still want to be able to watch their kids no matter where they are.
Why is this considered a good idea? The damage that can be done to a child if their parent can watch them *no matter where they are* is huge: they tend to not develop any kind of effective independence or personal strength, and they tend to have very bad relationships with their parents on trust grounds.
Being able to monitor children effectively is one thing: considering that the desire to watch them *no matter where they are* is reasonable is quite a different thing. At what point does the need of the child for privacy and indepdendence of choice override the protective desire of the parent? I would argue that it is from this, virtually unanswerable, question that the entire debate depends.
Why would a kid too young to think their way around this surveillance system have a cell phone on them at all? They'd have to be too young to responsibly use it.
As I see it, the real problem here is that ISP's bank on the fact that you'll use a lot less bandwidth than what you think you're paying for. The broadband connection to your house is (almost) always on, and if you wanted you could download stuff at a pretty decent clip 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. Nobody really does that, though...
Only for values of 'nobody' which includes a really rather large number of people. I'm an ISP and telecommunications engineer. We're expanding our broadband portfolio at the moment, so I've been looking at usage patterns. Most customers, indeed, use their pipe pretty much in 'peak hours', and not solidly but in repeated spikes through that time (peak hours, btw, are about 8am to about midnight by this definition). However, a significant enough percentage that we need to plan for them display a long term useage pattern of incoming and outgoing, nailed up to flat-line, 24/7. This persists through upgrades (ie. they're flatlined 24/7 at 512 down, 256 up, and then they get an upgrade, and they go straight up to 2Mb down, 512 up and sit nailed there, etc).
~cHris
Re:Some monetary reasons to return to the moon
on
Back to the Moon
·
· Score: 1
It should be considered that there are fringe benefits here: systematically strip-mining the moon will have a significantly lower risk of causing indigenous inhabitants to murder thousands of Americans than doing the same to any of the other places available at the moment.
If you wanted to get lost in 1890, you could. You can't get lost today. DNA, fingerprinting, mandatory photo IDs, e-mail, telephones, RF communications, purchasing habits. You can be found in America. Sure, if you disappear into some caves in Afghanistan, no one can find you, but the second you plug into the grid in modern America, you're there to stay. Jefferson is rolling over in his grave.
This raises a quite interesting train of thought about the nature of choices. In order to effectively 'dissappear', even prior to modern photo-IDs and DNA profiles, you usually needed to sacrifice access to civilisation. Using your 1890 metaphor, you had to go further west, or you had to go to small-town America away from the big city, leave your name behind, abandon assets in order to run, and so on.
What you're describing here is that if you're on the grid, you can be found. That's true, I'd say, unless you have a reasonable understanding of the techniques the finders use. However, being on the grid is a choice. It's a choice to live a lifestyle which involves you in the grid, in modern life. Your point about going to Afghanistan is really a point about personal choice.
Living on the grid is not a requirement: it's a choice. I have access to this view because I grew up off the grid, I didn't really plug in until 1995 when I was 18. But in the modern west, we tend to see electricity, running water and computer access as being basic standards of living, and they aren't: they're choices. If one chooses a different style of life, once can happily avoid the grid.
I guess I'm not really making an argument here, just thinking out loud, but it's interesting. Thank you.
And the primary instrument our government has for that is legislation:
Yikes! No. It's the Constitution that does that. Legislation comes and goes, but the key structural pillars of the government are set forth in the Constitution.
... Which is a piece of legislation. You can tell that, if nothing else, by who it is that changes it: it's not the Judiciary, and it isn't the Executive Branch.
I'm talking about corporate sponsored refusal to carry types of traffic.
Then they would lose their "common carrier" status, a fate VERY few of the big boys would willingly risk.
That's pretty much exactly what we're talking about, yes. Thing is, though, losing common carrier status would require someone to take it off them. The real problem, as highlighted by TFA and many others people over the last few years, is that the lawmakers will redifine internet traffic such that doing this to it does not violate the definition of "common carrier". That's the whole point: changing the language such that you can do stuff currently considered risky. That's a part of what the attack on P2P content is about: permits people to get away with banning the traffic.
A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government. --George Washington
Our government can't perform a mass seizure because the people are armed.
