"In effect, it's like going after a photocopier manufacturer when the users start to mainly photocopy books illegally... Oh.. wait."
Not quite. Remember that the name and functionality of this site is clearly marked towards copyright infringement. They aren't called "The Pirate Bay" for nothing.
So it is like going after a photocopy shop that calls themselves "Illegal photocopy shop" and advertises themselves as "Come here to illegally copy and share your books with other users". They may not themselves be doing any illegal copying, but they are facilitating it.
If you set up a Torrent site mainly meant for sharing Linux ISOs and free software and somebody took advantage of it to do copyright infringement you would be more like a photocopier manufacturer.
"But as someone who pulled it from the net, I did not ever get any license "assigned" to me."
That is YOUR problem, not the Copyright owner's problem. No license == no rights. You assume that you have full rights if you have no valid license. This is exactly the opposite of what Copyright law says. In the absence of a valid license, you have no rights. Exploiting a copyrighted work, with no permission is a criminal offence.
"Copyright is a publisher's right, not the artist's right."
No. Copyright is the right of the copyright owner. That means the artist/creator unless he has assigned his copyright to someone else (i.e. record label or employer). It is automatic and does not get magically reassigned to the publisher when someone publishes the work. It so happens that most artists are required to give up their copyright to the record label as part of their deal with the label.
"No license, but given to anyone = Free for all."
Your arguments seem to be based upon wishful thinking and have absolutely no basis in law.
"You are mixing up downloading (what you talked about until then), and uploading (sending)."
Neither are permitted without a valid license from the copyright holder. And no, if someone sent me a file and made up a license (or didn't give me a license), that would not make it a valid license from the copyright holder.
"Sending something without a license, that you got with a license is a completely different beast, because then, as I said in my original post, you are breaking a license. (Because now there actually is something to break.)"
No. Copyright law automatically covers works of art. You do not have to be given a license for the work to be copyrighted. It is automatically copyrighted. The only way for you to have any rights at all is for the copyright owner to explicitly grant them to you in a license/contract.
The license/contract thus exists primarily to GIVE you rights to the work not to take them away (since you have none) (*).
"You forgot the little fact, that if I re-publish a work, there is a new license, which makes the uploader with the license the law-breaker, and gives the downloader his complete freedom (eg. to become another uploader)."
This is simply not a fact. A valid license can only be given by the copyright holder, unless the copyright holder explicitly have given you the rights to sub-license the work (as in the case of the GPL).
Copyright law is very explicit. Without a valid license from the copyright holder, you have no rights to download or share a copyrighted work. It is a criminal offence and you are liable for civil lawsuits. I suggest you read this and this.
The GPL exists to give you rights you would otherwise not have. The GPL acknowledges this itself in point 5 (emphasis mine):
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License"
Thus, re-distributors of GPL code are required to distribute the license note as well, so that receivers are given the same rights as the re-distributor. Otherwise the receiver has no rights.
(*) To confuse the matter, some software licenses do indeed try to take away related rights not covered by copyright, such as rights to sue if the software is defective... or take away fair use rights such as the right to 'cite' the work, benchmark it... etc..
"This is a beef I have with commuters. I'm always hearing demands from people who live 50 miles from work that I need to spend 20 billion dollars on highway improvements. Meanwhile I spend an extra $400 a month to live close to work and drive less than 10 miles and don't touch an interstate."
Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as you argue. Most roads are full of people for whom it is simply not practical to move for many different reasons. For instance: a) Your wife works in Town A. You could only find work in Town B. One (or both) of you will have to commute. b) You got a one year contract in Town B. Moving to Town B for one year, may not be practical, so you stay in Town A and commute.
There can be loads of other reasons why moving closer to work isn't a practical option, and the roads are full of people with this problem. Thus the only sensible option for the government is to provide solid infrastructure, so this can happen efficiently.
Yes they are. Your entire post is based on a complete misunderstanding of Copyright law. Copyright infringement is in most countries (In the US, after the 1979 Copyright act) both a civil and a criminal matter. You are thus performing an illegal act when you are distributing (or receiving) copyrighted material without being licensed to do so.
Copyright is not based on contract law, which you seem to think. It is an exclusive right to exploit intellectual works given to the copyright owner by the government. This applies to most governments, at least all the ones that signed the Berne Copyright Convention in 1988.
