Threaded conversations are the best part of gmail. It's why I use it, and it's the number one reason why people switch to gmail after peeking over my should and seeing how it works.
While I tend to agree, I also must say that in the unmanaged teams I've seen, areas of expertise have tended to form rather quickly. And if given the chance, most programmer will go to great lengths trying to figure out what users actually want:-)
It may not be terribly efficient, but it generally works.
What doesn't work is testing. Programmers just can't test their own apps.
You: "Women are biased, spin crap, barely code at all and if they do not proficiently, and can't be trusted to do proper statistics because they are an interest group."
As I've said, between the two of you, she seems to be slightly less insane. All you've done with your reply is validate my point.
By the way, I love the part where you state that your subjective evaluation of a dozen women's code is evidence that women don't excel at coding. Well done. I have some evidence of my own: Back when I studied comp sci, we had to write a compiler in teams of two. The two pairs with girls in them handed in the most well-written, highest-rated, elegant compilers at the end of the course (I was in one of them, and for the record, my female friend wrote 90% of the code). Clearly evidence that women write better compilers than men! Now how do you explain that evidence! Perhaps their brains are more adept to writing compilers! Must be so! Only possible explanation!
If I may make a suggestion, read the last paragraph of your own answer and think about how the part about not seeing this objectively could possibly apply to you.
Did you ever consider that it perhaps might have been readnotify failing, rather than your prof not actually looking at your assignment? Occam's razor and all that...
Sorry, my "sardonic emphasis filter" was not working correctly. I was implying that a woman making a few throwaway comments about such things *IS* the same thing as would be produced by a woman programmer who was charged with compiling statistics on the matter.
Congratulations, you've just entered at the top of my "most inane stuff I've heard all month" list.
As a male who tries to be as non-sexist as I can
Except for when you rant about how females can't compile proper statistics about female programmers, how females as a whole are an interest group, and imply that the average female programmer could not possibly be better than the average male programmer, despite the fact that programmers are a self-selected group to begin with and thus don't necessarily represent their gender at all.
I probably generally write the best commented code of anyone I have ever worked with in my life
That reminds me of those studies which have shown that people will below-average knowledge are likely to overestimate their abilities, while people who actually know shit often end up being insecure because they are capable of seeing their own mistakes.
Not to mention that, ignoring your subjective evaluation of your comments and accepting that you are the best commenter of all times, one outlier means jack shit.
There's nothing in my brain that's being particularly female when I do this
So you constantly measure your oestrogen level?
The comments this woman made mean nothing at all. Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong. The same applies to your comments. You certainly said nothing that would invalidate anything this woman has said, and frankly, between the two of you, she seems to be slightly less insane.
Yeah, the average percentage of females in comp sci classes kind of fluctuates. However, at least at ETH Zuerich, it's starting to climb again, and I think they're closing in on 20% again.
One of the issues I've noticed is that some of the (older) comp sci profs really don't think that females actually should study comp sci. When I was studying, female students often complained about unfair treatment, which isn't particularly hard to believe.
Same thing happened to me. I did a compiler design class with a girl (we were supposed to do "teams" of two people for the assignments). Man, she was hardcore! I was interested in the topic, but I also was kind of a lazy bum. Some of the assignments were freaking hard, and I would generally imply that I thought we should just let this one go, but man, did she do them all, and to ad insult to injury, she then had to explain to me what the hell she did! Her coding skills and understanding of hardware was off the charts.
OTOH, when learning for physics tests, it would generally be me explaining stuff to her.
The first year of studying, I barely managed to get passing grades; but after we started doing everything together, both our grades improved tremendously and I think we both eventually finished in the top percent of your year.
I'm not sure if we complemented each other so well due to our different genders (I would normally expect males to do quite well at compiler design), but whatever the reason was, it sure worked for us.
Unfortunately, after finishing studying, her first job was at a company where she wrote fucking Word and Excel macros. I guess her employer simply thought that girls were too dumb to write "real" code. She eventually changed jobs and is much happier now.
the real problem of -isms is not whether one group is generally different to another or not, but when members of a group are presupposed to conform to the stereotype
Exactly. If you average two groups of different individual, you will always find differences between the groups. However, these differences only apply to the group as a whole, not to each particular individual!
Quite simply, the average man is seldom average, and neither is the average woman.
No, they did not hire a woman programmer to compile the statistics. Had you not acted like a male and actually read the fucking article, you would have noticed that there are not statistics. She didn't cite any statistics, she just made a few throwaway comments about how people behave.
I studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a European institute comparable to the MIT in the US. The percentage of women starting Computer Science each year in the last decade was generally between 5% and 20%. Not sure how large the percentage of those finishing was, but back when I was studying, females were not a lot more likely to bail than males (although they often did complain about unfair treatment by profs, some of which openly proclaimed that there was no place for women in software engineering).
First of all, I see a ton of (hopefully facetious) comments implying that "chicks can't code." This is bull. Back when I was studying comp sci, I had database classes taught by Moira Norrie. Not sure what she does now, but back then, she did some hardcore stuff with object-oriented dbs; she's probably a better programmer and engineer than 99.99% of the people posting on this/. story (as an aside, I also had classes by Felicitas Pauss, who now works at the LHC at CERN, which will of course soon destroy the world as we know it by producing strangelets or something - remember, dudes, your demise will be brought upon you by a woman, and don't you forget that!:-)
Having worked with a few female coders, I would tend to think that they are slightly more careful with how elegant their code is, and how readable it is. I have worked with some guys who wrote beautiful, readable code, but generally, I think the females have a slight edge here. Guys are happy if it works, females seem to be more likely to go the extra mile.
Of course, this is a subjective assessment and influenced by my own prejudices. I could be totally wrong.
Something else I've noticed is that females often get stuck doing the crap nobody wants to do, like coding Word macros after four years of studying software engineering, or coding some stupid Access database. I think most guys would quit if put in that position. Or perhaps it's that most companies would not dare insulting males by giving them such crappy assignments, while they're quite happy wasting their female engineers' time since, after all, they're just women, right?
First, despite of what you might have heard, a corporation is not a person. Sure, corporations are made of people, but a corporation should not have the same basic rights as a person.
Why not?
Because if a corporation is a person, nobody is accountable for that person's actions.
If you start a business as an individual, and you expect to have the freedom to do x thing (for example, to sell a product at a reduced price reflective of an ongoing service agreement; or possibly to sell a widget at a reduced price because it is slightly defective [while disclosing that minor deviation to the consumer]), or any of the other scenarios you might come up with under the fundamental freedom to contract for whatever you like, absent illegality, why should it be different when your one-man shop grows into a local chain?
Because it's a trade-off. If you create a corporation, you get some things, such as protection ensuring that the things you personally own won't be taken away from you if the corporation goes belly-up. In exchange, that corporation has a few less rights than you have.
If you don't want to make that trade-off, you're free not to.
As far as transactions are concerned, there's no reason to deny a company those rights simply because it has successfully grown beyond a single person. To do so would burden the expansion of business, something we would frown upon as a society.
I'm not sure why you think that everything that puts a burden on the expansion of a business is automatically a bad thing. Whether something puts a burden on the expansion of a business is one aspect of evaluating something; not the only aspect. Societies are made up of humans, and their goal should be to make these humans' lives better. If supporting corporations does that, cool. If not, there's no reason to support corporations.
I find it interesting that a lot of people have that idea that supporting corporations is a goal in its own right. It's not, it's a means to an end.
Corporations don't have the same individual rights with respect to liberty and privacy, but treating them as a "person" as business transactions is the only approach that makes sense.
If that is the case, you certainly have not provided any evidence supporting it. Obviously, I couldn't disagree more.
Mob rule implies that there is no law, that the majority decides on a whim and punishes those which don't adhere with their decision. That is not how democracy works.
That's exactly how a democracy works.
No. See below.
That's also why we don't have one.
Speak for yourself:-)
Your "mob rule" remark implies that you think the voting people replace courts. Not the case.
Well it's not my comment, and risking putting words in someone else's mouth, legislative power overrides courts.
Not true. Courts can throw out laws if they are against the constitution, and - in some cases - even prevent laws from being voted on if they are against the constitution. Furthermore, new laws are not retroactive. Hence, new laws can't override existing court decisions.
If the "voting people" (to borrow your term) get angry and pass a law using mob rule, the courts are obliged to obey it.
Not true, see above.
In a direct democracy, the courts cannot exercise power against the will of the people.
Again, not true.
That's why it's a fundamentally flawed system for anything larger than a small town.
Switzerland seems to be doing just fine.
Really, I think it's obvious that you are severely misinformed. I suggest you read up on that stuff; opinions without factual background are useless.
By saying parents aren't capable of evaluating whether a school is any good, you imply that politicians are somehow able to do that?
No. Don't know where you got that idea.
