Wow, big points for working for a decent real estate agency! I dealt with a branch campus of PSU that basically had to beat 18-19 year olds into shape so they could handle real university. It was quite comical after a few years. We would put price sheets up for every single thing in the apartment - literally everything, a light bulb was $2.00 or $0.50 per roommate, door hinge screws were a buck per hinge per side, etc. We'd hang it on the door, we made them sign for it on move-in, we would distribute it with inspection notices, we'd hand it out with move-out instructions.
Lesson learned? Build your student housing out of cinder blocks. Make damn sure you have good liability insurance tho - cinder doesn't give way to a drunken head the way drywall does.
If they tear out all the drywall, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring, and appliances, leaving you with nothing but a room full of 2x4s holding up the ceiling, then yeah, you could end up paying tens of thousands. But I've never seen a place THAT trashed, and I work for a real estate company that specializes in selling foreclosed properties.
I have. I worked in student housing. One day, the security guard gave me a call around 11PM on the day all the students were to be out and said he found a door that had been left unlocked by the students when they left. The scene inside was horrifying. Each apartment comes furnished, the living room has a couch, end table, bucket chair, TV stand, and a coffee table. The dining room has a table and four chairs. Each bedroom has a bed, desk, chair, and endtable, for four bedrooms.
Everything save the dining room table, beds, and desks had been implanted in the walls. That's eight chairs, five end tables, a coffee table, and a TV stand, made of light steel yet contorted into odd geometric shapes.. The cabinets had been ripped from the walls, the refrigerator left in the middle of the kitchen. The washing machine was full of vomit. The oven had some sort of goo in it as if it had been used to cook crack. The ceiling had unexplainable footprints all over it. Even the storage closet outside was not spared: Its interior had been removed so that the students could slip between their and their neighbor's apartments through the walls.
This was the worst, but certainly not the only one. All said and done, by the end of the summer, we had recorded over $50,000 in damages in a 648 bed complex, with bills to individual students going as high as $5,000 - that's almost the entire school years rent. It's just nuts. These kids are/so/ loaded it's not even funny. One kid reported us to the BBB because we charged him $100 to remove his TV, a gigantic 64" DLP behemoth that worked just fine. What the hell?! Why was it left behind?! And why was I supposed to have to have my maintenance men waste an hour trying to get it out of the third floor apartment?! In another instance, we evicted a kid whose car was worth more than the house I was born in.
In the US, most of the youth are wholly unprepared for life and completely unable to accept any responsibility, and their parents back them up no matter how unruly and uncivilized. I say this as a 25 year old. I had a phone call from a woman one time berating me about her son's damage bill, saying, "Shame on you for ripping off my child! He's just a college student, he doesn't know any better!" My response was that, at the time, I was a college student as well, and I had yet to have a dime removed from my security deposit, even freshman year when I didn't work for the company. I was told that I wasn't allowed to talk to an adult the way I was - telling her that sorry, I might be a "child," but I was the one who wrote the invoices, and no, my "adult" boss wasn't going to make any changes, no matter how wrong or whatever I was.
We had a kid run his car off of our private road, tumble it down a hill and into one of our buildings, prompting an evacuation and us having to house the students in a hotel room. He was drunk, but he managed to get out of the car, take his keys, and run home. On the way home, he slipped and fell. He was never charged with DUI, our insurance had to pay for the damages, AND the insurance paid for his injuries (they didn't want to fight it). Fun times.
The beneficiaries of tax-and-spend policy are those who receive the spending, not those who pay the taxes lol what? I pay $120 something a year to drive my car around, plus like $0.16 per gallon when I do. In return, I get to use a rather damn-well built interstate system where I can drive from Maine to California in a few days. Hell, in PA it was only $36/year with a higher per gallon tax, but it's a damn miracle that even gets me ONE road that is, shockingly, plowed every once in a while.
The plastic door panel replacement pins are like $5 at a parts store, and if it's dangling, the car already did half the job for you. Pull out the, what, 6 screws, replace the pins, done. Pretty much/every/ car is like that. A crap-ass cupholder is like $75 at the dealer, and they don't break very often if you confine its use to a sanely-sized drinking cup. My console is just fine, except for that fucking weird plastic coating on everything. However, clean it all off, and boom - clean plastic underneath.
