. I own probably 100 CD-Rs given to me by various local and independent bands (in about 10% of cases, I paid about $5, but usually they just give them to me because they want me to hear the music). This stuff is not contraband! I'm not a pirate!
The most important thing we can do is be vigilant against the notion that if something doesn't come out of mainstream channels, it's somehow inferior or illegal. The RIAA pays lobbyists like Rosen millions of dollars a year to sell us that proposition; let them know we're not buying.
Each chemical that forms your DNA" is adenine, guanine, cytosine, or thymine, and we've known the chemical structure of all those for decades.
That's a bit incomplete. The helix itself isn't made of those chemicals; it's some kind of protein structure.
The original poster actually makes a valid argument, but only if the subject receiving the CD is not familiar with genetics. In other words, if we put the CD in a time capsule, and then wiped ourselves out with biological warfare, and then the Earth was resettled by aliens 150 million years later, then even if they knew the CD was full of some kind of genetic information, they wouldn't be able to recreate a human without some additional knowledge. Consider receiving the world's first MP3, being told it was "a song", and being asked to write a player. Now, think of something several orders of magnitude more difficult. Yeah, that's about right.
But even if he makes a valid point, it's not necessarily a very relevant one, since I see no compelling reason to care what happens to the universe after our species is extinct...
Years ago, I don't know where, I heard of someone making "DNA Music". They took A,C,T,G, and mapped them to musical notes: A->A, C->C, T->E, G->G. Fits rather nicely into the key of C major
Dude.. that's an Am7 chord. Your entire song is a "random arpeggio" through a single Am7 chord. Play it really fast and you've got.. an Am7 chord with a lot of vibrato on it.
So we should start replacing words in our dictionaries?
Replacing words in dictionaries is a constant, ongoing process. The word "D'oh!" was completely unknown to the English language five years ago; today it can be found in most major dictionaries.
Spellings, historically, have changed slowly but steadily; it's interesting to read a little Chaucer and wonder just how many steps it took for "soute" to become "sweet".
Meanings tend to change a little faster. For example, there's an early-20th-century piece of literature (whose name escapes me today) that includes the sentence "He fagged his way down the road until he was knocked up." meaning "He walked until very tired." Obviously, connotative meanings of those terms have rendered that sentence completely obselete.
It's an inevitability that text-messaging will make an extremely rapid impact on the English language. It would not surprise me in the slightest if, 150 years from now, the correct spelling of "you" actually is "u".
Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea what happens if you take a huge file, like a DVD rip, rename it robots.txt, and stick it on your webserver?
The article isn't slashdotted. It doesn't mention private mail servers.
I'm guessing that the DOJ isn't pleased by the concept of private mail servers, though. It makes this kind of stuff much more difficult to subpoena. I own the domain www.youhavenochancetosurvivemakeyourtime.com; the WHOIS contact information is listed as Bageeno Hormonis of 123 Fake Street in Springfield. (Granted, the government could still track me down if it deemed necessary, but I'm sure that kind of stuff has to be an annoying waste of resources for them).
My best guess is that, yeah, retention requirements for public mail servers would apply to private mail servers, and you'd get hit with a substantial fine if the government tried to subpoena your mail and found it missing.
According to Locke, the "natural rights" of man are life, liberty, and the ability to own property; when you enter into a society, you turn over all those rights to the State in return for whatever rights it deems fit to grant you.
Thus, no one has the right to eat, have children, work, or be sheltered, unless their government sees fit to grant those rights. Certainly, America does not acknowledge a right to be employed or to eat; in fact, it's been known to blacklist people in the hope that they'll do neither.
And no, no society I'm aware of has ever given its citizens the right to copy information indiscriminately. Personally, I would love to see a society do so, because I suspect that such a society would actually probably end up richer in technology and culture. Both sides of the argument make some sense, but only one is actually tried, and it's apparent that excessively restrictive copyright laws actually retard cultural and economic growth. But, no, as it stands, society has deemed that the exclusive right to copy a piece of work is something a government can hand out.
