For every Mona Lisa or David, there are a crapload of priceless artistic treasures that have been lost to antiquity. Just because some stuff gets saved and preserved doesn't mean that it's the most effective means that were used to accomplish it, or that there weren't other things lost that could have been saved had other means of preservation been available (and legal).
The "render unto caesar" quote is one of the most notoriously tricky passages from the Bible. What did Jesus actually mean by that? Some interpret it to mean that since God made everything, then everything is God's and therefore Caesar is entitled to nothing.
Call it "Nanny computing." It's more pejorative. And accurate.
"Curated" sounds like the company who's controlling your systems is a servant who works for you, a "custodian" of the inner plumbing of your device which you as lord and master do not need to trifle with.
HTML is inadequate as a software platform - it's a markup language, not a proper development language.
Pretty much.
That's not to say that you can't have applications which are embedded in an HTML document, such as java applets or javascript or flash objects, or whatever.
As well, you can also have applications which present an HTML-based interface to a user, and generate more HTML-based stuff as their output (and do other things as well). In other words, your traditional "web application" that you access through a browser.
It is laden with hacks and "extensions" by individual browsers that are not officially supported and therefore not found in other browsers. Maintaining backwards compatibility creates a very difficult environment to develop web applications in.
Yes, although I see this as more of a history and legacy of HTML from basically the start of the browser wars until around 2005-6. While bleeding edge web development might still utilize hacks, the need for hacks for the stuff that is provided in the W3C Recommendations for HTML4+CSS2.1 is pretty much over.
If you want to use HTML5+CSS3, you're back to working with hacks until W3C finalizes their Recommendation and browser vendors catch up and implement in a W3C-compliant manner. You don't *need* to do this, just wait for the Recommendation to be finalized and for browser vendors to implement it.
But the point I am making now is that browser vendors have largely given up trying to hijack HTML and extend it with proprietary tags that no other browser vendor uses. Microsoft has shifted the war away from the browser and conceded on HTML being an open standard. They are now focusing on making HTML irrelevant by going beyond it and developing Silverlight.
As the WWW moves further and further away from serving static content, and more towards application functionality, HTML will be forced to adapt and innovate, or else become irrelevant as XAML provides web app developers an easier way to make better user interfaces for web apps.
Just because HTML *today* is a document markup language doesn't mean that HTML *tomorrow* has to be so limited. W3C could create recommendations that will provide open standards that will make HTML5- or 6- or 7- or whatever-based web apps easier to build and provide better interfaces. Indeed, I want them to.
But we've been in a world of HTML4 for about a decade. The first half of that decade was spent waiting for the Browser Wars to settle out and for browser vendors to fall in line and deliver compliant implementations of W3C recommendations. During this time, W3C couldn't do much more than wait for browser vendors to catch up. The second half of the decade, HTML and CSS have stagnated. W3C have taken forever to finalize HTML5 and CSS3, and other players have realized that this creates an innovation vacuum and an opportunity for them to step in and usurp the open web by making better solutions that happen to be proprietary.
W3C need to innovate and release more rapidly in order to be able to compete with Adobe AIR and Microsof Silverlight and whatever other proprietary technologies may emerge and threaten to make the WWW a proprietary domain. I want HTML5 to be great and serve the WWW for a long time, but if we don't see continuous development of innovative extensions to base HTML5, surely companies that have the means to provide these innovations in W3C's absence will do so, and thereby put the future of the open web in jeopardy.
The W3C lacks the authority to reliably set standards and best-practices for the industry that a closed-source vendor would have.
Kindof. The W3C doesn't call their Recommendations standards; they call them Recommendations for a reason. Nevertheless, their recommendations serve as a common and open standard that everyone can make use of, and this is a Good Thing. What's bad is that W3C haven't in
Right; XAML was just an example. It's not to say that there are not others.
Any proprietary replacement for HTML that is better than HTML for web application development will have a good chance of supplanting plain old HTML if HTML does not advance and innovate to keep pace with the state of the art.