Government needs the same simple scales to measure performance as parents do. If schooling was private, there would emerge serveral independent measuring instrument, typically run by magazines or consumer organizations - think fortune 500, but for schools.
Exactly. They would be measured like a fortune 500 company. Which is not good.
Most parents can't aren't capable of evaluating whether a school is actually good, and if you measure a private school, they'll do whatever is necessary to get high rankings in the measurement, regardless of what it actually does to the quality of their education. If you measure by grades, they'll give good grades. If you test the pupils, they'll train them to do well at those tests.
The trick is to align the profit motive with the actual task at hand
Unfortunately, this is almost never possible. A company's main (and pretty much only) motive is to make as much money as possible. In almost all cases, this is not only not what people want from a public service, but actually at odds with what people want from a public service.
This reminds me of trying to motivate programmers. There are tons of things you can try to motivate programmers - give them bonuses based on written lines of code, solved issues, milestones... It never works, because there's always a way to make the numbers look good without actually doing anything.
The same applies to companies. You can't get a private company to reliably do anything other than maximize profits.
Why would teachers get paid more in a privatized school system?
I see no reason why a privatized school system would increase competition between schools. Hence, schools would try to maximize profits. That is easily done by cutting salaries, as can be seen in every other area where public services were privatized.
But as GP said, it used to be that teachers were respected. Nowadays, not so much anymore. Also, work has become harder in general I think, because children tend to be less well-behaved than even a decade ago. So the incentive to being a teacher is going down and needs to be replaced with something else. Money is the obvious choice.
Even though I would personally like being a teacher, I would never even consider becoming one; firstly, because I see what my mom has to go through as a teacher; secondly, because I make about three times as much money as a software engineer.
No, that's what's supposed to happen in mob rule. Some of us believe in fundamental limitations on government power and regulations in order to protect our freedom. And yes, I would consider the ability to sell a phone with certain additional requirements part of freedom, just as I would consider the ability to sell a phone without those strings attached part of freedom also.
I'd like to point out two things:
First, despite of what you might have heard, a corporation is not a person. Sure, corporations are made of people, but a corporation should not have the same basic rights as a person. Thus, taking away freedom from corporations should not be held equal to taking away freedom from actual people.
Second, you're wrong about that "mob rule" thing. Mob rule implies that there is no law, that the majority decides on a whim and punishes those which don't adhere with their decision. That is not how democracy works. In a democracy, even in a direct democracy, there's a separation of powers. Your "mob rule" remark implies that you think the voting people replace courts. Not the case. In a direct democracy, voters vote on laws. Switzerland is a constitutional state, a state under the rule of law, despite of the fact that it is a direct democracy.
In other words, even the people can't vote on laws which are against the constitution (they can, however, change the consitution, although this is no easy).
So no, a direct democracy has pretty much nothing in common with mob rule.
Except when you can't. In the U.S, it's probably no big deal if you can't get unlocked phones. In Europe, where you can't spit without hitting two other countries, it is. The people here want phones to be unlocked by government mandate; some governments have followed the people's will. That's what typically is supposed to happen in a democracy.
Where I live, there will be two carriers. Furthermore, one of them (swisscom) sells all phones unlocked; I have high hopes they'll do this for the iPhone, too.
I guess you can't convince me and I can't convince you, so we'll just have to agree to disagree:-)
Just four points:
For example, I have yet to see a full orchestral piece of music in an indie collection (perhaps you could prove me wrong?)
This is a typical example of music that was never funded by record sales. When the music was originally written, it was funded by a patron (which is still a valid business model). Nowadays, it's funded by people going to concerts.
And the second point:
It seems fairly obvious to me that more money into the field produces more works
That is not obvious to me at all, because the "field" is comprised not only of the acutal musicians, but of the labels as well. Most of the money from record sales (possibly all of it, plus some money from the bands) goes to the labels, where it funds the labels themselves, not the bands.
As you suggest, I'm looking at the "free" music compared to the "commercial" music, and I find the commercial music severely lacking in all aspects except promotion; that last part is quickly changing.
Third point: bands don't produce one record which loses money to later create one which makes money. Almost all CDs are money-losing propositions. Bands make money in different ways already. Even established bands don't make money selling music; and if they do, it's because they sell it themselves, on the Internet (NIN, for example).
Fourth point: The fact that you argue that I make the assumption that bands can afford Internet shows that I'm not really making any assumptions:-)
As for your question:
Why not just leave copyright, don't mess with the conditions that nurtured this golden age about to spurt forth, and just enjoy it?