They are not, however, disciplined. This is the crux of the 'well-regulated' bit right before 'militia' in the second ammendment. Both Washington, and the framers of the second ammendment, make it clear in their language that they are talking about organisations which train and discipline their members, not about private gun ownership. This is, of course, never going to be clear legally because far too many have far too much vested in ensuring that the majority of people with a gun don't know how to use it properly.
I have no issue with somone who's gone to Thunder Ranch and qualified for handgun expertise up to full combat-condition examinations including soft-target testing carrying a gun in every day life. They have demonstrated both the skills, and the discipline, to ensure that they know what they're doing. If people are going to be armed, then let them also be trained, is my opinion. I've also never seen why that capacity should be limited to guns: why can't I carry the rapier or the sabre, which I've spent over a decade becoming expert with, when that geek over there can carry a fully automatic weapon after no training and a 7-day wait?
If you have a single button mouse, like most Mac users,
Is this actually still true? I mean, I'm a Mac user (PowerBook), and I know quite a lot of Mac users of various types, and I dont know a single one with a one-button mouse. I know there must be some, because Mac are still selling the things and the laptops ship with only one button, but... who doesn't buy a USB mouse with a decent number of buttons and plug it in?
I mean, seriously. I haven't run with less than five buttons since my first personally-owned computer (only had three on that mouse). I switched my main operating environment to a Mac in 2002, but it never occured to me to suddenly stop using my mouse functionality...
Your first paragraph has nothing to do with the quote from mine, so I'm going to ignore it except for this:
Also, your allusion to war and money is a bit specious.
Um? Okay. It was intended as an illustration of ways in which money and power are synoymous. Having money provides power: on a small scale, it provides small power and on a large scale it provides enough military technology to take over the world.
This is because any given consumer has the power of choice, but consumers en masse do exactly what they're told.
Sheep get what sheep deserve, then. I will have no part of it if and when I choose to opt out. Until then, DRM isn't causing me any headaches at all.
Apart from being an apparent demonstration of my point, this seems totally irrelevant. Any given consumer (in this case you) has the power of choice, and it sounds like you're exercising it. Well done. Consumers en masse do what they're told by marketeering, media saturation and cultural peer pressure. Your response is "Sheep get what sheep deserve", which while it seems to indicate that you in fact agree with my point, is a bit superfluous, and implies a value judgement that I, at least, would not be comfortable making. I was commenting on the reality of modern mass-perception engineering. You don't seem to have disputed the accuracy of my comment.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret that seems to have elluded you: power is not taken. Power is given. The media conglomerates have power (or money if you choose to use the terms interchangeably) because consumers give them money (aka "power"). Consumers can, if they so choose, vote with their wallets and put the conglomerates in their place.
Which they won't. How many people boycotted Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy merely because its profits went to a member of the MPAA? Moving on: they already have spectacular reserves of money. These guys are complaining about falling profit, not falling bank balances. They're scared because they're adding less to the mountain of money each year, not because they're having to actually dip into the mountain of money to make new movies. They've already got the power, because it was given to them years ago and they were intelligent with how they invested it. One way they invested it was in politicians: the end result is the Bono act, the DMCA, and whatever similar modifications of law the politicians they invested in pass next year. That's another illustration of ways in which money provides power.
Also: power is not taken, it's given? Tell that to the current citizens of Iraq. Power was taken away from the Ba'ath party, by the men with guns. Power is now being taken away from the moderates who want to try and run a peaceful and prosperous Iraq, by the other men with guns. Some power is awarded by default, some power is given willingly, some power is taken by force. No nation on earth in the 21st century has anything like the record that the USA has in terms of taking power by force.
Your last paragraph is fundamentally irrelevant to my point, though relevant to the original article under discussion. Will the slow-boil method allow the cartel to keep consumers jogging along without any kind of real change in consumption patterns? I don't know. I really don't think there's enough evidence to say, yet.
It's not about power, it's about money. No matter what the media moguls do, the one thing they cannot do is force us to buy their products. We have the power of choice, they do not.
There's something of a series of responses I'd like to make here.
Firstly, there's no question that you're right that this is about money. You seem to have missed the basic reality that in the West, and indeed most places, money == power, up to the point of full-scale nuclear military engagement. Without money, you can't run a war: why do you think the US national debt is so much higher now than it was in 2000? You can work from there right down the scale to the two guys on the street who see a hot dog stand and are both hungry. The one who has $5 has the power to become fed, the one who does not lacks this power. But you're right: it's about the money.