I doubt that I'm alone in my belief that it is always tragic when any piece of information--no matter how trivial--is lost forever.
If a person has offered that information for free at any point, to the extent that an automated script could access it, then I believe that information can be safely considered public domain. I doubt that there's any mechanism by which Richard M. Stallman could lose his mind and "rein in" all copies of GNU, or by which Stephen King could recall all his novels and refund the purchase price; once something is offered to the public, it no longer belongs exclusively to the publisher.
In my opinion, the value of archives in the future immeasurably outweighs occasional inconveniences of having information stick around longer than the author would have wished.
Still, that said, I think that even without mergers, this drive to force consumers to replace everything they own will continue.
Look at computers. The game market pushes the hardware market which pushes the game market - but it's not the same company doing it.
And not to get *too* off-topic here, but I suspect that Civ III is horribly slow specifically because it's badly programmed to push the hardware market. It's really not significantly more complex a game than Civ II, and yet I can't even get to the medieval period without getting too sick of lagginess to continue. A K-6 500 with 256 megs of RAM should be enough power to run a freaking turn-based game.
Ever tried to by a tape of your favorite new album?
Tower Records still orders and stocks cassette tapes from the manufacturers, who still manufacture and sell them. Want to buy Puff Daddy on cassette? No problem.
(Actually, interestingly enough, my experience was that 60% of the tapes we sold were rap, compared to maybe 10% of CDs).
I'm a musican and (inept) recording artist, and actually, I think this is really encouraging. If people get used to paying $10 for an album with their credit card, well, it's the easiest thing in the world for me to offer my albums online for $5 (and in good old MP3 format, at that). The only real barrier to independent distribution is that the public is too hooked on plastic discs. And, hey, at $5, if I can just get 300 downloads a month, I'll be making more than the average schoolteacher - and that's a number that shouldn't be too hard to reach if I play shows every other weekend at various venues.
What's happening to music is almost communist; with digital recording, digital mastering, and digital distribution, the means of production are squarely in the hands of the people.
going from a $20 CD to a $9.99 downloadable album or a $0.99 track is the RIAA realizing that the natural price is lower than what they've been charging.
That would be nice, yeah. But you're wrong.
I used to work at Tower Records, and my employee discount was "cost plus 10%", so I checked out the costs of a lot of discs. The average cost of a CD to the store was about $7-11; the store markup was usually anywhere from $2 to $10.
If you figure that the cost of manufacturing and shipping these CDs is probably somewhat higher than buying bandwidth and paying web designers, then the RIAA is actually charging more for music than they used to. They've just cut trucks and CDs out of the equation.
I don't think that the natural price of music is zero. People are willing to pay for convenience and to legitimize their activities, and they often want to support the artists who make the music. But, you're right, I think the natural price of music is far, far, far lower than $9.99 an album.
I just had a long, emotional, drawn-out argument with the newsgroup rec.music.makers.songwriters over this very issue.
It's my opinion that piracy, murder, and theft are three very different, distinguishable offenses, and have to be treated as such. To call piracy an act of "theft" is just as dishonest as calling drug use an act of "terrorism".
The crime of theft has very definite implications. Theft always causes the victim to lose property. Property carries value, so value is always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator.
The mechanism of piracy is much different. Piracy does not act on existing property; it may or may not deprive the victim of future sales, or of the ability to make money in the future. There are acts of piracy which cause no financial harm at all; the pirate, for example, who illegally copies a piece of software, doesn't understand it, can't get it to install, and deletes it, can hardly have been said to have done harm to the company. Therefore, unlike theft, value is not always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator. The size of the victim's estate remains constant; the size of the perpetrator's estate grows.