That isn't the actual question. I don't suggest copyright will change. The fact is that people don't care about copyright. People do and always will download music on the Internet. The actual question is whether this is bad for music. I don't think it is.
Either way, thanks for your thoughtful discussion, it was a pleasure talking to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Threaded conversations are the best part of gmail. It's why I use it, and it's the number one reason why people switch to gmail after peeking over my should and seeing how it works.
While I tend to agree, I also must say that in the unmanaged teams I've seen, areas of expertise have tended to form rather quickly. And if given the chance, most programmer will go to great lengths trying to figure out what users actually want :-)
It may not be terribly efficient, but it generally works.
What doesn't work is testing. Programmers just can't test their own apps.
She: "Women write better comments than men."
You: "Women are biased, spin crap, barely code at all and if they do not proficiently, and can't be trusted to do proper statistics because they are an interest group."
As I've said, between the two of you, she seems to be slightly less insane. All you've done with your reply is validate my point.
By the way, I love the part where you state that your subjective evaluation of a dozen women's code is evidence that women don't excel at coding. Well done. I have some evidence of my own: Back when I studied comp sci, we had to write a compiler in teams of two. The two pairs with girls in them handed in the most well-written, highest-rated, elegant compilers at the end of the course (I was in one of them, and for the record, my female friend wrote 90% of the code). Clearly evidence that women write better compilers than men! Now how do you explain that evidence! Perhaps their brains are more adept to writing compilers! Must be so! Only possible explanation!
If I may make a suggestion, read the last paragraph of your own answer and think about how the part about not seeing this objectively could possibly apply to you.
Did you ever consider that it perhaps might have been readnotify failing, rather than your prof not actually looking at your assignment? Occam's razor and all that...
Congratulations, you've just entered at the top of my "most inane stuff I've heard all month" list.
Except for when you rant about how females can't compile proper statistics about female programmers, how females as a whole are an interest group, and imply that the average female programmer could not possibly be better than the average male programmer, despite the fact that programmers are a self-selected group to begin with and thus don't necessarily represent their gender at all.
That reminds me of those studies which have shown that people will below-average knowledge are likely to overestimate their abilities, while people who actually know shit often end up being insecure because they are capable of seeing their own mistakes.
Not to mention that, ignoring your subjective evaluation of your comments and accepting that you are the best commenter of all times, one outlier means jack shit.
So you constantly measure your oestrogen level?
The comments this woman made mean nothing at all. Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong. The same applies to your comments. You certainly said nothing that would invalidate anything this woman has said, and frankly, between the two of you, she seems to be slightly less insane.
Yeah, the average percentage of females in comp sci classes kind of fluctuates. However, at least at ETH Zuerich, it's starting to climb again, and I think they're closing in on 20% again.
One of the issues I've noticed is that some of the (older) comp sci profs really don't think that females actually should study comp sci. When I was studying, female students often complained about unfair treatment, which isn't particularly hard to believe.
Same thing happened to me. I did a compiler design class with a girl (we were supposed to do "teams" of two people for the assignments). Man, she was hardcore! I was interested in the topic, but I also was kind of a lazy bum. Some of the assignments were freaking hard, and I would generally imply that I thought we should just let this one go, but man, did she do them all, and to ad insult to injury, she then had to explain to me what the hell she did! Her coding skills and understanding of hardware was off the charts.
OTOH, when learning for physics tests, it would generally be me explaining stuff to her.
The first year of studying, I barely managed to get passing grades; but after we started doing everything together, both our grades improved tremendously and I think we both eventually finished in the top percent of your year.
I'm not sure if we complemented each other so well due to our different genders (I would normally expect males to do quite well at compiler design), but whatever the reason was, it sure worked for us.
Unfortunately, after finishing studying, her first job was at a company where she wrote fucking Word and Excel macros. I guess her employer simply thought that girls were too dumb to write "real" code. She eventually changed jobs and is much happier now.
You have a cat who can read core dumps? Damn, where did you get that?
Exactly. If you average two groups of different individual, you will always find differences between the groups. However, these differences only apply to the group as a whole, not to each particular individual!
Best quote of the whole thread :-)
No, they did not hire a woman programmer to compile the statistics. Had you not acted like a male and actually read the fucking article, you would have noticed that there are not statistics. She didn't cite any statistics, she just made a few throwaway comments about how people behave.
I studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich, a European institute comparable to the MIT in the US. The percentage of women starting Computer Science each year in the last decade was generally between 5% and 20%. Not sure how large the percentage of those finishing was, but back when I was studying, females were not a lot more likely to bail than males (although they often did complain about unfair treatment by profs, some of which openly proclaimed that there was no place for women in software engineering).
First of all, I see a ton of (hopefully facetious) comments implying that "chicks can't code." This is bull. Back when I was studying comp sci, I had database classes taught by Moira Norrie. Not sure what she does now, but back then, she did some hardcore stuff with object-oriented dbs; she's probably a better programmer and engineer than 99.99% of the people posting on this /. story (as an aside, I also had classes by Felicitas Pauss, who now works at the LHC at CERN, which will of course soon destroy the world as we know it by producing strangelets or something - remember, dudes, your demise will be brought upon you by a woman, and don't you forget that! :-)
Having worked with a few female coders, I would tend to think that they are slightly more careful with how elegant their code is, and how readable it is. I have worked with some guys who wrote beautiful, readable code, but generally, I think the females have a slight edge here. Guys are happy if it works, females seem to be more likely to go the extra mile.
Of course, this is a subjective assessment and influenced by my own prejudices. I could be totally wrong.
Something else I've noticed is that females often get stuck doing the crap nobody wants to do, like coding Word macros after four years of studying software engineering, or coding some stupid Access database. I think most guys would quit if put in that position. Or perhaps it's that most companies would not dare insulting males by giving them such crappy assignments, while they're quite happy wasting their female engineers' time since, after all, they're just women, right?
First, despite of what you might have heard, a corporation is not a person. Sure, corporations are made of people, but a corporation should not have the same basic rights as a person.
Why not?
Because if a corporation is a person, nobody is accountable for that person's actions.
If you start a business as an individual, and you expect to have the freedom to do x thing (for example, to sell a product at a reduced price reflective of an ongoing service agreement; or possibly to sell a widget at a reduced price because it is slightly defective [while disclosing that minor deviation to the consumer]), or any of the other scenarios you might come up with under the fundamental freedom to contract for whatever you like, absent illegality, why should it be different when your one-man shop grows into a local chain?
Because it's a trade-off. If you create a corporation, you get some things, such as protection ensuring that the things you personally own won't be taken away from you if the corporation goes belly-up. In exchange, that corporation has a few less rights than you have.
If you don't want to make that trade-off, you're free not to.
As far as transactions are concerned, there's no reason to deny a company those rights simply because it has successfully grown beyond a single person. To do so would burden the expansion of business, something we would frown upon as a society.
I'm not sure why you think that everything that puts a burden on the expansion of a business is automatically a bad thing. Whether something puts a burden on the expansion of a business is one aspect of evaluating something; not the only aspect. Societies are made up of humans, and their goal should be to make these humans' lives better. If supporting corporations does that, cool. If not, there's no reason to support corporations.
I find it interesting that a lot of people have that idea that supporting corporations is a goal in its own right. It's not, it's a means to an end.
Corporations don't have the same individual rights with respect to liberty and privacy, but treating them as a "person" as business transactions is the only approach that makes sense.
If that is the case, you certainly have not provided any evidence supporting it. Obviously, I couldn't disagree more.
Mob rule implies that there is no law, that the majority decides on a whim and punishes those which don't adhere with their decision. That is not how democracy works.
That's exactly how a democracy works.
No. See below.
That's also why we don't have one.
Speak for yourself :-)
Your "mob rule" remark implies that you think the voting people replace courts. Not the case.
Well it's not my comment, and risking putting words in someone else's mouth, legislative power overrides courts.
Not true. Courts can throw out laws if they are against the constitution, and - in some cases - even prevent laws from being voted on if they are against the constitution. Furthermore, new laws are not retroactive. Hence, new laws can't override existing court decisions.
If the "voting people" (to borrow your term) get angry and pass a law using mob rule, the courts are obliged to obey it.
Not true, see above.
In a direct democracy, the courts cannot exercise power against the will of the people.
Again, not true.
That's why it's a fundamentally flawed system for anything larger than a small town.
Switzerland seems to be doing just fine.
Really, I think it's obvious that you are severely misinformed. I suggest you read up on that stuff; opinions without factual background are useless.
No. Don't know where you got that idea.
Government needs the same simple scales to measure performance as parents do. If schooling was private, there would emerge serveral independent measuring instrument, typically run by magazines or consumer organizations - think fortune 500, but for schools.Exactly. They would be measured like a fortune 500 company. Which is not good.