Your comment about the power of choice, unfortunately, is theoretically fine but practically irrelevant. The US consumer really doesn't have the power of choice, and most consumers in the Western world lack it as well; those in some corners of Europe like Scandanavia and the Czech Republic have more than most. This is because any given consumer has the power of choice, but consumers en masse do exactly what they're told. Marketing works. Targetted and co-ordinated marketing works (take a look at how we got into Operation Cobra II in the first place). The only arenas in which Western consumers have actual choice are those in which there are competing products made by companies who have to compete on quality and price: arenas like, for example, high grade sports equipment or food. Lots of choices there. The current area of discussion, however, is a cartel-based industry. There is no competition on price (prices are standard). There is no competition based on quality, because while the cartel may display the occasional interneicine rivalry, everyone in the club knows that they aren't competing against each other: all they have to do is keep making less movies at more money per movie every year, and because they are the only game in town, the general public will keep watching their movies. In case you doubt that comment, apply google to the problem and take a look at the number of movies made per year and how that indicates a trend over the time period from 1920 to the present day. Cross-reference with average price per movie.
Now we get to the meat of the issue. Just as with the produced-band, hip-hop canned pap industry (otherwise known as the Recording Industry of America Association) the cartel which rules movies has seen a very worrying trend. People aren't spending as much money on movies as they used to. They're still buying the merchandise, which helps: they're still buying movies and going to see them in the cinema, but they're doing so less often. The obvious conclusion from this is they don't like the movies, or consider them (or their media) to be overpriced for the quality. This, however, is not something a cartel can admit. The cartel in question are looking for any way to maintain their profit margins: that's their job. Their profit margins are not based on quality or competition: they are the only game in town. What are their profit margins traditionally based on?
Leverage of a monopoly status. The term 'gatekeepers' is a useful one: see Jim Baen for a more developed version of this argument from the point of view of a print literature publisher. Publication of entertainment, be it books, films or music, was once an industry with a staggeringly high cost of entry. You had to be One of Us (tm) already to be able to afford to enter the industry, and if you got into it and weren't already one of us, you'd soon have enough cash that you were acceptable to the club. This high cost of entry meant that a cartel-based industry could develop without problems. Back in the day, the cartels *did* compete, but the losers got bought by the winners until pretty much all movies distributed by Hollywood today are owned
I keep hearing this comment. I can only assume that you don't have HDTV yourself? HD content looks significantly better than SD on a 36" TV
... up from there? You do realise that in much of the world, the UK included, a 36" TV is *huge*? The majority of single young people I know have 14" or 15" TVs: most families I know who own a TV are happy if it's 24" because they probably recently upgraded from a 14".
Yeah, there's also lots of people with 28", 32" widescreen TVs around these days. They're less than half the price they were when I bought one for the first time, seven years ago. However, comma. The idea that starting at 36" and going up from there is relevant to normal people is pretty much alien to anyone outside the US, or possibly Japan, as far as I know.
I just love the post 9-11 world. Attach "terrorism" to any bill, and walla, it passes.
Unusually, to be fair to the UK parliament, they fought this as hard as they could against a dedicated government effort to get it through. Checks and Balances are still tilted in favour of the government in the UK, and if they really want something, they can usually get it through. That's pretty much what happened here.
I'm nothing saying that its effortless, but they certainly don't view it as work .
I disagree, actually. IME the main difference between the artists I know, visual, computer, musical and literary who make a living off their work, have audiences, readerships, fans; who are, in short, professionals in their craft, and the fan-fiction net-weenies is that they *do* see what they do as work. They *also* tend to see it as craft, art, vocation and lifestyle, but in there is the "I work at this really hard, both improving my technique and ensuring that no work leaves my hands which is not the best I can create".
Look at interviews with people like Isaac Asimov or Ian M. Banks, or at JMS's The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, or look at what Joss Whedon or Peter Jackson say when they speak about their work. Take a look at the comments of people like Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio when they're speaking to or writing for up-coming professionals within their own art (screenwriting). Creative art is work. The thing is, it's work as well, rather than being just work.
Professional attitude. It's just as valuable to creative artists as it is to surgeons and rocket scientists.
Btw, I snipped the rest of your article because, in the main, I agree with the point you're making: modern Intellectual Property attitudes are a complete perversion of the Enlightenment philosophic concept of govenmentally-guaranteed copyright.