The only rights you have to any copyrighted work is the rights assigned to you in a license by the copyright owner. This is in fact how the GPL (GNU General Public License) that govern Linux amongst other things, work.
The license is implicit, because if you do not accept the license, you have no rights at all.
Now.. This means that unless the license for the CD you bought explicitly specified that you are allowed to share it with your friends (*), you are bound by copyright law. If you distribute it anyway, you are breaking copyright law, not contract law. Now if you actually signed a contract that explicitly said that you are not allowed to distribute the music, you would be breaking both contract law (a civil matter) and copyright (a civil and criminal matter).
So when you send your friend some copyrighted music without being licensed to do so, you are in fact, doing something illegal (**).
But what about your friend? Well, he is receiving copyrighted material without any license, which also constitutes copyright infringement. And if he distribute it to others, he is certain to break the law.
I suppose if you (wrongfully) claimed to be the copyright owner when you distributed the music to your friend, he might (***) have grounds to claim he simply didn't know any better. But if the music in question is performed by Metallica or Britney Spears, it is very unlikely that anyone would believe him.
So to summarise: 1. If you do not have explicit permission from the copyright owner, you have no rights to distribute the works. Not having a license is no excuse.
and
2. Breaking copyright is both a civil and a criminal matter, so copyright infringement is in fact illegal.
and
3. Please get your most basic facts right before trying to 'make reality a bit more clear' for anyone.
Whether or not copyright infringement == theft is a completely different matter (****).
(*) Some CDs from Telle records, which used to have famous electronica band Royksopp on their books, used to explicitely say: "copy and share, but do not sell the copies because that is not nice". (**) Unless you live in a country that has lax copyright laws, but if so you should have specified that in your post. (***) Consult a lawyer on this one. (****) For the record, I think it obviously is not equal to theft since the copyright owner still has his own copy.
"Only geeks know/think that Vista was a failure. It was only a PR failure. If it was a real failure new PCs would not be shipping with it."
Not true. Microsoft is all about big profits and Vista was a failure if there was no net profit in developing it.
The right questions are: 1. Have Vista led to an increase in their sales? or 2. Have Vista stopped their sales from taking a nosedive?
If the answer to both these questions is 'no', then Vista was a monumental failure, since they spent billions of dollars developing it.
Personally I doubt Vista made any noticable changes to the Windows sales. Nobody seems to think that 'oh that Windows XP is too old to use now' or 'gotta buy myself a new PC to get some of that Vista love'. People are happy to keep on buying a PC with Windows XP.
"I bought pirated X-Files DVDs from China. It cost $30 to ship it here from China, so yes, shipping would all but make up the price difference.
However, it was cost effective for me to buy the pirated DVDs because I bought all 9 seasons for $80 total, plus $30 shipping."
This makes absolutely no sense to me. I suppose you save a little on effort, but this is an inferior solution to just pirating it and burning it yourself in other respects.
* It is just as illegal. * You are most likely funding organised crime. A lot of these are total scumbags and chances are big that you are indirectly hurting someone. * The chance of getting caught is probably at least as big. * You are opening yourself up to fraud. How do you know these people won't just take your money and just not send anything to you? * You have no way of knowing the quality before shelling out $110. It could be piss poor, and it would be hard to get your money back.
"AIUI, if PsyStar have rightly identified that Apple failed to register the version of Mac OS X sold by PsyStar within 3 months of publication, then Apple can't bring the suit."
Not correct. Please read your own sources better. As your link clearly states: "Registration may be made at any time within the life of the copyright."
However as the grand parent state (and your link confirms) Apple can't file for statutory damages or attorney fees unless they filed the registration within 3 months.
Another quote from your link: "Even though registration is not a requirement for protection, the copyright law provides several inducements or advantages to encourage copyright owners to make registration."
I hate the term 'negative person', because the wording suggests that it is always wrong to be negative.
Being 'negative' is not wrong in itself because it depends completely on what you are negative towards. It is just as neutral as the word 'change'. It depends completely on what the change is.
The term 'negative person' is extremely often used as a derogatory term towards people that have different opinions than yourself. I.e. the Church of Scientology uses this wording towards anyone that opposes them.
I also hear people saying that being successful is all about getting rid of all 'negative influences'. This is the same as getting rid of all critical thinking.