My 2000 is a great car, but all the rubber took a dive when I moved from the Northeast to the middle of the desert. THat's my only issue with it.
That happens in PA even with gasoline, or at least did, because of a switch to winter gas - same shit, required oxygen additive. I can see the difference in average MPG when all the stations switch.
Oh dear lord the catastrophes would be awful. Little Johnny almost made it out, but his poor legs got stuck in the droopy floor. But don't worry, Little Johnny, the fire department's here! Unfortunately, the fire department put out the fire, cooled off the droopy floor, and made Little Johnny a permanent fixture. That is, if the fumes didn't get em first.
Well, for shits and giggles, I did. The most worrying fact from that article is that pencil erasers are colored with cadmium tint. WTF, mang? Thas fucked up.
I am using a bit of circular logic here, but then again, the guarantee of patent protection in the US Constitution doesn't limit itself to excluding prior art just by its wording - and changing organic law is a bit more difficult than the rest of it.
I think that if we removed/all/ patent protection - and for the sake of argument, let's remove trade secret protection as well, leaving the only protection on technological advancement that which could be done via civil law, with non-disclosure agreements and such. In the pro-corporate environment that we're in now, wouldn't we just replace it with lock-downs and the like? I've seen PIN pads that, upon breaching the case, fry their epoxied-in crypto chips. I think that would start to appear in your run-of-the-mill iPod. While everyone would be free to try and circumvent the protection, what do you do once you do? You wouldn't be able to buy the hardware to place the reverse-engineered firmware in. Foundries would refuse to lithograph a die that you would certify that wasn't encumbered by any NDAs or non-competes, not because they're afraid of patents or copyright, but because their agreement with Apple states that the day Apple catches the foundry making a design that is the same or similar to one of theirs is the day the foundry quits making Apple chips.
I used ConAgra as an example because of their very, very poor corporate altruism. They crush the little guy; as a corporate argibusiness, their duty is to the stockholder, not the contract farmer, not their employees, and certainly not society. A good example is their policies with their chicken farmers: You will buy chicks from our suppliers (Owned by us). You will feed them feed from our suppliers (Owned by us). You will ship the finished product using our distributors (Owned by us). If we find out you're somehow making a higher profit than others in your area, you will be penalized, because you must be doing something shady (We know all).
Apple is a good example because, despite Jobs being King Dickbag of the tech world, they were just a short few years ago on the brink of bankruptcy. Their creativity has, despite the somewhat immoral business decisions, brought them back from the brink, as evidenced by the article here last night about them breaking the 10% mark again. I think that if patents were to disappear tomorrow, we would indeed be in a society that would use trade secrets excessively, and there would be a very low power to invent, if only because no Joe Sixpack or hell, even Joe Tenpack could find a manufacturer willing to risk their tail.
Patent law does, in a convoluted way, protect the small guy. Compaq proved that to us with their clean-room reverse engineering. While still very limiting, patents have lead to a pharmaceutical industry where America/still/ leads the world in technological innovation, yet some stores can give away thousands of now-generic, life-saving drugs at no charge. I'll concede that some (possibly drastic) changes are needed. Apple's bullshit screen-orientation patent from yesterday's story sounds fishy, and the fact that our tiny little (thanks, slashdot, for the new fucking layout that drove everyone away) community can find prior art in 20 minutes, and the examiners can't in 4+ years is as well. I completely and absolutely reject the DMCA - instead of buying a BluRay that won't play on my XBMC media server, I'll take a Matroska video file, thank you very much. But then again, without copyright, there's no GPL.
Patent law protects your right to do that because it would prevent anyone else from patenting your discovery because there'd be prior art. However, once ConAgra gets their hands on your technology, considering their already monstrous size, it could raise their efficiency level to the point that you can no longer make a profit.
But the thing is, people groping children is utterly senseless
No, it's not. Now, I realize this isn't Bosnia, but my stepfather spent time in the military there. He's also served twice in Iraq, and he's gearing up for his third in Afghanistan.