Because propaganda like that is the current MO of the US government and media? "The entire population of a religion is evil, they're freedom-hating fanatics who will fight to the last man, woman and child?" Sounding familiar?
Nuke and re-install in this case would have involved formatting the hard drive. Yes, it's my fault that my partition structure wasn't more sensible. That's totally true. I stuck with Debian for about another six months on all my other machines, but the FreeBSD system eventually just appealed to me so much more.
~cHris
I switched away from Debian because of apt: which was ironic as I switched to Debian becasue of... apt. It served me well for several years and then one day it broke. When it broke, there was no way in hell to disentangle the mess it had got its dependencies into: the only option remaining was nuke, format, re-install. It is possible that an uber-geek could have resolved the conflict. None of those I spoke to knew how, and I'm not one.
I ended up with FreeBSD. The Ports system is fairly straight-forward. I've had dependency and versioning conflicts develop using ports: I've been able to resolve each one. It's slower: apt pre-compiles and ports compiles on my box, so it's slower. On the other hand, when it breaks even I can fix it. I'm pretty much happy with that.
On my mac, the system has never broken. Go figure.
The OP was talking about writers: for example, Neil Gaiman is a superb writer of graphic novels, but does not draw. Many graphic novel authors are not graphic novel artists.
Mind you, there aren't any female writers springing immediately to mind, either. There's a number of female artists: Jill Thompson (who drew the story arc "Brief Lives" for Gaiman's Sandman project) comes quickest to mind.
Please don't try to pin what the Catholics did in the dark ages on "christians" in general. It is condemned and was even condemned by non Catholics at the time.
I don't even know where to start.
Non-Catholics in the Dark Ages??? I can only assume the the OP is conflating the Reformation with the Dark Ages and isn't aware of the thousand-year gap between them.
If an American company did really come out with an interactive adult humanoid robot, like the NS-1 from the "I, Robot" movie, I think it would not sell too well. Americans, at least me and my friends, are uncomfortable with servants. If someone is getting paid to do a job, that is one thing, but a servant class is bad. We would be compelled to treat an interactive adult humanoid robot like one of a) an equal, b) a friend who helps you out, or c) a tool. And if we treat it as a tool, it had better not look too human or be too personable.
This is explored at length in 'Satisfaction Guaranteed', 'Galley Slave', 'Little Lost Robot' (the origin of the Nestor designation, the NS-2 series of robots), and various other stories by Isaac Asimov. It is discussed most explicitly during "Robots and Empire" when two Spacer scientists are discussing the discontinuation of a line of fully humanoid, as in indistinguishably humanoid, robots orginally made for planetary exploration. Asimov did not perceive it as being unique to Americans, so much as that the closer mechanical humans came to being indistinguishable from real ones, the more uncomfortable real ones would get.
Bladerunner has, if you think about it, rather the same theme. As do many other "Robot as Menace" (to use Asimov's categorization) stories from the 60s and 70s.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this considered a good idea? The damage that can be done to a child if their parent can watch them *no matter where they are* is huge: they tend to not develop any kind of effective independence or personal strength, and they tend to have very bad relationships with their parents on trust grounds.
Being able to monitor children effectively is one thing: considering that the desire to watch them *no matter where they are* is reasonable is quite a different thing. At what point does the need of the child for privacy and indepdendence of choice override the protective desire of the parent? I would argue that it is from this, virtually unanswerable, question that the entire debate depends.
~cHrisWhy would a kid too young to think their way around this surveillance system have a cell phone on them at all? They'd have to be too young to responsibly use it.
~cHrisOnly for values of 'nobody' which includes a really rather large number of people. I'm an ISP and telecommunications engineer. We're expanding our broadband portfolio at the moment, so I've been looking at usage patterns. Most customers, indeed, use their pipe pretty much in 'peak hours', and not solidly but in repeated spikes through that time (peak hours, btw, are about 8am to about midnight by this definition). However, a significant enough percentage that we need to plan for them display a long term useage pattern of incoming and outgoing, nailed up to flat-line, 24/7. This persists through upgrades (ie. they're flatlined 24/7 at 512 down, 256 up, and then they get an upgrade, and they go straight up to 2Mb down, 512 up and sit nailed there, etc).