Thievery is the act of illegal taking; piracy is the act of illegal copying; murder is the act of illegal killing. You can argue semantics and say that killing is the taking of life and copying is the taking of information, but I believe that to take - that is, to transfer ownership from one party to yourself - is very, very distinguishable from killing and copying.
Are there any real-world implications of this semantic debate? I think we're seeing them right here. This islamic cleric is issuing his fatwa against piracy not based on the harms of piracy, but based on the harms of theft. Falsely associating one concept with another prevents people from really reasoning out the implications of each concept. Let me put it this way: if piracy were legalized, much of corporate capitalism as we know it would be over. But if theft were legalized, society as we know it would be over.
There is a BIG ethical difference between stealing someone's real property, and refusing to acknowledge that a copyrighted work *is* real property. I'm not saying that one is ethical and the other isn't; I'm saying that there's a difference, and we'd better be prepared to tackle the two abstract concepts separately.
Well, nearly every patent is, in a sense, a method of using a tool.
While it doesn't make sense to patent the hammering of nails, it does make sense to patent, for example, a better hammer. And when it comes down to it, a hammer can be reduced to "a method of using a foundry to pour an alloy into a particular shape" and "a method of using a sawmill to cut wood in a particular shape" and "a method of using a robotic arm (or Indonesian eight-year-old) to attach a handle to the head of a hammer"
A computer itself is a tool; few would argue that *no* "method of using a computer" should be patented. If I spend ten years of my life developing an entirely new OS from scratch, and it's awesome, I should get some compensation.
The question, I guess, is the level of "tools with tools" at which a patent becomes reasonable. He who figures out how to fashion a computer from a series of factories deserves a patent. He who creates a more efficient OS for that computer probably deserves a patent. Even he who creates a new programming language under that OS probably deserves a patent.
But he who writes a three line script in an that programming language probably does not.
In fact, it's even listed as a religion on Britian's national census. Because over 10,000 fans listed "Jedi Knight" as their religion on the 2001 census, the government cannot consider it statistically insignificant.
And that doesn't even go into the rejection of false dichotomies
One particularly deep false dichotomy was the time that Towelie was offered a choice by the evil towel: save his friends, or take a hit off his precious bong. Towelie considered for a moment, and answered: "I choose both!"
I guess in a book called "Politics", it makes sense that Aristotle plays both sides of the fence
Aristotle's stance is consistent; it merely doesn't hug one of the extremes.
One problem today in American politics is that a politician is expected to take an extreme stance, and stick to it, like "Abortions for all!" or "No abortions for anyone!" In my mind, the very fact that both extreme stances exist and conflict is essentially proof that neither one in and of itself is correct.
Aristotle is right on both counts; 1) there needs to be a way for laws to adapt when conditions render them obselete; and 2) there needs to be a system set up so that laws can't be changed based on the whims of the moment.
I think the U.S. actually follows these guidelines pretty well; it takes so many votes to amend the constitution that we've really only done it a handful of times. Amendments like the "flag-burning amendment" or "abortion amendment" or "health insurance admendment" have been thought too frivolous to really have to go that deeply into our legal system. Really, with the exception of prohibition, most of the amendments have been absolutely necessary as times changed. Women's sufferage isn't something that should come and go as the national mood changes, but it is certainly something that needed to be implemented when various technologies drastically changed the role of the woman in society.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason that our more recent ideas aren't on the list is because we don't know which are the good ones yet. Hindsight is needed to appreciate what we've been doing.
Case in point: the article talks about The Modem: 1962. You really think a list compiled in 1972 would include that?
It really does make me wonder about the galaxy of technology that has already been invented, has a functional prototype, and which no member of the public will ever see until the year 2045. If you had the means to seek out all that stuff, you'd probably find that our society is 50 years more advanced than it appears.
For example, some of what I've read has indicated that recent revolutions in turbine technology (within the last 3 years) make it possible to run the world's power grid entirely with windmills on farms and hydroelectric power. How long do you think it'll take that innovation to become significant to our lives?