Some wonderful people will send their children to run over to the soldiers in the street with a fruit basket, or some flowers. Some of those wonderful people pack that fruitbasket full of explosives. Don't think for a second that the terrorists give a shit about their own kids. Until we get over the PC bullshit, we'll be groping up harmless little kids and grandmothers.
I do, however, wonder what these people do to get searched in the first place. I fly 4-5 times a year, and I've only once been grope-searched - I couldn't seem to find what was making the hand held magnetometer go off. I've never even had to opt out of the porno scanners. Take off my belt and shoes, act like I know what I'm doing, and line up in front of the magnetometer. In, out, done. Don't act pissy or whiny, follow the rules.
If I make a movie, and I know that I make it possible for someone else to get their grubby little hands on my movie, it's game over for me, you'll be watching my movie in my theater. You'll be strip searched. You'll also be banned from seeing another movie again, EVER, if I catch you trying to video record it. And, since everyone else making movies has the same problem as me, you'll be doing the same thing to watch that artsy-fartsy movie across the street. Me and the artsy-fartsy guy charge about $500 a pop because we both know that the little snot running the projector is going to copy our film as soon as we leave our respective theaters for the night. We did try listening to our fans and hiring reputable projectionists that wouldn't dare do such a thing, but then we'd have to charge about $1,000 a head. We could probably make things a little cheaper if we could show each others' movies as a double feature, but fuck him! He'd take out all my credits and replace them with his own, leaving the movie unchanged. Not that I'd do any different.
Me and artsy-fartsy tried home distribution before. It's rather hard when some guy in Chinatown can have a stall outside our door, copying our movies and selling them for ten cents over the price of blank media. We can't stop him - there's no right to restrict copying! We came up with a brand-spanking-new media, that users never had to rewind, had over twice the video quality of the previous media, and never lost quality over subsequent uses. We added digital restrictions management to the media, not so strong to be overly obtrusive, but to no avail. Some shit teenager in the Netherlands said "INFOMASHUN SHOULD B FREE!", hacked our DRM, and now we're/really/ fucked because one can make completely bit-for-bit accurate copies for free, legally. We tried making it literally impossible to view the movies without the players phoning home and grabbing a key signature from our servers, but our customers weren't about to pay $1000 for a DVD/and/ have to ask me permission all the time.
We've even tried hiring cheaper actors, but nobody wants to see those hacks. They'd rather see the hacks on stage, where they can laugh and boo them off stage if need be. Turns out the real theater companies can't make any money either. A writer makes a beautiful stage play, and then next week, middle school drama classes are shitting all over his brilliance. Ever heard of The Oz?
We'd love to see some competition, but it just ain't happenin. Ya see, artsy-fartsy and I have worked for decades on perfecting the film medium. We are dedicated to the art - not the money - but finely ground lenses, camera bodies, film, lighting, all that aren't cheap. We have our own costs. Not only that, but we feel that our work is worth something. We'd love to write a book about it and share it with the world. We/could/ do that rather cheaply, but photocopiers can certainly copy our works even cheaper.
The most worrying thing, though, isn't some snot kid with a video camera or some nihil-anarchist from Dutch country, it's those fucking conglomerates. Like I said, we're dedicated to the movies, not the money. Those rich bastards can come pay the $500 a head I'm charging - for a whole team of transcriptionists - and record every detail of my movie. Then, they can reproduce it in perfection to a T, slap their name on it, and show it in their cheap nickelodeons. Now I'm really fucked.
But we do have copyright, so I can write an awesome play, let only reputable companies showcase it, make the movie myself, and do my best to market and show it at any theater, knowing that if someone tries to make a quick buck off of it, they're screwed. I can share my experiences with others in a fashion that I would like to - I'd rather not make a Movies for Dummies book, and I'd rather my methods not end up there. I'll sure share it with artsy-fartsy, as long as he shows me how to get that awesome effect perfect for my next movie.
Keeping, say, another multi-billion dollar company from ripping off my film show film and just calling it their own? Or keeping one multi-billion dollar company from ripping off another multi-billion dollar company's movie?