~cHrisIt should be considered that there are fringe benefits here: systematically strip-mining the moon will have a significantly lower risk of causing indigenous inhabitants to murder thousands of Americans than doing the same to any of the other places available at the moment.
This raises a quite interesting train of thought about the nature of choices. In order to effectively 'dissappear', even prior to modern photo-IDs and DNA profiles, you usually needed to sacrifice access to civilisation. Using your 1890 metaphor, you had to go further west, or you had to go to small-town America away from the big city, leave your name behind, abandon assets in order to run, and so on.
What you're describing here is that if you're on the grid, you can be found. That's true, I'd say, unless you have a reasonable understanding of the techniques the finders use. However, being on the grid is a choice. It's a choice to live a lifestyle which involves you in the grid, in modern life. Your point about going to Afghanistan is really a point about personal choice.
Living on the grid is not a requirement: it's a choice. I have access to this view because I grew up off the grid, I didn't really plug in until 1995 when I was 18. But in the modern west, we tend to see electricity, running water and computer access as being basic standards of living, and they aren't: they're choices. If one chooses a different style of life, once can happily avoid the grid.
I guess I'm not really making an argument here, just thinking out loud, but it's interesting. Thank you.
~cHris... Which is a piece of legislation. You can tell that, if nothing else, by who it is that changes it: it's not the Judiciary, and it isn't the Executive Branch.
~cHrisThey are not, however, disciplined. This is the crux of the 'well-regulated' bit right before 'militia' in the second ammendment. Both Washington, and the framers of the second ammendment, make it clear in their language that they are talking about organisations which train and discipline their members, not about private gun ownership. This is, of course, never going to be clear legally because far too many have far too much vested in ensuring that the majority of people with a gun don't know how to use it properly.
I have no issue with somone who's gone to Thunder Ranch and qualified for handgun expertise up to full combat-condition examinations including soft-target testing carrying a gun in every day life. They have demonstrated both the skills, and the discipline, to ensure that they know what they're doing. If people are going to be armed, then let them also be trained, is my opinion. I've also never seen why that capacity should be limited to guns: why can't I carry the rapier or the sabre, which I've spent over a decade becoming expert with, when that geek over there can carry a fully automatic weapon after no training and a 7-day wait?
~cHrisThe mantra has also been added to of late: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength ... Bush is President.
If you have a single button mouse, like most Mac users,
Is this actually still true? I mean, I'm a Mac user (PowerBook), and I know quite a lot of Mac users of various types, and I dont know a single one with a one-button mouse. I know there must be some, because Mac are still selling the things and the laptops ship with only one button, but ... who doesn't buy a USB mouse with a decent number of buttons and plug it in?
I mean, seriously. I haven't run with less than five buttons since my first personally-owned computer (only had three on that mouse). I switched my main operating environment to a Mac in 2002, but it never occured to me to suddenly stop using my mouse functionality...
~cHrisYour first paragraph has nothing to do with the quote from mine, so I'm going to ignore it except for this:
Also, your allusion to war and money is a bit specious.
Um? Okay. It was intended as an illustration of ways in which money and power are synoymous. Having money provides power: on a small scale, it provides small power and on a large scale it provides enough military technology to take over the world.
This is because any given consumer has the power of choice, but consumers en masse do exactly what they're told.
Sheep get what sheep deserve, then. I will have no part of it if and when I choose to opt out. Until then, DRM isn't causing me any headaches at all.
Apart from being an apparent demonstration of my point, this seems totally irrelevant. Any given consumer (in this case you) has the power of choice, and it sounds like you're exercising it. Well done. Consumers en masse do what they're told by marketeering, media saturation and cultural peer pressure. Your response is "Sheep get what sheep deserve", which while it seems to indicate that you in fact agree with my point, is a bit superfluous, and implies a value judgement that I, at least, would not be comfortable making. I was commenting on the reality of modern mass-perception engineering. You don't seem to have disputed the accuracy of my comment.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret that seems to have elluded you: power is not taken. Power is given. The media conglomerates have power (or money if you choose to use the terms interchangeably) because consumers give them money (aka "power"). Consumers can, if they so choose, vote with their wallets and put the conglomerates in their place.