... and stronger, but did not breed as fast as us, thus being overcome by sheer numbers.
We know that they had similar capabilites when it comes to tools, society and culture as us.
Thus given the fairly large range of intellect among us, we can be pretty sure that a Neanderthal raised as a human would fit perfectly well within our range of intellectual capability.
Would they look different? Sure, but given the shear range of appearance among us, it is not unlikely that a Neanderthal may appear human.
However, given that people KNOW they are different, they will be treated differently and may thus have a very unhappy life.
I guess you could arrange for a family to take the child with a secret identity, but sooner or later the child would find out, and imagine the horror of finding out you aren't actually the same species as everyone else, but cloned from an extinct branch considered 'primitive'.
... for those that can't be bothered to read this lengthy yet information sparse piece.
1. MacOS X is faster in graphics intensive benchmarks. 2. The other benchmarks are fairly even with Ubuntu coming out on top more often than OS X (one notable exception is SQLite).
This is hardly anything new. OS X has a well optimised graphics system with good drivers for the intel chips (which up until now was used in both Macbooks and Mac Minis).
Also SQLite is AFAIK integral to many features of OS X, and for this reason it makes sense for Apple to have optimised for it.
Overall the benchmarks suggests that Linux (not just Ubuntu) needs some work on the graphics system and the Intel drivers. What a shock.
It seems 3 years and 5 years support cycles are both correct. 3 years for the desktop, 5 years for the server version.
And "biannually" does not mean what you think it means. I assume you mean every two years, in which case you are correct and my previous post was wrong.
I'm thinking easy on line storage integrated with OS and applications. Similarly they could offer backup space, email accounts, web space, picture storage and sharing,, Jabber service, OpenID, etc.
Think ".Mac/MobileMe" style services.
I would certainly be willing to pay a reasonable subscription fee for a nicely integrated service.
I am uncertain what you mean. No Linux distribution 'requires' updates, although you are certainly encouraged to update them from a security (and stability) point of view.
If you on the other hand mean operating system upgrades, then the Long Term Support releases from Ubuntu which comes out once a year are supported with security and stability fixes for three years (same time scale as Debian I think). This may be slightly too short for you, in case you might want to consider for instance Red Hat Enterprise Linux, who have 7 year support cycles.
Neither Ubuntu or RHEL will stop working after the support cycle is over, although no more security updates will be released by Canonical or Red Hat Inc.
I have no idea how long security updates are released for Slackware.
"When I pointed out that contention would cause variable transfer speeds instead of a flat one, they tried to get me off the phone and told me to write to their head office. I totally hate that company. Avoid."
Look, IANAL, but I would start documenting the bandwidth capping, and then cancel the subscription and any payments to them due to what I would consider to be breach of contract from their point of view.
This sounds like wilful capping of the speed, which can hardly be covered by their standard contract legalese.
Chances are they would not bother taking you to court over ending the contract early.
Star Wars is all about the fantasy of being a hero. The problem is that playing minor characters in world where the heroes get all the action sucks.
Exactly, and all the replies you have received so far completely miss the point. In an old school offline game, you are the exceptional hero and everything in the game centers on you. This is the fantasy that makes games so unique as entertainment. You are the hero, not just watching the hero.
Making it possible to become an exceptional and unique in an MMO is completely besides the point. I will never become that hero. I am not good enough and not devoted enough and neither are 95% of all the people playing World of Warcraft. Only the small elite can by definition be good enough to be an exceptional hero, otherwise there is nothing exceptional about it.
You then have to wonder what the point of playing an MMO is. I play games to have fun, to relax and probably to get a feeling of mastering something. An MMO can never give me this unless I devote an obscene amount of time and effort into it, and it may still not be good enough. This is exactly what real life is like, so why seek it out in games?
"A country that cares about its citizens doesn't try to take over the health care industry, it allows people to get the amount or level of insurance they want and don't overload the system by making it free for all. Free for all means mediocre or poor for everyone."
Could you please provide some evidence for this statement? Free healthcare is provided in almost the entire Europe and Canada.
Yes, sometimes we have waiting lists for non life threatening operations. People sometimes rightfully complain about things and many things could be improved.
However, not once have I heard anyone seriously suggesting we get rid of nationalised health care. Why? Because health care is generally good, we all know we will be cared for regardless of our current financial status and because nationalised health care saves lives.