If you were, say, Lionsgate, and tomorrow, Procter and Gamble decided to throw a copy of your movie in for free with your bottle of Crest toothpaste, you'd be jacked.
to incentivize the distribution means to allow it out and not, say, make people sit quietly at a desk of your choosing to read your story or view your art.
Oh, I forgot to add for all you non-desert lovers, 117F isn't really all that awful. No worse than a Pennsylvania summer where it's pushing 90, with the air completely saturated with moisture. Sweating is actually quite useful here.
Seriously, I moved to Phoenix from East Bumfuck, PA, and they're the best invention ever. A/C works fine, but it's hard work to keep a room at 0% humidity when you have to pump more heat into the 117F outside. Swamp coolers kill two birds with one stone, they cool AND humidify the air.
I saw a guy with a 50-gallon trash container with polka-dot sized holes cut in it, a ring of (polyethylene, i think) foam attached to a metal frame inside, filled with about half a foot of water. He had an air duct attached to suck air through the center of the foam ring. THe whole apparatus sat outside his fifth-wheel RV, ducting the chilled air inside.
Did ya read the rest of the sentence? Probably not. Here it is, for completeness.:
What we want to avoid is a situation where common street-corner drug dealers reguarly without thinking make their record books and notes utterly unreadable by law enforcement at the click of a mouse button. In this regard, we hope that the availability of highly reliable encryption that provides recovery systems will reduce the demand for other types of encryption, and increase the likelihood that criminals will use recoverable encryption.
The smart ones and the kingpins are always going to be one step ahead. Its when the morons that they inspire can keep up that we have a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you believe some citizens are lesser beings than others? Perhaps that's one of the things making them so mad?
Yes. They're called minors for a reason. They've been pissy whiny hormonally emotional about it since, well, forever.
Wow, big points for working for a decent real estate agency! I dealt with a branch campus of PSU that basically had to beat 18-19 year olds into shape so they could handle real university. It was quite comical after a few years. We would put price sheets up for every single thing in the apartment - literally everything, a light bulb was $2.00 or $0.50 per roommate, door hinge screws were a buck per hinge per side, etc. We'd hang it on the door, we made them sign for it on move-in, we would distribute it with inspection notices, we'd hand it out with move-out instructions.
Lesson learned? Build your student housing out of cinder blocks. Make damn sure you have good liability insurance tho - cinder doesn't give way to a drunken head the way drywall does.
If they tear out all the drywall, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring, and appliances, leaving you with nothing but a room full of 2x4s holding up the ceiling, then yeah, you could end up paying tens of thousands. But I've never seen a place THAT trashed, and I work for a real estate company that specializes in selling foreclosed properties.
I have. I worked in student housing. One day, the security guard gave me a call around 11PM on the day all the students were to be out and said he found a door that had been left unlocked by the students when they left. The scene inside was horrifying. Each apartment comes furnished, the living room has a couch, end table, bucket chair, TV stand, and a coffee table. The dining room has a table and four chairs. Each bedroom has a bed, desk, chair, and endtable, for four bedrooms.
Everything save the dining room table, beds, and desks had been implanted in the walls. That's eight chairs, five end tables, a coffee table, and a TV stand, made of light steel yet contorted into odd geometric shapes.. The cabinets had been ripped from the walls, the refrigerator left in the middle of the kitchen. The washing machine was full of vomit. The oven had some sort of goo in it as if it had been used to cook crack. The ceiling had unexplainable footprints all over it. Even the storage closet outside was not spared: Its interior had been removed so that the students could slip between their and their neighbor's apartments through the walls.
This was the worst, but certainly not the only one. All said and done, by the end of the summer, we had recorded over $50,000 in damages in a 648 bed complex, with bills to individual students going as high as $5,000 - that's almost the entire school years rent. It's just nuts. These kids are /so/ loaded it's not even funny. One kid reported us to the BBB because we charged him $100 to remove his TV, a gigantic 64" DLP behemoth that worked just fine. What the hell?! Why was it left behind?! And why was I supposed to have to have my maintenance men waste an hour trying to get it out of the third floor apartment?! In another instance, we evicted a kid whose car was worth more than the house I was born in.