Which they won't. How many people boycotted Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy merely because its profits went to a member of the MPAA? Moving on: they already have spectacular reserves of money. These guys are complaining about falling profit, not falling bank balances. They're scared because they're adding less to the mountain of money each year, not because they're having to actually dip into the mountain of money to make new movies. They've already got the power, because it was given to them years ago and they were intelligent with how they invested it. One way they invested it was in politicians: the end result is the Bono act, the DMCA, and whatever similar modifications of law the politicians they invested in pass next year. That's another illustration of ways in which money provides power.
Also: power is not taken, it's given? Tell that to the current citizens of Iraq. Power was taken away from the Ba'ath party, by the men with guns. Power is now being taken away from the moderates who want to try and run a peaceful and prosperous Iraq, by the other men with guns. Some power is awarded by default, some power is given willingly, some power is taken by force. No nation on earth in the 21st century has anything like the record that the USA has in terms of taking power by force.
Your last paragraph is fundamentally irrelevant to my point, though relevant to the original article under discussion. Will the slow-boil method allow the cartel to keep consumers jogging along without any kind of real change in consumption patterns? I don't know. I really don't think there's enough evidence to say, yet.
It's not about power, it's about money. No matter what the media moguls do, the one thing they cannot do is force us to buy their products. We have the power of choice, they do not.
There's something of a series of responses I'd like to make here.
Firstly, there's no question that you're right that this is about money. You seem to have missed the basic reality that in the West, and indeed most places, money == power, up to the point of full-scale nuclear military engagement. Without money, you can't run a war: why do you think the US national debt is so much higher now than it was in 2000? You can work from there right down the scale to the two guys on the street who see a hot dog stand and are both hungry. The one who has $5 has the power to become fed, the one who does not lacks this power. But you're right: it's about the money.
Your comment about the power of choice, unfortunately, is theoretically fine but practically irrelevant. The US consumer really doesn't have the power of choice, and most consumers in the Western world lack it as well; those in some corners of Europe like Scandanavia and the Czech Republic have more than most. This is because any given consumer has the power of choice, but consumers en masse do exactly what they're told. Marketing works. Targetted and co-ordinated marketing works (take a look at how we got into Operation Cobra II in the first place). The only arenas in which Western consumers have actual choice are those in which there are competing products made by companies who have to compete on quality and price: arenas like, for example, high grade sports equipment or food. Lots of choices there. The current area of discussion, however, is a cartel-based industry. There is no competition on price (prices are standard). There is no competition based on quality, because while the cartel may display the occasional interneicine rivalry, everyone in the club knows that they aren't competing against each other: all they have to do is keep making less movies at more money per movie every year, and because they are the only game in town, the general public will keep watching their movies. In case you doubt that comment, apply google to the problem and take a look at the number of movies made per year and how that indicates a trend over the time period from 1920 to the present day. Cross-reference with average price per movie.
Now we get to the meat of the issue. Just as with the produced-band, hip-hop canned pap industry (otherwise known as the Recording Industry of America Association) the cartel which rules movies has seen a very worrying trend. People aren't spending as much money on movies as they used to. They're still buying the merchandise, which helps: they're still buying movies and going to see them in the cinema, but they're doing so less often. The obvious conclusion from this is they don't like the movies, or consider them (or their media) to be overpriced for the quality. This, however, is not something a cartel can admit. The cartel in question are looking for any way to maintain their profit margins: that's their job. Their profit margins are not based on quality or competition: they are the only game in town. What are their profit margins traditionally based on?
Leverage of a monopoly status. The term 'gatekeepers' is a useful one: see Jim Baen for a more developed version of this argument from the point of view of a print literature publisher. Publication of entertainment, be it books, films or music, was once an industry with a staggeringly high cost of entry. You had to be One of Us (tm) already to be able to afford to enter the industry, and if you got into it and weren't already one of us, you'd soon have enough cash that you were acceptable to the club. This high cost of entry meant that a cartel-based industry could develop without problems. Back in the day, the cartels *did* compete, but the losers got bought by the winners until pretty much all movies distributed by Hollywood today are owned
I keep hearing this comment. I can only assume that you don't have HDTV yourself? HD content looks significantly better than SD on a 36" TV
... up from there? You do realise that in much of the world, the UK included, a 36" TV is *huge*? The majority of single young people I know have 14" or 15" TVs: most families I know who own a TV are happy if it's 24" because they probably recently upgraded from a 14".
