Copyright law, today, works for the corporation. Corporations, in turn, work hard to control congress which, in turn, controls copyright law. Is it any wonder that most of the complaints about sharing, copying, and otherwise circumventing copyright come not from authors but from corporations?
In many cases especially when it comes to things such as music, movies, TV, computer software, etc the original creator does not hold the copyright anyway. Even with literature the author may have to surrender his or her copyright in order to get published. (In the case of periodicals they author may give away their copyright even if they don't get published.) With this state of affairs the idea of copyright encouraging creators to create more works is more or less null and void. Another group who like the current state of affairs are the descendants of the creators of popular works created in the past. Maybe the children and grandchildren of todays creators might not get such a good deal royaltywise though.
As for me, I'm a teacher. I break copyright every day. I hand out copies of poems, I photocopy sections of books, I encourage students to read books out of libraries instead of buying them. (I use libraries as an example of defeating copyright because they do what p2p does in a system that is legitimate only because it has been around for a long time.)
You could hardly set up libraries from scratch now... Had the technology to trivially clone books existed a few centuries back then libraries would probably have embraced it. No need to track lendings, returns and reservations. No problems with books being unavailable because they are on loan or, worst, have been stolen. Since the master copies would be somewhere safe less risk of books being stolen or vanalised by organisations who dislike the content or the author. "Book burning" is a little hard where any copy left, anywhere on the planet, renders the whole exercise futile. Of course had something like the Internet come into existance before mass printing the business model of a third party publisher would never existed, copyright law would have been radically different assuming it even existed at all. In this alternative possible history the likes of the RIAA and MPAA simply could not exist. Probably different business models for sound recordings (e.g. mostly from concerts rather than studio work) and motion pictures would exist.
I like that the author likens this battle to the drug wars. The government has illegalized pot. The kids have no trouble getting it. They get in trouble when they are caught, so they do it surreptitiously. This puts them in more danger than the drug itself--by far.
You also have the problem of prohibition making the drugs themselves more dangerous since supply is controlled by crooks, who don't tend to put the fair treatment of their customers as a priority. With a legal commodity there are plenty of laws addressing purity of anything intended to be ingested and accurate labling. The problems of the modern "war on drugs" can be seen with the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the early 20th century.
The over-reaching copyright laws, outrageous price-fixing by the music industry, and the control of the radio airwaves have brought about an underground system that works very well, will not likely be stopped, and will, eventually, be legitimate even if it's not legal.
Especially since "bootleg" sound and video recordings won't kill anyone. "Bootleg" drugs can quite easily kill or cause serious injury because of unknown dosage or contamination. A bad copy of the latest CD or movie will just cause annoyance.
If a work is created in the United States and the copyright is valid for the 75 magic years, what happens in another country where the copyright is only 10 years after the work is created?
It's probably an academic question. Since the only way such a country could even exist would be if it were capable of seriously hurting the US either by imposing trade sanctions or military action. Any other nation would have been told "Hanmonize or else" years ago.
Are books just not as in demand as music and video? (well, Duh...!) Or is there something
preferable about the tactile sense of holding a book that we don't get from a computer
screen or PDA?
Maybe it's because no-one has built a machine which can read and dititise a book with minimal human involvement. At least not one which is relativly cheap and dosn't require dismantling the book.
Life plus X years is very bad law. Copyright should be the same period for everyone.
It can make it hard to work out when a copyright expires, especially if X is a long period of time. Also an effectivly imortal corporation can probably wait X years more easily than a person...
Certainly life expectancies have increased in the past 200 odd years. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that considered 19 years an upper limit based on the actuarial(sp?) data available at the time.
Is like expectancy the right metric in the first place? As opposed to some measurment of "generation" either human or related to the type of creative work.
Literature from the period 1908 and 1928 will now be under the complete control of their owners, which are mostly major corporations. A work of art is now deprived from the view of the public, and will in many cases be unavailable completely.
Copyright libraries, such as the Library of Congress and the British Library, already have problems with storage. Even then they don't hold works such as films, TV, sound recordings, computer programs, etc. Copyright holders often do not take good care of works they are not activly issuing.
if you can't get renumeration in the 50 years that follows the creation of your work, then screw you.