You're not helping your case.
Most parents can't aren't capable of evaluating whether a school is actually good, and if you measure a private school, they'll do whatever is necessary to get high rankings in the measurement, regardless of what it actually does to the quality of their education. If you measure by grades, they'll give good grades. If you test the pupils, they'll train them to do well at those tests.
Here's the key point, as you say:
Unfortunately, this is almost never possible. A company's main (and pretty much only) motive is to make as much money as possible. In almost all cases, this is not only not what people want from a public service, but actually at odds with what people want from a public service.
This reminds me of trying to motivate programmers. There are tons of things you can try to motivate programmers - give them bonuses based on written lines of code, solved issues, milestones... It never works, because there's always a way to make the numbers look good without actually doing anything.
The same applies to companies. You can't get a private company to reliably do anything other than maximize profits.
For most people, it's not really a choice if one of them costs, and the other doesn't.
Why would teachers get paid more in a privatized school system?
I see no reason why a privatized school system would increase competition between schools. Hence, schools would try to maximize profits. That is easily done by cutting salaries, as can be seen in every other area where public services were privatized.
You're invalidating your own point. Yes, people don't have to pay for their kids to go to school because they pay either way.
But as GP said, it used to be that teachers were respected. Nowadays, not so much anymore. Also, work has become harder in general I think, because children tend to be less well-behaved than even a decade ago. So the incentive to being a teacher is going down and needs to be replaced with something else. Money is the obvious choice. Even though I would personally like being a teacher, I would never even consider becoming one; firstly, because I see what my mom has to go through as a teacher; secondly, because I make about three times as much money as a software engineer.
I'd like to point out two things:
First, despite of what you might have heard, a corporation is not a person. Sure, corporations are made of people, but a corporation should not have the same basic rights as a person. Thus, taking away freedom from corporations should not be held equal to taking away freedom from actual people.
Second, you're wrong about that "mob rule" thing. Mob rule implies that there is no law, that the majority decides on a whim and punishes those which don't adhere with their decision. That is not how democracy works. In a democracy, even in a direct democracy, there's a separation of powers. Your "mob rule" remark implies that you think the voting people replace courts. Not the case. In a direct democracy, voters vote on laws. Switzerland is a constitutional state, a state under the rule of law, despite of the fact that it is a direct democracy.
In other words, even the people can't vote on laws which are against the constitution (they can, however, change the consitution, although this is no easy).
So no, a direct democracy has pretty much nothing in common with mob rule.
Except when you can't. In the U.S, it's probably no big deal if you can't get unlocked phones. In Europe, where you can't spit without hitting two other countries, it is. The people here want phones to be unlocked by government mandate; some governments have followed the people's will. That's what typically is supposed to happen in a democracy.
Where I live, there will be two carriers. Furthermore, one of them (swisscom) sells all phones unlocked; I have high hopes they'll do this for the iPhone, too.
I guess you can't convince me and I can't convince you, so we'll just have to agree to disagree :-)
Just four points:
For example, I have yet to see a full orchestral piece of music in an indie collection (perhaps you could prove me wrong?)This is a typical example of music that was never funded by record sales. When the music was originally written, it was funded by a patron (which is still a valid business model). Nowadays, it's funded by people going to concerts.
And the second point:
It seems fairly obvious to me that more money into the field produces more worksThat is not obvious to me at all, because the "field" is comprised not only of the acutal musicians, but of the labels as well. Most of the money from record sales (possibly all of it, plus some money from the bands) goes to the labels, where it funds the labels themselves, not the bands.
As you suggest, I'm looking at the "free" music compared to the "commercial" music, and I find the commercial music severely lacking in all aspects except promotion; that last part is quickly changing.
Third point: bands don't produce one record which loses money to later create one which makes money. Almost all CDs are money-losing propositions. Bands make money in different ways already. Even established bands don't make money selling music; and if they do, it's because they sell it themselves, on the Internet (NIN, for example).
Fourth point: The fact that you argue that I make the assumption that bands can afford Internet shows that I'm not really making any assumptions :-)
As for your question:
Why not just leave copyright, don't mess with the conditions that nurtured this golden age about to spurt forth, and just enjoy it?That isn't the actual question. I don't suggest copyright will change. The fact is that people don't care about copyright. People do and always will download music on the Internet. The actual question is whether this is bad for music. I don't think it is.
Either way, thanks for your thoughtful discussion, it was a pleasure talking to you.