Contrary to what you might think, Doctors in the UK (and Norway) tend to like the nationalised health care, despite the fact that they could earn loads more in a privatised system. Why? Because they feel it is morally right and because they know they will never have to turn someone away simply because they don't have money or insurance.
This fantasy world many americans live in with regards to 'socialised medicine' is baffling at times.
Well, that will give them moral superiority as they declare bankrupcy following a life-saving emergency surgery.
Or: This will give them moral superiority after they wisely emigrate to Europe where (in at least most countries) they will not have to deal with an insurance company refusing them medical insurance. Instead it all gets covered by national health care, pre-existing condition or not.
Leaving medical coverage to private companies that has no obligation to provide insurance to people not meeting certain health standards is inhumane and evil. At least if your country has enough money to support a proper health system for everyone.
Yes, keep on using this term "communist" willy nilly. It lets you tar any lefties at the same time as you tar the repressive policies of Labour. New labour are in social and economic policies a centrist-right party, very far from "socialist" or "communist".
Their policies on detention, warrantless searches, etc. are, however, quite repressive.
Since they protect the status quo and the interest of the wealthy, they are far more facist than communist.
The laws of economics would have you expect the price to come down, but not in the world of the MPAA.
The laws of economics would expect them to maximize profit. They do that by selling fewer units at higher prices and throwing the rest away.
Only because of price fixing and content monopoly. In a real free market you'd expect them to be forced to sell cheaper in order to sell at all. There really needs to be anti trust or cartel litigation against the MPAA members.
Slashdot Mirror
"In effect, it's like going after a photocopier manufacturer when the users start to mainly photocopy books illegally... Oh.. wait."
Not quite. Remember that the name and functionality of this site is clearly marked towards copyright infringement. They aren't called "The Pirate Bay" for nothing.
So it is like going after a photocopy shop that calls themselves "Illegal photocopy shop" and advertises themselves as "Come here to illegally copy and share your books with other users". They may not themselves be doing any illegal copying, but they are facilitating it.
If you set up a Torrent site mainly meant for sharing Linux ISOs and free software and somebody took advantage of it to do copyright infringement you would be more like a photocopier manufacturer.
"But as someone who pulled it from the net, I did not ever get any license "assigned" to me."
That is YOUR problem, not the Copyright owner's problem. No license == no rights. You assume that you have full rights if you have no valid license. This is exactly the opposite of what Copyright law says. In the absence of a valid license, you have no rights. Exploiting a copyrighted work, with no permission is a criminal offence.
"Copyright is a publisher's right, not the artist's right."
No. Copyright is the right of the copyright owner. That means the artist/creator unless he has assigned his copyright to someone else (i.e. record label or employer). It is automatic and does not get magically reassigned to the publisher when someone publishes the work. It so happens that most artists are required to give up their copyright to the record label as part of their deal with the label.
"No license, but given to anyone = Free for all."
Your arguments seem to be based upon wishful thinking and have absolutely no basis in law.
"You are mixing up downloading (what you talked about until then), and uploading (sending)."
Neither are permitted without a valid license from the copyright holder. And no, if someone sent me a file and made up a license (or didn't give me a license), that would not make it a valid license from the copyright holder.
"Sending something without a license, that you got with a license is a completely different beast, because then, as I said in my original post, you are breaking a license. (Because now there actually is something to break.)"
No. Copyright law automatically covers works of art. You do not have to be given a license for the work to be copyrighted. It is automatically copyrighted. The only way for you to have any rights at all is for the copyright owner to explicitly grant them to you in a license/contract.
The license/contract thus exists primarily to GIVE you rights to the work not to take them away (since you have none) (*).
"You forgot the little fact, that if I re-publish a work, there is a new license, which makes the uploader with the license the law-breaker, and gives the downloader his complete freedom (eg. to become another uploader)."
This is simply not a fact. A valid license can only be given by the copyright holder, unless the copyright holder explicitly have given you the rights to sub-license the work (as in the case of the GPL).
Copyright law is very explicit. Without a valid license from the copyright holder, you have no rights to download or share a copyrighted work. It is a criminal offence and you are liable for civil lawsuits. I suggest you read this and this.