How long is it before record companies consider a song which dosn't sell well a "miss", how long before movie companies judge a film a "flop", TV companies will cancel a TV series, book publishers will have unsold books destroyed? A lot less than 50 years, typically a lot less than 5, this was probably the case back in 1952 as well.
Gee, good thing Hans Christian Anderson didn't
have a country that was adding 20 years of copyright extension every 5 years, or Disney would be losing billions to the very same policy they are pushing.
Actual creators don't tend to be demanding increased copyright protection. It tends to be either publishers, so they can squeeze some additional profits from their back catalogue and the descendants of popular creators (the way things are going great grandchildren) who would rather live off their ancestor than use their own talents. Indeed quite often still living, and youthfull, creators don't hold the copyright on their works.
Copyright was designed to give the creators of some kind of intellectual property a reasonable amount of time to profit from their creation before opening it to the rest of society for use in derivative works, not to tightly control use of one's works, even long after they may have been dead.
Originally copyright was designed to give the state control over who could use the newly invented printing press. The version in the US constitution is the revised version. Note that profiting from the work isn't the intended end that is that the author continue to produce. Too long a copyright will have the opposite effect and they certainly can't produce anything after they are dead. (Ghosts and vampires more often are characters than authors...)
Its bad enough Taiwan's copyright duration was increased so much...10 years does seem a little short, but 50 seems too much, its still better than 70 or 99 though.
10 years is probably actually plenty. There can't be many works which having failed to make back their costs in 10 years would magically do so if they had an extra 40-80 years to do so. Indeed in many lines of publishing (movie and music industries) if something isn't making a profit in something around 10 months (or even 10 weeks) it's considered a "flop".
They took something in the public domain and remade it, and when that entered the public domain, Disney remade it.
This is what people have done since prehistory.
Except that now, Disney's remade versions aren't passing into the public domain to allow the next generation of interpretation.
Copyright is fairly new idea. It was invented when the printing press originally as a way for the state to control who could use that then new invention. This was later revised into copyright V2 which gave rights to the author, rather than the publisher. This is the version the writers of the US constitution used as a model. Since then copyright has grown both in length and scope, such that it is completly out of step with "the next generation of interpretation". Not a problem for the big corporate publishers though, since they can easily cross licence with each other, but a big issue for those outside that cartel.
When it comes to the greenhouse effect, biomass has no advantage over coal or oil. See, you might as well tend forests or crops in order to sequester deliberately the same amount of carbon that you release with fossil fuels. That will work just as well as switching to biomass fuels, and will cost less.
Except that if your idea is to use forests or crops to adsorb fossil carbon you need to constantly plant more and more plants. Whereas for biomass you simply need a crop grown as any other crop is grown.
Could you please explain what these "local oil prices" are? Oil is globally traded, if supply goes down prices go up - even if your particular supplier continues to have steady production.
Also oil is always priced in US dollers. Which adds currency traders into the mix. Traders can also be influenced simply by possibilities.
i'm not positive if it's the same alcohol as this, but a lot of race cars are using alcohol engines. my cousin was driving a stock car and his used it.
Indy cars use methanol, so it's perfectly possible to build a high performance car fueled by alcohol. One reason for using alcohol in race cars is that it it is safer in a crash, since it dosn't burn as hot. Even though the flames are less visible.
Actually, they already use alcohol to fuel cars in Brazil, they have been since the oil crisis in the 70's. However, then there was an alcohol crisis in 1989, so gasoline has been taking over again.
You can add a certain amount of ethanol into the mix without needing to modify the engine at all. More than a certain amount and you need to modify timings and fuel air mixture. (Though you'd think a modern engine, especially one with fuel injection and a fair amount of computer power should be able to adjust itself.) At one time ethanol was added to fuel, prior to TEL becoming popular.
If it burns cleaner it might be worth it. Also, it is much easier to grow sugar cane in the US than to talk Iraq into selling us oil when we run out.
Probably cheaper than bombing Iraq (and whoever else) in order to get a government the US happens to like. Especially since all those warplanes need oil for fuel and the explosives are probably petrochemical derived too.