In the US, most of the youth are wholly unprepared for life and completely unable to accept any responsibility, and their parents back them up no matter how unruly and uncivilized. I say this as a 25 year old. I had a phone call from a woman one time berating me about her son's damage bill, saying, "Shame on you for ripping off my child! He's just a college student, he doesn't know any better!" My response was that, at the time, I was a college student as well, and I had yet to have a dime removed from my security deposit, even freshman year when I didn't work for the company. I was told that I wasn't allowed to talk to an adult the way I was - telling her that sorry, I might be a "child," but I was the one who wrote the invoices, and no, my "adult" boss wasn't going to make any changes, no matter how wrong or whatever I was.
We had a kid run his car off of our private road, tumble it down a hill and into one of our buildings, prompting an evacuation and us having to house the students in a hotel room. He was drunk, but he managed to get out of the car, take his keys, and run home. On the way home, he slipped and fell. He was never charged with DUI, our insurance had to pay for the damages, AND the insurance paid for his injuries (they didn't want to fight it). Fun times.
The beneficiaries of tax-and-spend policy are those who receive the spending, not those who pay the taxes lol what? I pay $120 something a year to drive my car around, plus like $0.16 per gallon when I do. In return, I get to use a rather damn-well built interstate system where I can drive from Maine to California in a few days. Hell, in PA it was only $36/year with a higher per gallon tax, but it's a damn miracle that even gets me ONE road that is, shockingly, plowed every once in a while.
whereas manuals are stuck with six gears max.
lol, ur funny. Go take a look in a big truck sometime, and see how many gears that transmission has.
The plastic door panel replacement pins are like $5 at a parts store, and if it's dangling, the car already did half the job for you. Pull out the, what, 6 screws, replace the pins, done. Pretty much /every/ car is like that. A crap-ass cupholder is like $75 at the dealer, and they don't break very often if you confine its use to a sanely-sized drinking cup. My console is just fine, except for that fucking weird plastic coating on everything. However, clean it all off, and boom - clean plastic underneath.
My 2000 is a great car, but all the rubber took a dive when I moved from the Northeast to the middle of the desert. THat's my only issue with it.
That happens in PA even with gasoline, or at least did, because of a switch to winter gas - same shit, required oxygen additive. I can see the difference in average MPG when all the stations switch.
Sad thing is, my buddy's 1.8T and my VR6 sound the same in the winter. Mine sounds distinctly like a diesel.
Oh dear lord the catastrophes would be awful. Little Johnny almost made it out, but his poor legs got stuck in the droopy floor. But don't worry, Little Johnny, the fire department's here! Unfortunately, the fire department put out the fire, cooled off the droopy floor, and made Little Johnny a permanent fixture. That is, if the fumes didn't get em first.
Yeah, fuck plastic houses.
Well, for shits and giggles, I did. The most worrying fact from that article is that pencil erasers are colored with cadmium tint. WTF, mang? Thas fucked up.
Just being a smart ass, but yes, I'm from Pennsylvania, where the lady in the article is from.
Usually, it's just "PA" - but that doesn't work here in Arizona. They look at me like I'm nuts.
Yep. I'm an 'ol Commonwealth resident, and Verizon is our ILEC/RBOC, formerly known as Bell Atlantic.
I am using a bit of circular logic here, but then again, the guarantee of patent protection in the US Constitution doesn't limit itself to excluding prior art just by its wording - and changing organic law is a bit more difficult than the rest of it.
I think that if we removed /all/ patent protection - and for the sake of argument, let's remove trade secret protection as well, leaving the only protection on technological advancement that which could be done via civil law, with non-disclosure agreements and such. In the pro-corporate environment that we're in now, wouldn't we just replace it with lock-downs and the like? I've seen PIN pads that, upon breaching the case, fry their epoxied-in crypto chips. I think that would start to appear in your run-of-the-mill iPod. While everyone would be free to try and circumvent the protection, what do you do once you do? You wouldn't be able to buy the hardware to place the reverse-engineered firmware in. Foundries would refuse to lithograph a die that you would certify that wasn't encumbered by any NDAs or non-competes, not because they're afraid of patents or copyright, but because their agreement with Apple states that the day Apple catches the foundry making a design that is the same or similar to one of theirs is the day the foundry quits making Apple chips.