I actually said that HTML4+CSS2.1 has deficiencies, among them an inability to do columns. True columns (where text flows from the bottom of Column A into the top of Columb B) are not possible using HTML+CSS. It's possible to do layout with divs or tables that look like columns, but they are not true columns, and positioning the divs correctly is not easy to figure out how to do.
Shortcomings in the current recommendation are precisely what leaves the door open for a new technology such as XAML/Silverlight to come in and make regular HTML+CSS obsolete.
What I said was easy is writing W3C-valid HTML+CSS. The rules for marking up a valid document are not hard to understand or follow.
First, minor nitpick though it may be, HTML isn't coding, it's markup. It shouldn't require a 90th percentile web developer to craft it. All you have to do is understand and follow about 2-5 pages of straightforward rules, and you can create a valid HTML file. It's not hard. People don't do it not because they're dumb, but because they can get away with it.
HTML was designed to be as accessible to new developers as possible. If it had not been, and you could only do web development if you were in the 90th percentile of brilliant developers, it would not have taken off so explosively in the mid-90's.
HTML was originally designed to be loose and forgiving about markup errors. This was both good (HTML was fault tolerant; you could still read a page even if the author didn't mark up everything perfectly) and bad (because now the browser had to do a lot of guessing to infer the intent behind the bad markup and render it somehow, and this made things very prone to error and inconsistent rendering). Ultimately it was recognized to be bad, so W3C tightened up the rules for validating correct HTML syntax, and web developers who cared learned to appreciate the benefits of valid markup. The browser is still forgiving of invalid markup, of course, so bad markup is still tolerated. But unless the web developer recognizes the value of valid markup (consistent rendering as intended), which isn't hard to author, they will tend not to worry about validation, and will continue to think that the web ecosystem still sucks as much as it did in the late 90's when browsers from various vendors were widely inconsistent.
In the early days, the browser wars were not just about who owned the market share, but who could usurp the open standard for HTML and CSS through vendor lockin to unofficial vendor-specific HTML tags. Browser vendors thought they could win the browser wars if they could advance HTML and offer web developers incentives to develop web sites for a specific browser, and thereby steer the market toward using the preferred browser.
As a result, browser developers routinely ignored, broke, or unofficially extended W3C recommendations in ways which made web development a horrible nightmare. When W3C released HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 recommendations, it took nearly 6 years for browser vendors to deliver browsers that actually supported those standard anywhere near decently.
They STILL don't support the standards fully, 100%. W3C has never even finalized the CSS 2.1 recommendation, for that matter.
We've been stuck in a decade of HTML4/XHTML1 + CSS 2.1 stagnation. Only the last 4-5 years have been decent for web developers to fully use clean, compliant HTML4+CSS2.1, and even then only if they elect to break compatibility for outdated browsers and focus on supporting reasonably modern versions of the major browsers that have finally gotten on board with supporting the W3C recommendations.
The downside to this decade of stagnation is that we've been stuck with the limitations of HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 for a long time, long enough for other people to come up with other ideas. Things like tableless layout, fluid layout, rounded corners, transparency, server-provided fonts, multi-column text flow, and so on have frustrated web developers for the last decade. W3C really couldn't do much about it for the first half of that decade because it took browser vendors that long to just get their shit together enough to support the most recent standard. But now, they've been taking way too long to advance to the next level.
HTML 5 and CSS3 are nearly here, and are already partly supported by contemporary mainstream browsers. This is good, but we really need to see a faster adoption, especially in the advancement through the Recommendation process. Unless innovation happens on a regular basis, other players out there are bound to realize that you don't have to serve only HTML over HTTP. Microsoft has something called XAML now, which they use to build rich interfaces for Silve
while (Flash.Sucks) { Developer.Bitch(); Developer.Moan(); Developer.Complain(); }
While in another thread, I have:
while (Apple.IsBastards) { Developer.Bitch(); Developer.Moan(); Developer.Complain(); }
These threads are deadlocked in a race condition, and meanwhile, most Users have absolutely no idea what's going on. Surprisingly few of them even seem to care.