The GPL exists to give you rights you would otherwise not have. The GPL acknowledges this itself in point 5 (emphasis mine):
"You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License"
Thus, re-distributors of GPL code are required to distribute the license note as well, so that receivers are given the same rights as the re-distributor. Otherwise the receiver has no rights.
(*) To confuse the matter, some software licenses do indeed try to take away related rights not covered by copyright, such as rights to sue if the software is defective... or take away fair use rights such as the right to 'cite' the work, benchmark it... etc..
"This is a beef I have with commuters. I'm always hearing demands from people who live 50 miles from work that I need to spend 20 billion dollars on highway improvements. Meanwhile I spend an extra $400 a month to live close to work and drive less than 10 miles and don't touch an interstate."
Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as you argue.
Most roads are full of people for whom it is simply not practical to move for many different reasons. For instance:
a) Your wife works in Town A. You could only find work in Town B. One (or both) of you will have to commute.
b) You got a one year contract in Town B. Moving to Town B for one year, may not be practical, so you stay in Town A and commute.
There can be loads of other reasons why moving closer to work isn't a practical option, and the roads are full of people with this problem. Thus the only sensible option for the government is to provide solid infrastructure, so this can happen efficiently.
Nobody is illegally downloading anything!
Yes they are. Your entire post is based on a complete misunderstanding of Copyright law. Copyright infringement is in most countries (In the US, after the 1979 Copyright act) both a civil and a criminal matter. You are thus performing an illegal act when you are distributing (or receiving) copyrighted material without being licensed to do so.
Copyright is not based on contract law, which you seem to think. It is an exclusive right to exploit intellectual works given to the copyright owner by the government. This applies to most governments, at least all the ones that signed the Berne Copyright Convention in 1988.
The only rights you have to any copyrighted work is the rights assigned to you in a license by the copyright owner. This is in fact how the GPL (GNU General Public License) that govern Linux amongst other things, work.
The license is implicit, because if you do not accept the license, you have no rights at all.
Now.. This means that unless the license for the CD you bought explicitly specified that you are allowed to share it with your friends (*), you are bound by copyright law. If you distribute it anyway, you are breaking copyright law, not contract law. Now if you actually signed a contract that explicitly said that you are not allowed to distribute the music, you would be breaking both contract law (a civil matter) and copyright (a civil and criminal matter).
So when you send your friend some copyrighted music without being licensed to do so, you are in fact, doing something illegal (**).
But what about your friend? Well, he is receiving copyrighted material without any license, which also constitutes copyright infringement. And if he distribute it to others, he is certain to break the law.
I suppose if you (wrongfully) claimed to be the copyright owner when you distributed the music to your friend, he might (***) have grounds to claim he simply didn't know any better. But if the music in question is performed by Metallica or Britney Spears, it is very unlikely that anyone would believe him.
So to summarise:
1. If you do not have explicit permission from the copyright owner, you have no rights to distribute the works. Not having a license is no excuse.
and
2. Breaking copyright is both a civil and a criminal matter, so copyright infringement is in fact illegal.
and
3. Please get your most basic facts right before trying to 'make reality a bit more clear' for anyone.
Whether or not copyright infringement == theft is a completely different matter (****).
(*) Some CDs from Telle records, which used to have famous electronica band Royksopp on their books, used to explicitely say: "copy and share, but do not sell the copies because that is not nice".
(**) Unless you live in a country that has lax copyright laws, but if so you should have specified that in your post.
(***) Consult a lawyer on this one.
(****) For the record, I think it obviously is not equal to theft since the copyright owner still has his own copy.
"Only geeks know/think that Vista was a failure. It was only a PR failure. If it was a real failure new PCs would not be shipping with it."
Not true. Microsoft is all about big profits and Vista was a failure if there was no net profit in developing it.
The right questions are:
1. Have Vista led to an increase in their sales?
or
2. Have Vista stopped their sales from taking a nosedive?
If the answer to both these questions is 'no', then Vista was a monumental failure, since they spent billions of dollars developing it.
Personally I doubt Vista made any noticable changes to the Windows sales. Nobody seems to think that 'oh that Windows XP is too old to use now' or 'gotta buy myself a new PC to get some of that Vista love'. People are happy to keep on buying a PC with Windows XP.
So, Vista seems a total fiasco.