I used ConAgra as an example because of their very, very poor corporate altruism. They crush the little guy; as a corporate argibusiness, their duty is to the stockholder, not the contract farmer, not their employees, and certainly not society. A good example is their policies with their chicken farmers: You will buy chicks from our suppliers (Owned by us). You will feed them feed from our suppliers (Owned by us). You will ship the finished product using our distributors (Owned by us). If we find out you're somehow making a higher profit than others in your area, you will be penalized, because you must be doing something shady (We know all).
Apple is a good example because, despite Jobs being King Dickbag of the tech world, they were just a short few years ago on the brink of bankruptcy. Their creativity has, despite the somewhat immoral business decisions, brought them back from the brink, as evidenced by the article here last night about them breaking the 10% mark again. I think that if patents were to disappear tomorrow, we would indeed be in a society that would use trade secrets excessively, and there would be a very low power to invent, if only because no Joe Sixpack or hell, even Joe Tenpack could find a manufacturer willing to risk their tail.
Patent law does, in a convoluted way, protect the small guy. Compaq proved that to us with their clean-room reverse engineering. While still very limiting, patents have lead to a pharmaceutical industry where America /still/ leads the world in technological innovation, yet some stores can give away thousands of now-generic, life-saving drugs at no charge. I'll concede that some (possibly drastic) changes are needed. Apple's bullshit screen-orientation patent from yesterday's story sounds fishy, and the fact that our tiny little (thanks, slashdot, for the new fucking layout that drove everyone away) community can find prior art in 20 minutes, and the examiners can't in 4+ years is as well. I completely and absolutely reject the DMCA - instead of buying a BluRay that won't play on my XBMC media server, I'll take a Matroska video file, thank you very much. But then again, without copyright, there's no GPL.
Patent law protects your right to do that because it would prevent anyone else from patenting your discovery because there'd be prior art. However, once ConAgra gets their hands on your technology, considering their already monstrous size, it could raise their efficiency level to the point that you can no longer make a profit.
But the thing is, people groping children is utterly senseless
No, it's not. Now, I realize this isn't Bosnia, but my stepfather spent time in the military there. He's also served twice in Iraq, and he's gearing up for his third in Afghanistan.
Some wonderful people will send their children to run over to the soldiers in the street with a fruit basket, or some flowers. Some of those wonderful people pack that fruitbasket full of explosives. Don't think for a second that the terrorists give a shit about their own kids. Until we get over the PC bullshit, we'll be groping up harmless little kids and grandmothers.
I do, however, wonder what these people do to get searched in the first place. I fly 4-5 times a year, and I've only once been grope-searched - I couldn't seem to find what was making the hand held magnetometer go off. I've never even had to opt out of the porno scanners. Take off my belt and shoes, act like I know what I'm doing, and line up in front of the magnetometer. In, out, done. Don't act pissy or whiny, follow the rules.
I won't call you crazy, not one bit. Sorry for being harsh to begin with. But patent law protects your right to do that!
However, it might not be a great idea if one of those farmers that you tell is ConAgra.
Yep.
If I make a movie, and I know that I make it possible for someone else to get their grubby little hands on my movie, it's game over for me, you'll be watching my movie in my theater. You'll be strip searched. You'll also be banned from seeing another movie again, EVER, if I catch you trying to video record it. And, since everyone else making movies has the same problem as me, you'll be doing the same thing to watch that artsy-fartsy movie across the street. Me and the artsy-fartsy guy charge about $500 a pop because we both know that the little snot running the projector is going to copy our film as soon as we leave our respective theaters for the night. We did try listening to our fans and hiring reputable projectionists that wouldn't dare do such a thing, but then we'd have to charge about $1,000 a head. We could probably make things a little cheaper if we could show each others' movies as a double feature, but fuck him! He'd take out all my credits and replace them with his own, leaving the movie unchanged. Not that I'd do any different.