Either way, it's something too small to be sticking out of the console, or put a pretty label on. And future consoles will likely have even smaller media, if they do use some kind of removable media.
You pop the game into the top of the console, so the game is sticking out the top like in ye olden times, and you could see the sweet artwork on the front of the cartridge.
DS games are like a microSD format, and are tiny. I don't think we'll see a return to bulky Atari or NES-style game carts.
More likely, downloadable games will be the future anyway. And they'll be rented content, tied to servers, and DRMed to the point that you in no way actually own the game unless you're actively paying for it and you are bio-authenticated.
Right, like I said, there are problems with both approaches. 3D chips will have cooling issues, larger dies will have issues with timing due to the speed of the signals vs. the distance they have to cover.
I think the speed of light issue can be somewhat mitigated by having many small cores on a single die, working in a small enough area that speed-of-light problems are minimized.
At some point, they'll realize that instead of making the die features smaller, they can make the die larger. Or three-dimensional. There are problems with both approaches, but they'll be able to continue doubling transistor count if they figure out how to do this, for a time.
Do you really think that the entire ocean would need to be contaminated before we had major problems? Can you possibly be that blind?
The ocean's volume may be fast, but it doesn't take contamination of the entire volume of the ocean's water to seriously disrupt life in and out of the oceans.
The oil on the surface blocks sunlight. A large percentage of the ocean life that we know about lives in the layer that depends highly on sunlight. Mammals and birds need to be able to reach the surface in order to breathe.
Spend your next vacation on the coast of the gulf and visit the affected areas. Maybe that will open your eyes.
All the money in the world won't bring back the species that will be threatened by this spill, or the delicate ecosystems that they used for habitat. That's going to be the real cost of this disaster.
It's OK as far as I know to prosecute on information obtained illegally, as long as the perpetrators of the illegal information gathering were not law enforcement. IANAL, so...
I was just thinking about paying them for the excellent service I've had for free for the last 10 years. I've had a free account with them for that long, and have always been extremely happy. Never paid for an upgrade because I never needed it. I think I'll hold off now and see how Opera handles the takeover.
Given that everything is automatically and implicitly copyrighted the moment it is committed to a storage medium, by whoever authored it, you're absolutely right. Nearly all file copy operations are in violation of copyright law.
On P2P networks, most certainly, 99% of what's available AND what is actually being transferred is not merely copyrighted, but commercially available product. And sharing that stuff for free does hurt the business model of selling it, without question.
The thing is, technology has progressed to the point where that business model is no longer viable, without onerous and draconian law enforcement. It's about ten years past time to see the writing on the wall, and change the business model, or go out of business and find another line of work.
Moreover, it's time for the laws to be rewritten so that they make sense for the realities of the present day and forseeable future market.
The problem with that is that those who profited greatly by the old order are not going to let go of their empires willingly, and will fight tooth and nail to preserve them, even at the expense of destroying culture.
They don't want to have to imagine, innovate, and work out new ways of doing business. They want their old business model to be preserved by legal fiat for all eternity.
Technologies and industries can and do become obsolete. Adapt or die is how business works. I'm not here provide free business consulting, but when your business model hinges upon restricting everyone else's rights to the point where they no longer have them anymore, that's a real problem.
Rather than selling copies on physical media, and rather than selling downloads, they could figure out a business model that allows them to make money by leveraging freely available, freely distributable content.
We can streamline the industry greatly by eliminating a vast amount of middlemen, and probably we don't really need publishers anymore. You don't need an industry when you can do everything yourself out of your bedroom. Charge for performances and appearances. Use the recording for promotion.