Or in the case of the UK (where we are taxed 80% on our gasoline), our government made a big deal about getting people to switch to diesel as it was taxed considerably less than regular gasoline, and was cleaner for the environment. Then, as soon as a significant quantity of people had realised the money they could save by switching over, the government inflated the tax so that it now costs MORE per gallon than regular.
Then decided to go after people who used recycled vegetable oil, for "tax evasion". Good idea, turn a waste product into something useful and get fined.
Sugar cane processing produces this distilled alcohol. That's great that is is cheaper than gasoline NOW, but what happens when the demand increases? Let's say someone builds a distilled alcohol passenger plane. Demand increases for distilled alcohol. All of a sudden, demand for distilled alcohol creates a demand for more sugar and thus more sugar cane. Sugar cane growth is limited by the land and regions it can be grown. And growing it takes some time, so there is an increase in demand and supply stays the same.
The reason the Brazilians use sugar cane is that it grows well in Brazil. Another plant used for commercial production of sugar is sugar beet which grows in temperate climates. Anyway plenty of plants can be used for production of alcohol, quite probably where the part being fermented is otherwise waste.
Distilled alcohol prices rise above gasoline quickly and all of a sudden the whole distilled alcohol plane is starting to cost you MORE than the gasoline did.
Typically passenger planess use jet A which is less volatile than the gasoline type fuels used in cars and light aircraft. Anyway if the Rusians can build a jet fighter which will run on just about anything the same technology will work with any other plane. Most likely the issue is with certification.
Diesel cars used to be hot in the early 80's because diesel was so much cheaper than unleaded or regular. Economics screwed that up because diesel cars got to be big enough that regular gas stations (not just truck stops) started to carry diesel. That increased the gas stations cost, and thus raised the price of diesel to the same or higher levels compared to unleaded.
In many parts of the world a major part of the cost of the fuel is taxation. Anyway the oil companies will use any excuse to raise profits.
it says that using sugar cane alcohol as a source of fuel also fights the greenhouse effect, because it doesn't produce C02 like regular fuel.
It's not quite that simple, buring ethanol does produce carbon dioxide. But the important point is that the carbon released isn't "fossil carbon" which has been locked up in mineral deposits for a long time. Only a short time ago this carbon was previously in carbon dioxide which a sugar cane plant took in for photosynthesis. The next result of using biomass fuels is that the crabon dioxide content of the atmosphere stays much the same. On average for every carbon dioxide you put in from burning the fuel one will be taken out bu the next batch of your crop.
Yeah, right. Of course you are rather stuck with them, but who cares if you can get them into a form that is not dangerous?
With heavy metals it can be difficult to find a compound which isn't harmful to living organisms. Especially amongst apex predators who tend to wind up getting the higest doses. Effectivly you'd need for the plant to be able to create a stable organic compound which is undigestable by anything which might eat the plant.
Last summer, (we were without a junior level admin at the time) I was off work, when I got a call from my boss - someone was unable to dial into our modem bank, so he called me to ask how to check the RADIUS logs.. I told him "ssh into the machine, cd to the log directory, and type 'grep [username] radius.log |tail'"
An alternative version if he was having the user try as he was talking to them would have been "tail -f radius.log |grep [username]"
Yeah, to me, this looks like a first step. The goal should be a plant/organism that sucks up the nasty stuff and then synthesizes/metabolizes it into something benign, or even useful. Otherwise, you've cleaned things up, but still have to dispose of the stuff....
The metals in question are elements. Unless you can geneticly engineer the plant to also be a nuclear reactor you are rather stuck with them.
It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
Which is easier said than done. We already have problems with genetically modified crop plants winding up as weeds in other farmers' fields. So it's highly likely that such plants would "escape" and quite possibly form hybrids with other plants of the same species.
I'm also an American and I resent your thinking my SUV is some sort of massive waste. First off, I live in an area where one is requisite -- in winter, people without one are called moguls.
Of there were so good for winters you'd think they'd comprise the entire production of Volvo:)
No, this is why a new car today costs (on average) about $22,000 (US) whereas when I started driving in 1976 the average was closer to US$10,000. Cars are much better today: more reliable, safer for passengers, better on the environment, etc. That did not come for free: consumers said what they wanted and they got it but someone has to pay the bill.