Yeah, there's also lots of people with 28", 32" widescreen TVs around these days. They're less than half the price they were when I bought one for the first time, seven years ago. However, comma. The idea that starting at 36" and going up from there is relevant to normal people is pretty much alien to anyone outside the US, or possibly Japan, as far as I know.
~cHrisI just love the post 9-11 world. Attach "terrorism" to any bill, and walla, it passes.
Unusually, to be fair to the UK parliament, they fought this as hard as they could against a dedicated government effort to get it through. Checks and Balances are still tilted in favour of the government in the UK, and if they really want something, they can usually get it through. That's pretty much what happened here.
~cHrisBeen there, and seen it. Two 25kilo flour-sacks full of bills being walked out of the bank, in order to pay a monthly household grocery bill.
I disagree, actually. IME the main difference between the artists I know, visual, computer, musical and literary who make a living off their work, have audiences, readerships, fans; who are, in short, professionals in their craft, and the fan-fiction net-weenies is that they *do* see what they do as work. They *also* tend to see it as craft, art, vocation and lifestyle, but in there is the "I work at this really hard, both improving my technique and ensuring that no work leaves my hands which is not the best I can create".
Look at interviews with people like Isaac Asimov or Ian M. Banks, or at JMS's The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, or look at what Joss Whedon or Peter Jackson say when they speak about their work. Take a look at the comments of people like Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio when they're speaking to or writing for up-coming professionals within their own art (screenwriting). Creative art is work. The thing is, it's work as well, rather than being just work.
Professional attitude. It's just as valuable to creative artists as it is to surgeons and rocket scientists.
Btw, I snipped the rest of your article because, in the main, I agree with the point you're making: modern Intellectual Property attitudes are a complete perversion of the Enlightenment philosophic concept of govenmentally-guaranteed copyright.
~cHrisBecause propaganda like that is the current MO of the US government and media? "The entire population of a religion is evil, they're freedom-hating fanatics who will fight to the last man, woman and child?" Sounding familiar?
~cHrisNuke and re-install in this case would have involved formatting the hard drive. Yes, it's my fault that my partition structure wasn't more sensible. That's totally true. I stuck with Debian for about another six months on all my other machines, but the FreeBSD system eventually just appealed to me so much more. ~cHris
I switched away from Debian because of apt: which was ironic as I switched to Debian becasue of ... apt. It served me well for several years and then one day it broke. When it broke, there was no way in hell to disentangle the mess it had got its dependencies into: the only option remaining was nuke, format, re-install. It is possible that an uber-geek could have resolved the conflict. None of those I spoke to knew how, and I'm not one.
I ended up with FreeBSD. The Ports system is fairly straight-forward. I've had dependency and versioning conflicts develop using ports: I've been able to resolve each one. It's slower: apt pre-compiles and ports compiles on my box, so it's slower. On the other hand, when it breaks even I can fix it. I'm pretty much happy with that.
On my mac, the system has never broken. Go figure.
~cHrisThe OP was talking about writers: for example, Neil Gaiman is a superb writer of graphic novels, but does not draw. Many graphic novel authors are not graphic novel artists.
Mind you, there aren't any female writers springing immediately to mind, either. There's a number of female artists: Jill Thompson (who drew the story arc "Brief Lives" for Gaiman's Sandman project) comes quickest to mind.
~cHris
I don't even know where to start.
Non-Catholics in the Dark Ages??? I can only assume the the OP is conflating the Reformation with the Dark Ages and isn't aware of the thousand-year gap between them.
~cHrisWhich they did not do. They called themselves "open enough"; there is a difference. ~cHris
This is explored at length in 'Satisfaction Guaranteed', 'Galley Slave', 'Little Lost Robot' (the origin of the Nestor designation, the NS-2 series of robots), and various other stories by Isaac Asimov. It is discussed most explicitly during "Robots and Empire" when two Spacer scientists are discussing the discontinuation of a line of fully humanoid, as in indistinguishably humanoid, robots orginally made for planetary exploration. Asimov did not perceive it as being unique to Americans, so much as that the closer mechanical humans came to being indistinguishable from real ones, the more uncomfortable real ones would get.
Bladerunner has, if you think about it, rather the same theme. As do many other "Robot as Menace" (to use Asimov's categorization) stories from the 60s and 70s.
~cHrisAnd, it should be pointed out, 80% of America drives automatic cars. Do the math.
~cHris, linux user for longer than I care to remember.
... Bush is president.
~cHris