The industry will shrink, and that's a good thing, because at present it's bloated. They're dinosaurs taking their last gasps, and they don't care who their death rattle crushes. I guess I don't blame them, really. But that doesn't mean I have any sympathy for them. They could have seen things coming and adapted and continued to be relevant and provide useful services that people need. They chose instead not to.
When I tried being a cub scout for a couple years, all we did was sit around in the suburbs and glue popsicle sticks together. Do the cub scouts even go outside anymore?
That argument assumes they don't make the distinction between piracy and fair use. There is a huge difference. Most pirates don't make such distinctions and assume theft is covered by fair use. It is not.
Correct. But it is also true that many takedown notices and C&D's are thrown at legitimate fair use of copyrighted material. MAFIAA lawyers don't really appear to discriminate between fair use and piracy.
I tend to agree with kklien, in that I would like to be compensated for my work, not for the time I took to accomplish the work.
I am not compensated for ideas I have in the shower, or stuff that comes to me in dreams. My company wants me to put 40 hours into a timesheet every week, sometimes more, but never less, unless I'm taking leave time. It doesn't matter to them if I can get everything they want me to do in 30 or 20 hours. If I can, they'll find more work for me to do to fill up the remaining time. It doesn't matter to them whether it has anything to do with my career field or not.
I wear a pager and there's an expectation that I'll respond to pages potentially at any time, as though I'm a firefigher constantly on duty. I'm not compensated for all the time I wear the pager. My stance is that if they can page me at any time, intruding into my personal time, and expect me to drop whatever I'm doing and come in and do work, then they can damn well let me do some personal stuff during work hours, as long as I'm delivering consistent, high quality results. This includes casual web surfing, making personal phone calls, sending faxes from the office, and doing business with companies whose only hours of operation happen to be the same hours that I'm expected to be in the office doing work.
Slashdot Mirror
mv *.tarball > /dev/null
For every Mona Lisa or David, there are a crapload of priceless artistic treasures that have been lost to antiquity. Just because some stuff gets saved and preserved doesn't mean that it's the most effective means that were used to accomplish it, or that there weren't other things lost that could have been saved had other means of preservation been available (and legal).
NASA's link says the 777 design flies 10% slower. A pretty good return!
Also, anyone can read, write, and execute it.
The "render unto caesar" quote is one of the most notoriously tricky passages from the Bible. What did Jesus actually mean by that? Some interpret it to mean that since God made everything, then everything is God's and therefore Caesar is entitled to nothing.
Well, for starters iPad is closer to a general purpose computer than a game console.
Call it "Nanny computing." It's more pejorative. And accurate.
"Curated" sounds like the company who's controlling your systems is a servant who works for you, a "custodian" of the inner plumbing of your device which you as lord and master do not need to trifle with.
So let me see if I can sum this up:
HTML is inadequate as a software platform - it's a markup language, not a proper development language.
Pretty much.
That's not to say that you can't have applications which are embedded in an HTML document, such as java applets or javascript or flash objects, or whatever.
As well, you can also have applications which present an HTML-based interface to a user, and generate more HTML-based stuff as their output (and do other things as well). In other words, your traditional "web application" that you access through a browser.
It is laden with hacks and "extensions" by individual browsers that are not officially supported and therefore not found in other browsers. Maintaining backwards compatibility creates a very difficult environment to develop web applications in.
Yes, although I see this as more of a history and legacy of HTML from basically the start of the browser wars until around 2005-6. While bleeding edge web development might still utilize hacks, the need for hacks for the stuff that is provided in the W3C Recommendations for HTML4+CSS2.1 is pretty much over.
If you want to use HTML5+CSS3, you're back to working with hacks until W3C finalizes their Recommendation and browser vendors catch up and implement in a W3C-compliant manner. You don't *need* to do this, just wait for the Recommendation to be finalized and for browser vendors to implement it.
But the point I am making now is that browser vendors have largely given up trying to hijack HTML and extend it with proprietary tags that no other browser vendor uses. Microsoft has shifted the war away from the browser and conceded on HTML being an open standard. They are now focusing on making HTML irrelevant by going beyond it and developing Silverlight.