Are these shows too intelligent for the average viewer, or is it the sci-fi image that pushes people away?
Both are incorrect. It is the sci-fi image that shoves people away. Shoving is the answer. I am the pusher robot. PAK CHOOIE UNF.
So why would we chose not to protect the weakest among us? Why should we be allowed to perform experiments on a human being just because he can't talk yet, or doesn't look like one yet? Why should a human being be denied a chance at living a full life, simply because her parents find her inconvenient?
You make it sound like someone's experimenting on babies. No one's experimenting on humans who can't talk yet; they're experimenting on humans who will never talk, because they are dead. I strongly support research on the dead; without it, most freshman doctors would have to try to find your appendix from a chart. Failure rates would skyrocket.
Your secondary question is:
Why should a human being be denied a chance at living a full life, simply because her parents find her inconvenient?
The short answer is that (s)he should not be denied that chance. But there are, of course, dozens of other reasons for abortion. For example, women with reproductive problems may be faced with a terrible choice: abort the baby, or die in childbirth. Who are you to make that choice for her?
And there are dozens of grey areas - what about a woman raped by a man whose family has a history of cystic fibrosis? Are you going to tell her it's her moral duty to watch the child of her rapist grow to his teenage years, only to choke to death on his own liquefied lungs? Maybe that's the choice you'd make, but it's not a choice I can accept being imposed on someone else.
Although abortion shouldn't be used casually, as an alternate to birth control, there are situations where it is absolutely necessary. Life isn't so black-and-white as you're trying to make it out to be. And when a pregnancy is tragically required to be aborted, why waste the stem cells from that fetus? In my mind, that's a far greater waste of life than simply throwing the fetus in a container of biohazardous waste and shipping it somewhere to be incinerated.
while I don't like Bush's take on stem cell research any more than you do, I don't believe he banned it. He just cut off federal funding. Private companies can still partake
That's.. sort of right, and sort of wrong.
Bush didn't ban stem cell research - he banned the creation of new lines of stem cells for research. Thus, all research must proceed from existing lines. There are only a couple dozen in existence, and worries that only a handful of those are viable.
In other words, he didn't stop stem cell research, but it certainly made it more difficult and expensive for everyone.
I'm a (not terribly good) independent musician (if you have any interest in hearing my stuff, you can navigate over to the URL on my user page).
In 1999, at the height of the Napster furor, I decided I was going to boycott the entire RIAA until further notice; the implications of their copyright fanaticism on free speech are staggering, and I feel like I would be remiss in supporting it.
You can't really base a boycott on piracy, so I've stopped listening to RIAA recordings altogether; 99% of what I hear is stuff I download from other musicians' sites and burn to CD-R. And although you have to search a little harder, I think some of my CD-Rs are plain and simply *better* than anything the Big Four have put out since, say, 1985.
Here's two of the primary problems I encouter:
1. That fucking CD-R tax. Every time I buy a CD-R, Congress assumes I'm a pirate, and I have to pay a nickel to mega-acts like Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. That's exactly the kind of shit I'm trying to boycott in the first place; it infuriates me that they've circumvented some of my boycott through Congressional lobbying. In a way, I feel like I'd be justified in stealing a Britney CD and microwaving it; I'm paying for it, right? But I don't.
2. This eBay policy, and the dozens of similar policies, that assume that legitimate music cannot be packaged as a CD-R. News flash: it can. I own probably 100 CD-Rs given to me by various local and independent bands (in about 10% of cases, I paid about $5, but usually they just give them to me because they want me to hear the music). This stuff is not contraband! I'm not a pirate!
The most important thing we can do is be vigilant against the notion that if something doesn't come out of mainstream channels, it's somehow inferior or illegal. The RIAA pays lobbyists like Rosen millions of dollars a year to sell us that proposition; let them know we're not buying.