Me and artsy-fartsy tried home distribution before. It's rather hard when some guy in Chinatown can have a stall outside our door, copying our movies and selling them for ten cents over the price of blank media. We can't stop him - there's no right to restrict copying! We came up with a brand-spanking-new media, that users never had to rewind, had over twice the video quality of the previous media, and never lost quality over subsequent uses. We added digital restrictions management to the media, not so strong to be overly obtrusive, but to no avail. Some shit teenager in the Netherlands said "INFOMASHUN SHOULD B FREE!", hacked our DRM, and now we're /really/ fucked because one can make completely bit-for-bit accurate copies for free, legally. We tried making it literally impossible to view the movies without the players phoning home and grabbing a key signature from our servers, but our customers weren't about to pay $1000 for a DVD /and/ have to ask me permission all the time.
We've even tried hiring cheaper actors, but nobody wants to see those hacks. They'd rather see the hacks on stage, where they can laugh and boo them off stage if need be. Turns out the real theater companies can't make any money either. A writer makes a beautiful stage play, and then next week, middle school drama classes are shitting all over his brilliance. Ever heard of The Oz?
We'd love to see some competition, but it just ain't happenin. Ya see, artsy-fartsy and I have worked for decades on perfecting the film medium. We are dedicated to the art - not the money - but finely ground lenses, camera bodies, film, lighting, all that aren't cheap. We have our own costs. Not only that, but we feel that our work is worth something. We'd love to write a book about it and share it with the world. We /could/ do that rather cheaply, but photocopiers can certainly copy our works even cheaper.
The most worrying thing, though, isn't some snot kid with a video camera or some nihil-anarchist from Dutch country, it's those fucking conglomerates. Like I said, we're dedicated to the movies, not the money. Those rich bastards can come pay the $500 a head I'm charging - for a whole team of transcriptionists - and record every detail of my movie. Then, they can reproduce it in perfection to a T, slap their name on it, and show it in their cheap nickelodeons. Now I'm really fucked.
But we do have copyright, so I can write an awesome play, let only reputable companies showcase it, make the movie myself, and do my best to market and show it at any theater, knowing that if someone tries to make a quick buck off of it, they're screwed. I can share my experiences with others in a fashion that I would like to - I'd rather not make a Movies for Dummies book, and I'd rather my methods not end up there. I'll sure share it with artsy-fartsy, as long as he shows me how to get that awesome effect perfect for my next movie.
Sorry, saying t
Keeping, say, another multi-billion dollar company from ripping off my film show film and just calling it their own? Or keeping one multi-billion dollar company from ripping off another multi-billion dollar company's movie?
If you were, say, Lionsgate, and tomorrow, Procter and Gamble decided to throw a copy of your movie in for free with your bottle of Crest toothpaste, you'd be jacked.
to incentivize the distribution means to allow it out and not, say, make people sit quietly at a desk of your choosing to read your story or view your art.
Think.
Paying money to have sex is illegal in most places.
Filming other people having sex in private is usually illegal in most places.
Paying money to have sex and film it, and then selling copies is usually not.
Woah.
Hell, I drove from Altoona, PA to Phoenix, AZ and I STILL didn't get any free food! I even had to feed the damn cat!
Oh, I forgot to add for all you non-desert lovers, 117F isn't really all that awful. No worse than a Pennsylvania summer where it's pushing 90, with the air completely saturated with moisture. Sweating is actually quite useful here.
Swamp cooler.
Swamp cooler swamp cooler swamp cooler swamp cooler.
Seriously, I moved to Phoenix from East Bumfuck, PA, and they're the best invention ever. A/C works fine, but it's hard work to keep a room at 0% humidity when you have to pump more heat into the 117F outside. Swamp coolers kill two birds with one stone, they cool AND humidify the air.
I saw a guy with a 50-gallon trash container with polka-dot sized holes cut in it, a ring of (polyethylene, i think) foam attached to a metal frame inside, filled with about half a foot of water. He had an air duct attached to suck air through the center of the foam ring. THe whole apparatus sat outside his fifth-wheel RV, ducting the chilled air inside.
Did ya read the rest of the sentence? Probably not. Here it is, for completeness.:
The smart ones and the kingpins are always going to be one step ahead. Its when the morons that they inspire can keep up that we have a problem.
Who was your law professor?