"I bought pirated X-Files DVDs from China. It cost $30 to ship it here from China, so yes, shipping would all but make up the price difference.
However, it was cost effective for me to buy the pirated DVDs because I bought all 9 seasons for $80 total, plus $30 shipping."
This makes absolutely no sense to me. I suppose you save a little on effort, but this is an inferior solution to just pirating it and burning it yourself in other respects.
* It is just as illegal.
* You are most likely funding organised crime. A lot of these are total scumbags and chances are big that you are indirectly hurting someone.
* The chance of getting caught is probably at least as big.
* You are opening yourself up to fraud. How do you know these people won't just take your money and just not send anything to you?
* You have no way of knowing the quality before shelling out $110. It could be piss poor, and it would be hard to get your money back.
"AIUI, if PsyStar have rightly identified that Apple failed to register the version of Mac OS X sold by PsyStar within 3 months of publication, then Apple can't bring the suit."
Not correct. Please read your own sources better. As your link clearly states: "Registration may be made at any time within the life of the copyright."
However as the grand parent state (and your link confirms) Apple can't file for statutory damages or attorney fees unless they filed the registration within 3 months.
Another quote from your link:
"Even though registration is not a requirement for protection, the copyright law provides several inducements or advantages to encourage copyright owners to make registration."
Is it wrong of me to find this troll absolutely hilarious?
I hate the term 'negative person', because the wording suggests that it is always wrong to be negative.
Being 'negative' is not wrong in itself because it depends completely on what you are negative towards. It is just as neutral as the word 'change'. It depends completely on what the change is.
The term 'negative person' is extremely often used as a derogatory term towards people that have different opinions than yourself. I.e. the Church of Scientology uses this wording towards anyone that opposes them.
I also hear people saying that being successful is all about getting rid of all 'negative influences'. This is the same as getting rid of all critical thinking.
"or maybe he got one of the crippled EU ones with a volume limiter which precludes the use of a lot of high end headphones"
Yes, blame Apple for following EU regulation.
I can not take any discussion about The End of the World seriously unless the living dead are involved somehow.
I suggest everyone start preparing for this inevitability straight away.
... and stronger, but did not breed as fast as us, thus being overcome by sheer numbers.
We know that they had similar capabilites when it comes to tools, society and culture as us.
Thus given the fairly large range of intellect among us, we can be pretty sure that a Neanderthal raised as a human would fit perfectly well within our range of intellectual capability.
Would they look different? Sure, but given the shear range of appearance among us, it is not unlikely that a Neanderthal may appear human.
However, given that people KNOW they are different, they will be treated differently and may thus have a very unhappy life.
I guess you could arrange for a family to take the child with a secret identity, but sooner or later the child would find out, and imagine the horror of finding out you aren't actually the same species as everyone else, but cloned from an extinct branch considered 'primitive'.
... for those that can't be bothered to read this lengthy yet information sparse piece.
1. MacOS X is faster in graphics intensive benchmarks.
2. The other benchmarks are fairly even with Ubuntu coming out on top more often than OS X (one notable exception is SQLite).
This is hardly anything new. OS X has a well optimised graphics system with good drivers for the intel chips (which up until now was used in both Macbooks and Mac Minis).
Also SQLite is AFAIK integral to many features of OS X, and for this reason it makes sense for Apple to have optimised for it.
Overall the benchmarks suggests that Linux (not just Ubuntu) needs some work on the graphics system and the Intel drivers. What a shock.
I'm just waiting for a time I'm watching a football match in a pub and some arsehole switches off the TVs because he wants to drink 'in peace'.
It seems 3 years and 5 years support cycles are both correct. 3 years for the desktop, 5 years for the server version.
And "biannually" does not mean what you think it means. I assume you mean every two years, in which case you are correct and my previous post was wrong.
However biannually actually means twice a year.
... for users.
I'm thinking easy on line storage integrated with OS and applications. Similarly they could offer backup space, email accounts, web space, picture storage and sharing,, Jabber service, OpenID, etc.
Think ".Mac/MobileMe" style services.
I would certainly be willing to pay a reasonable subscription fee for a nicely integrated service.
"how often it requires updates"
I am uncertain what you mean. No Linux distribution 'requires' updates, although you are certainly encouraged to update them from a security (and stability) point of view.