As the WWW moves further and further away from serving static content, and more towards application functionality, HTML will be forced to adapt and innovate, or else become irrelevant as XAML provides web app developers an easier way to make better user interfaces for web apps.
Just because HTML *today* is a document markup language doesn't mean that HTML *tomorrow* has to be so limited. W3C could create recommendations that will provide open standards that will make HTML5- or 6- or 7- or whatever-based web apps easier to build and provide better interfaces. Indeed, I want them to.
But we've been in a world of HTML4 for about a decade. The first half of that decade was spent waiting for the Browser Wars to settle out and for browser vendors to fall in line and deliver compliant implementations of W3C recommendations. During this time, W3C couldn't do much more than wait for browser vendors to catch up. The second half of the decade, HTML and CSS have stagnated. W3C have taken forever to finalize HTML5 and CSS3, and other players have realized that this creates an innovation vacuum and an opportunity for them to step in and usurp the open web by making better solutions that happen to be proprietary.
W3C need to innovate and release more rapidly in order to be able to compete with Adobe AIR and Microsof Silverlight and whatever other proprietary technologies may emerge and threaten to make the WWW a proprietary domain. I want HTML5 to be great and serve the WWW for a long time, but if we don't see continuous development of innovative extensions to base HTML5, surely companies that have the means to provide these innovations in W3C's absence will do so, and thereby put the future of the open web in jeopardy.
The W3C lacks the authority to reliably set standards and best-practices for the industry that a closed-source vendor would have.
Kindof. The W3C doesn't call their Recommendations standards; they call them Recommendations for a reason. Nevertheless, their recommendations serve as a common and open standard that everyone can make use of, and this is a Good Thing. What's bad is that W3C haven't in
Right; XAML was just an example. It's not to say that there are not others.
Any proprietary replacement for HTML that is better than HTML for web application development will have a good chance of supplanting plain old HTML if HTML does not advance and innovate to keep pace with the state of the art.
You misunderstood what I wrote.
I actually said that HTML4+CSS2.1 has deficiencies, among them an inability to do columns. True columns (where text flows from the bottom of Column A into the top of Columb B) are not possible using HTML+CSS. It's possible to do layout with divs or tables that look like columns, but they are not true columns, and positioning the divs correctly is not easy to figure out how to do.
Shortcomings in the current recommendation are precisely what leaves the door open for a new technology such as XAML/Silverlight to come in and make regular HTML+CSS obsolete.
What I said was easy is writing W3C-valid HTML+CSS. The rules for marking up a valid document are not hard to understand or follow.
First, minor nitpick though it may be, HTML isn't coding, it's markup. It shouldn't require a 90th percentile web developer to craft it. All you have to do is understand and follow about 2-5 pages of straightforward rules, and you can create a valid HTML file. It's not hard. People don't do it not because they're dumb, but because they can get away with it.
HTML was designed to be as accessible to new developers as possible. If it had not been, and you could only do web development if you were in the 90th percentile of brilliant developers, it would not have taken off so explosively in the mid-90's.
HTML was originally designed to be loose and forgiving about markup errors. This was both good (HTML was fault tolerant; you could still read a page even if the author didn't mark up everything perfectly) and bad (because now the browser had to do a lot of guessing to infer the intent behind the bad markup and render it somehow, and this made things very prone to error and inconsistent rendering). Ultimately it was recognized to be bad, so W3C tightened up the rules for validating correct HTML syntax, and web developers who cared learned to appreciate the benefits of valid markup. The browser is still forgiving of invalid markup, of course, so bad markup is still tolerated. But unless the web developer recognizes the value of valid markup (consistent rendering as intended), which isn't hard to author, they will tend not to worry about validation, and will continue to think that the web ecosystem still sucks as much as it did in the late 90's when browsers from various vendors were widely inconsistent.