Each chemical that forms your DNA" is adenine, guanine, cytosine, or thymine, and we've known the chemical structure of all those for decades.
That's a bit incomplete. The helix itself isn't made of those chemicals; it's some kind of protein structure.
The original poster actually makes a valid argument, but only if the subject receiving the CD is not familiar with genetics. In other words, if we put the CD in a time capsule, and then wiped ourselves out with biological warfare, and then the Earth was resettled by aliens 150 million years later, then even if they knew the CD was full of some kind of genetic information, they wouldn't be able to recreate a human without some additional knowledge. Consider receiving the world's first MP3, being told it was "a song", and being asked to write a player. Now, think of something several orders of magnitude more difficult. Yeah, that's about right.
But even if he makes a valid point, it's not necessarily a very relevant one, since I see no compelling reason to care what happens to the universe after our species is extinct...
Years ago, I don't know where, I heard of someone making "DNA Music". They took A,C,T,G, and mapped them to musical notes: A->A, C->C, T->E, G->G. Fits rather nicely into the key of C major
Dude.. that's an Am7 chord. Your entire song is a "random arpeggio" through a single Am7 chord. Play it really fast and you've got.. an Am7 chord with a lot of vibrato on it.
I can't say I'm overwhelmingly impressed...
So we should start replacing words in our dictionaries?
Replacing words in dictionaries is a constant, ongoing process. The word "D'oh!" was completely unknown to the English language five years ago; today it can be found in most major dictionaries.
Spellings, historically, have changed slowly but steadily; it's interesting to read a little Chaucer and wonder just how many steps it took for "soute" to become "sweet".
Meanings tend to change a little faster. For example, there's an early-20th-century piece of literature (whose name escapes me today) that includes the sentence "He fagged his way down the road until he was knocked up." meaning "He walked until very tired." Obviously, connotative meanings of those terms have rendered that sentence completely obselete.
It's an inevitability that text-messaging will make an extremely rapid impact on the English language. It would not surprise me in the slightest if, 150 years from now, the correct spelling of "you" actually is "u".
Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea what happens if you take a huge file, like a DVD rip, rename it robots.txt, and stick it on your webserver?
The article isn't slashdotted. It doesn't mention private mail servers.
I'm guessing that the DOJ isn't pleased by the concept of private mail servers, though. It makes this kind of stuff much more difficult to subpoena. I own the domain www.youhavenochancetosurvivemakeyourtime.com; the WHOIS contact information is listed as Bageeno Hormonis of 123 Fake Street in Springfield. (Granted, the government could still track me down if it deemed necessary, but I'm sure that kind of stuff has to be an annoying waste of resources for them).
My best guess is that, yeah, retention requirements for public mail servers would apply to private mail servers, and you'd get hit with a substantial fine if the government tried to subpoena your mail and found it missing.
According to Locke, the "natural rights" of man are life, liberty, and the ability to own property; when you enter into a society, you turn over all those rights to the State in return for whatever rights it deems fit to grant you.
Thus, no one has the right to eat, have children, work, or be sheltered, unless their government sees fit to grant those rights. Certainly, America does not acknowledge a right to be employed or to eat; in fact, it's been known to blacklist people in the hope that they'll do neither.
And no, no society I'm aware of has ever given its citizens the right to copy information indiscriminately. Personally, I would love to see a society do so, because I suspect that such a society would actually probably end up richer in technology and culture. Both sides of the argument make some sense, but only one is actually tried, and it's apparent that excessively restrictive copyright laws actually retard cultural and economic growth. But, no, as it stands, society has deemed that the exclusive right to copy a piece of work is something a government can hand out.
I doubt that I'm alone in my belief that it is always tragic when any piece of information--no matter how trivial--is lost forever.