If you on the other hand mean operating system upgrades, then the Long Term Support releases from Ubuntu which comes out once a year are supported with security and stability fixes for three years (same time scale as Debian I think). This may be slightly too short for you, in case you might want to consider for instance Red Hat Enterprise Linux, who have 7 year support cycles.
Neither Ubuntu or RHEL will stop working after the support cycle is over, although no more security updates will be released by Canonical or Red Hat Inc.
I have no idea how long security updates are released for Slackware.
"When I pointed out that contention would cause variable transfer speeds instead of a flat one, they tried to get me off the phone and told me to write to their head office. I totally hate that company. Avoid."
Look, IANAL, but I would start documenting the bandwidth capping, and then cancel the subscription and any payments to them due to what I would consider to be breach of contract from their point of view.
This sounds like wilful capping of the speed, which can hardly be covered by their standard contract legalese.
Chances are they would not bother taking you to court over ending the contract early.
Star Wars is all about the fantasy of being a hero. The problem is that playing minor characters in world where the heroes get all the action sucks.
Exactly, and all the replies you have received so far completely miss the point. In an old school offline game, you are the exceptional hero and everything in the game centers on you. This is the fantasy that makes games so unique as entertainment. You are the hero, not just watching the hero.
Making it possible to become an exceptional and unique in an MMO is completely besides the point. I will never become that hero. I am not good enough and not devoted enough and neither are 95% of all the people playing World of Warcraft. Only the small elite can by definition be good enough to be an exceptional hero, otherwise there is nothing exceptional about it.
You then have to wonder what the point of playing an MMO is. I play games to have fun, to relax and probably to get a feeling of mastering something. An MMO can never give me this unless I devote an obscene amount of time and effort into it, and it may still not be good enough. This is exactly what real life is like, so why seek it out in games?
"A country that cares about its citizens doesn't try to take over the health care industry, it allows people to get the amount or level of insurance they want and don't overload the system by making it free for all. Free for all means mediocre or poor for everyone."
Could you please provide some evidence for this statement? Free healthcare is provided in almost the entire Europe and Canada.
Yes, sometimes we have waiting lists for non life threatening operations. People sometimes rightfully complain about things and many things could be improved.
However, not once have I heard anyone seriously suggesting we get rid of nationalised health care. Why? Because health care is generally good, we all know we will be cared for regardless of our current financial status and because nationalised health care saves lives.
Contrary to what you might think, Doctors in the UK (and Norway) tend to like the nationalised health care, despite the fact that they could earn loads more in a privatised system. Why? Because they feel it is morally right and because they know they will never have to turn someone away simply because they don't have money or insurance.
This fantasy world many americans live in with regards to 'socialised medicine' is baffling at times.
Well, that will give them moral superiority as they declare bankrupcy following a life-saving emergency surgery.
Or: This will give them moral superiority after they wisely emigrate to Europe where (in at least most countries) they will not have to deal with an insurance company refusing them medical insurance. Instead it all gets covered by national health care, pre-existing condition or not.
Leaving medical coverage to private companies that has no obligation to provide insurance to people not meeting certain health standards is inhumane and evil. At least if your country has enough money to support a proper health system for everyone.
"New" Labour, Old Communist party
Yes, keep on using this term "communist" willy nilly. It lets you tar any lefties at the same time as you tar the repressive policies of Labour. New labour are in social and economic policies a centrist-right party, very far from "socialist" or "communist".
Their policies on detention, warrantless searches, etc. are, however, quite repressive.
Since they protect the status quo and the interest of the wealthy, they are far more facist than communist.
CDE came out in 1993. The MacOS dock has its origin in NeXT who was later purchased by Apple, leading to Steve Jobs coming back to Apple.
Nextstep was first released in 1989 with previews all the way back to 1986 (according to Wikipedia anyway).
Thus, Nextstep does seem to preceed CDE by quite a few years and with NeXT Apple purchased these IP rights.
What this means for other OSes and Dock implementations I don't know.
The included camera is 640x480 or approximately 0.3 megapixels, not 3.0 megapixels.
The laws of economics would expect them to maximize profit. They do that by selling fewer units at higher prices and throwing the rest away.
Only because of price fixing and content monopoly. In a real free market you'd expect them to be forced to sell cheaper in order to sell at all. There really needs to be anti trust or cartel litigation against the MPAA members.