In the early days, the browser wars were not just about who owned the market share, but who could usurp the open standard for HTML and CSS through vendor lockin to unofficial vendor-specific HTML tags. Browser vendors thought they could win the browser wars if they could advance HTML and offer web developers incentives to develop web sites for a specific browser, and thereby steer the market toward using the preferred browser.
As a result, browser developers routinely ignored, broke, or unofficially extended W3C recommendations in ways which made web development a horrible nightmare. When W3C released HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 recommendations, it took nearly 6 years for browser vendors to deliver browsers that actually supported those standard anywhere near decently.
They STILL don't support the standards fully, 100%. W3C has never even finalized the CSS 2.1 recommendation, for that matter.
We've been stuck in a decade of HTML4/XHTML1 + CSS 2.1 stagnation. Only the last 4-5 years have been decent for web developers to fully use clean, compliant HTML4+CSS2.1, and even then only if they elect to break compatibility for outdated browsers and focus on supporting reasonably modern versions of the major browsers that have finally gotten on board with supporting the W3C recommendations.
The downside to this decade of stagnation is that we've been stuck with the limitations of HTML 4 and CSS 2.1 for a long time, long enough for other people to come up with other ideas. Things like tableless layout, fluid layout, rounded corners, transparency, server-provided fonts, multi-column text flow, and so on have frustrated web developers for the last decade. W3C really couldn't do much about it for the first half of that decade because it took browser vendors that long to just get their shit together enough to support the most recent standard. But now, they've been taking way too long to advance to the next level.
HTML 5 and CSS3 are nearly here, and are already partly supported by contemporary mainstream browsers. This is good, but we really need to see a faster adoption, especially in the advancement through the Recommendation process. Unless innovation happens on a regular basis, other players out there are bound to realize that you don't have to serve only HTML over HTTP. Microsoft has something called XAML now, which they use to build rich interfaces for Silve
In one thread, I have this going on:
while (Flash.Sucks)
{
Developer.Bitch();
Developer.Moan();
Developer.Complain();
}
While in another thread, I have:
while (Apple.IsBastards)
{
Developer.Bitch();
Developer.Moan();
Developer.Complain();
}
These threads are deadlocked in a race condition, and meanwhile, most Users have absolutely no idea what's going on. Surprisingly few of them even seem to care.
Either way, it's something too small to be sticking out of the console, or put a pretty label on. And future consoles will likely have even smaller media, if they do use some kind of removable media.
DS games are like a microSD format, and are tiny. I don't think we'll see a return to bulky Atari or NES-style game carts.
More likely, downloadable games will be the future anyway. And they'll be rented content, tied to servers, and DRMed to the point that you in no way actually own the game unless you're actively paying for it and you are bio-authenticated.
You mean they're not?
I like mice, but at times I find that keyboard is faster.
Uh, they do realize that Mac OS X is a fully certified Unix OS, right? And for that matter, that you can easily run Linux on Mac hardware.
Right, like I said, there are problems with both approaches. 3D chips will have cooling issues, larger dies will have issues with timing due to the speed of the signals vs. the distance they have to cover.
I think the speed of light issue can be somewhat mitigated by having many small cores on a single die, working in a small enough area that speed-of-light problems are minimized.
At some point, they'll realize that instead of making the die features smaller, they can make the die larger. Or three-dimensional. There are problems with both approaches, but they'll be able to continue doubling transistor count if they figure out how to do this, for a time.
Do you really think that the entire ocean would need to be contaminated before we had major problems? Can you possibly be that blind?
The ocean's volume may be fast, but it doesn't take contamination of the entire volume of the ocean's water to seriously disrupt life in and out of the oceans.
The oil on the surface blocks sunlight. A large percentage of the ocean life that we know about lives in the layer that depends highly on sunlight. Mammals and birds need to be able to reach the surface in order to breathe.
Spend your next vacation on the coast of the gulf and visit the affected areas. Maybe that will open your eyes.