If a person has offered that information for free at any point, to the extent that an automated script could access it, then I believe that information can be safely considered public domain. I doubt that there's any mechanism by which Richard M. Stallman could lose his mind and "rein in" all copies of GNU, or by which Stephen King could recall all his novels and refund the purchase price; once something is offered to the public, it no longer belongs exclusively to the publisher.
In my opinion, the value of archives in the future immeasurably outweighs occasional inconveniences of having information stick around longer than the author would have wished.
practically engorged difference
turgid in their desire
teased by more modern devices
wipe up and flush
Dude! Your subconscious is
screaming at you to go out and get laid! Listen to it!
Please mod parent up.
Still, that said, I think that even without mergers, this drive to force consumers to replace everything they own will continue.
Look at computers. The game market pushes the hardware market which pushes the game market - but it's not the same company doing it.
And not to get *too* off-topic here, but I suspect that Civ III is horribly slow specifically because it's badly programmed to push the hardware market. It's really not significantly more complex a game than Civ II, and yet I can't even get to the medieval period without getting too sick of lagginess to continue. A K-6 500 with 256 megs of RAM should be enough power to run a freaking turn-based game.
Yeah, but are you going to trust the forecasting ability of the company that saw the future of video was DIVX?
:)
The future of video *is* DIVX. I pirate 95% of my DVDs in that format
Ever tried to by a tape of your favorite new album?
Tower Records still orders and stocks cassette tapes from the manufacturers, who still manufacture and sell them. Want to buy Puff Daddy on cassette? No problem.
(Actually, interestingly enough, my experience was that 60% of the tapes we sold were rap, compared to maybe 10% of CDs).
I'm a musican and (inept) recording artist, and actually, I think this is really encouraging. If people get used to paying $10 for an album with their credit card, well, it's the easiest thing in the world for me to offer my albums online for $5 (and in good old MP3 format, at that). The only real barrier to independent distribution is that the public is too hooked on plastic discs. And, hey, at $5, if I can just get 300 downloads a month, I'll be making more than the average schoolteacher - and that's a number that shouldn't be too hard to reach if I play shows every other weekend at various venues.
What's happening to music is almost communist; with digital recording, digital mastering, and digital distribution, the means of production are squarely in the hands of the people.
Then you're lame. If you're going to use something that someone's selling, pay for it.
I have a zip-loc bag here full of a fully breathable nitrogen-oxygen mixture (with some trace gases). Want to buy it? Only $9.99.
going from a $20 CD to a $9.99 downloadable album or a $0.99 track is the RIAA realizing that the natural price is lower than what they've been charging.
That would be nice, yeah. But you're wrong.
I used to work at Tower Records, and my employee discount was "cost plus 10%", so I checked out the costs of a lot of discs. The average cost of a CD to the store was about $7-11; the store markup was usually anywhere from $2 to $10.
If you figure that the cost of manufacturing and shipping these CDs is probably somewhat higher than buying bandwidth and paying web designers, then the RIAA is actually charging more for music than they used to. They've just cut trucks and CDs out of the equation.
I don't think that the natural price of music is zero. People are willing to pay for convenience and to legitimize their activities, and they often want to support the artists who make the music. But, you're right, I think the natural price of music is far, far, far lower than $9.99 an album.
I just had a long, emotional, drawn-out argument with the newsgroup rec.music.makers.songwriters over this very issue.
It's my opinion that piracy, murder, and theft are three very different, distinguishable offenses, and have to be treated as such. To call piracy an act of "theft" is just as dishonest as calling drug use an act of "terrorism".
The crime of theft has very definite implications. Theft always causes the victim to lose property. Property carries value, so value is always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator.
The mechanism of piracy is much different. Piracy does not act on existing property; it may or may not deprive the victim of future sales, or of the ability to make money in the future. There are acts of piracy which cause no financial harm at all; the pirate, for example, who illegally copies a piece of software, doesn't understand it, can't get it to install, and deletes it, can hardly have been said to have done harm to the company. Therefore, unlike theft, value is not always transferred from the victim to the perpetrator. The size of the victim's estate remains constant; the size of the perpetrator's estate grows.