All the money in the world won't bring back the species that will be threatened by this spill, or the delicate ecosystems that they used for habitat. That's going to be the real cost of this disaster.
When will it be out?
It's OK as far as I know to prosecute on information obtained illegally, as long as the perpetrators of the illegal information gathering were not law enforcement. IANAL, so...
I was just thinking about paying them for the excellent service I've had for free for the last 10 years. I've had a free account with them for that long, and have always been extremely happy. Never paid for an upgrade because I never needed it. I think I'll hold off now and see how Opera handles the takeover.
Given that everything is automatically and implicitly copyrighted the moment it is committed to a storage medium, by whoever authored it, you're absolutely right. Nearly all file copy operations are in violation of copyright law.
On P2P networks, most certainly, 99% of what's available AND what is actually being transferred is not merely copyrighted, but commercially available product. And sharing that stuff for free does hurt the business model of selling it, without question.
The thing is, technology has progressed to the point where that business model is no longer viable, without onerous and draconian law enforcement. It's about ten years past time to see the writing on the wall, and change the business model, or go out of business and find another line of work.
Moreover, it's time for the laws to be rewritten so that they make sense for the realities of the present day and forseeable future market.
The problem with that is that those who profited greatly by the old order are not going to let go of their empires willingly, and will fight tooth and nail to preserve them, even at the expense of destroying culture.
They don't want to have to imagine, innovate, and work out new ways of doing business. They want their old business model to be preserved by legal fiat for all eternity.
Technologies and industries can and do become obsolete. Adapt or die is how business works. I'm not here provide free business consulting, but when your business model hinges upon restricting everyone else's rights to the point where they no longer have them anymore, that's a real problem.
Rather than selling copies on physical media, and rather than selling downloads, they could figure out a business model that allows them to make money by leveraging freely available, freely distributable content.
We can streamline the industry greatly by eliminating a vast amount of middlemen, and probably we don't really need publishers anymore. You don't need an industry when you can do everything yourself out of your bedroom. Charge for performances and appearances. Use the recording for promotion.
The industry will shrink, and that's a good thing, because at present it's bloated. They're dinosaurs taking their last gasps, and they don't care who their death rattle crushes. I guess I don't blame them, really. But that doesn't mean I have any sympathy for them. They could have seen things coming and adapted and continued to be relevant and provide useful services that people need. They chose instead not to.
When I tried being a cub scout for a couple years, all we did was sit around in the suburbs and glue popsicle sticks together. Do the cub scouts even go outside anymore?
Hence, that $$$ these companies are deriving from
That argument assumes they don't make the distinction between piracy and fair use. There is a huge difference. Most pirates don't make such distinctions and assume theft is covered by fair use. It is not.
Correct. But it is also true that many takedown notices and C&D's are thrown at legitimate fair use of copyrighted material. MAFIAA lawyers don't really appear to discriminate between fair use and piracy.
I tend to agree with kklien, in that I would like to be compensated for my work, not for the time I took to accomplish the work.
I am not compensated for ideas I have in the shower, or stuff that comes to me in dreams. My company wants me to put 40 hours into a timesheet every week, sometimes more, but never less, unless I'm taking leave time. It doesn't matter to them if I can get everything they want me to do in 30 or 20 hours. If I can, they'll find more work for me to do to fill up the remaining time. It doesn't matter to them whether it has anything to do with my career field or not.
I wear a pager and there's an expectation that I'll respond to pages potentially at any time, as though I'm a firefigher constantly on duty. I'm not compensated for all the time I wear the pager. My stance is that if they can page me at any time, intruding into my personal time, and expect me to drop whatever I'm doing and come in and do work, then they can damn well let me do some personal stuff during work hours, as long as I'm delivering consistent, high quality results. This includes casual web surfing, making personal phone calls, sending faxes from the office, and doing business with companies whose only hours of operation happen to be the same hours that I'm expected to be in the office doing work.