Thievery is the act of illegal taking; piracy is the act of illegal copying; murder is the act of illegal killing. You can argue semantics and say that killing is the taking of life and copying is the taking of information, but I believe that to take - that is, to transfer ownership from one party to yourself - is very, very distinguishable from killing and copying.
Are there any real-world implications of this semantic debate? I think we're seeing them right here. This islamic cleric is issuing his fatwa against piracy not based on the harms of piracy, but based on the harms of theft. Falsely associating one concept with another prevents people from really reasoning out the implications of each concept. Let me put it this way: if piracy were legalized, much of corporate capitalism as we know it would be over. But if theft were legalized, society as we know it would be over.
There is a BIG ethical difference between stealing someone's real property, and refusing to acknowledge that a copyrighted work *is* real property. I'm not saying that one is ethical and the other isn't; I'm saying that there's a difference, and we'd better be prepared to tackle the two abstract concepts separately.
Just remember this George Bush interview:
Warning: This is intentionally misleading. Yes, this is a George Bush quote - a George Bush, Sr. quote.
I don't like Dubya, but as far as I know he's never echoed his father's opinion that atheists should be denied citizenship.
How can you patent a method of using a tool?
Well, nearly every patent is, in a sense, a method of using a tool.
While it doesn't make sense to patent the hammering of nails, it does make sense to patent, for example, a better hammer. And when it comes down to it, a hammer can be reduced to "a method of using a foundry to pour an alloy into a particular shape" and "a method of using a sawmill to cut wood in a particular shape" and "a method of using a robotic arm (or Indonesian eight-year-old) to attach a handle to the head of a hammer"
A computer itself is a tool; few would argue that *no* "method of using a computer" should be patented. If I spend ten years of my life developing an entirely new OS from scratch, and it's awesome, I should get some compensation.
The question, I guess, is the level of "tools with tools" at which a patent becomes reasonable. He who figures out how to fashion a computer from a series of factories deserves a patent. He who creates a more efficient OS for that computer probably deserves a patent. Even he who creates a new programming language under that OS probably deserves a patent.
But he who writes a three line script in an that programming language probably does not.
It is a movie, not a religion
It is a religion.
In fact, it's even listed as a religion on Britian's national census. Because over 10,000 fans listed "Jedi Knight" as their religion on the 2001 census, the government cannot consider it statistically insignificant.
Lest I get heavily flamed, let me just acknowledge that this fact does not grant the Jedi any legal religious status.
And that doesn't even go into the rejection of false dichotomies
One particularly deep false dichotomy was the time that Towelie was offered a choice by the evil towel: save his friends, or take a hit off his precious bong. Towelie considered for a moment, and answered: "I choose both!"
I guess in a book called "Politics", it makes sense that Aristotle plays both sides of the fence
Aristotle's stance is consistent; it merely doesn't hug one of the extremes.
One problem today in American politics is that a politician is expected to take an extreme stance, and stick to it, like "Abortions for all!" or "No abortions for anyone!" In my mind, the very fact that both extreme stances exist and conflict is essentially proof that neither one in and of itself is correct.
Aristotle is right on both counts; 1) there needs to be a way for laws to adapt when conditions render them obselete; and 2) there needs to be a system set up so that laws can't be changed based on the whims of the moment.
I think the U.S. actually follows these guidelines pretty well; it takes so many votes to amend the constitution that we've really only done it a handful of times. Amendments like the "flag-burning amendment" or "abortion amendment" or "health insurance admendment" have been thought too frivolous to really have to go that deeply into our legal system. Really, with the exception of prohibition, most of the amendments have been absolutely necessary as times changed. Women's sufferage isn't something that should come and go as the national mood changes, but it is certainly something that needed to be implemented when various technologies drastically changed the role of the woman in society.