How much do the prices compare once you adjust for inflation? Does the average widget cost 2.2 times what it did 26 years ago?
Haven't we ALL already paid for Microsoft security? Trojans, worms, and virii have cost my company a hell of a lot.
But you havn't paid this money to Microsoft. Remember that their business model appears to require not stable profits, not increasing profits, but profits which increase at an ever increasing rate. At least up until the inevitable crash.
The problem that underlies this dispute is that as soon as a state declares itself to be the state of people of type X then all people not of type X are at a disadvantage. I am white, Iopposed the South African Appartheid regime for people who are white. If I reject discrimination that puts me at an advantage it is very unlikely I will accept discrimination that puts me at a disadvantage.
Often things only get done about discrimination when people the discrimination puts at an advantage object to it. Since the people it places at a disadvantage typically lack effective political power.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright law, today, works for the corporation. Corporations, in turn, work hard to control congress which, in turn, controls copyright law. Is it any wonder that most of the complaints about sharing, copying, and otherwise circumventing copyright come not from authors but from corporations?
In many cases especially when it comes to things such as music, movies, TV, computer software, etc the original creator does not hold the copyright anyway. Even with literature the author may have to surrender his or her copyright in order to get published. (In the case of periodicals they author may give away their copyright even if they don't get published.) With this state of affairs the idea of copyright encouraging creators to create more works is more or less null and void.
Another group who like the current state of affairs are the descendants of the creators of popular works created in the past. Maybe the children and grandchildren of todays creators might not get such a good deal royaltywise though.
As for me, I'm a teacher. I break copyright every day. I hand out copies of poems, I photocopy sections of books, I encourage students to read books out of libraries instead of buying them. (I use libraries as an example of defeating copyright because they do what p2p does in a system that is legitimate only because it has been around for a long time.)
You could hardly set up libraries from scratch now... Had the technology to trivially clone books existed a few centuries back then libraries would probably have embraced it. No need to track lendings, returns and reservations. No problems with books being unavailable because they are on loan or, worst, have been stolen. Since the master copies would be somewhere safe less risk of books being stolen or vanalised by organisations who dislike the content or the author. "Book burning" is a little hard where any copy left, anywhere on the planet, renders the whole exercise futile.
Of course had something like the Internet come into existance before mass printing the business model of a third party publisher would never existed, copyright law would have been radically different assuming it even existed at all. In this alternative possible history the likes of the RIAA and MPAA simply could not exist. Probably different business models for sound recordings (e.g. mostly from concerts rather than studio work) and motion pictures would exist.
I like that the author likens this battle to the drug wars. The government has illegalized pot. The kids have no trouble getting it. They get in trouble when they are caught, so they do it surreptitiously. This puts them in more danger than the drug itself--by far.
You also have the problem of prohibition making the drugs themselves more dangerous since supply is controlled by crooks, who don't tend to put the fair treatment of their customers as a priority. With a legal commodity there are plenty of laws addressing purity of anything intended to be ingested and accurate labling.
The problems of the modern "war on drugs" can be seen with the prohibition of alcohol in the US in the early 20th century.
The over-reaching copyright laws, outrageous price-fixing by the music industry, and the control of the radio airwaves have brought about an underground system that works very well, will not likely be stopped, and will, eventually, be legitimate even if it's not legal.
Especially since "bootleg" sound and video recordings won't kill anyone. "Bootleg" drugs can quite easily kill or cause serious injury because of unknown dosage or contamination. A bad copy of the latest CD or movie will just cause annoyance.
If a work is created in the United States and the copyright is valid for the 75 magic years, what happens in another country where the copyright is only 10 years after the work is created?
It's probably an academic question. Since the only way such a country could even exist would be if it were capable of seriously hurting the US either by imposing trade sanctions or military action.
Any other nation would have been told "Hanmonize or else" years ago.
Are books just not as in demand as music and video? (well, Duh...!) Or is there something preferable about the tactile sense of holding a book that we don't get from a computer screen or PDA?
Maybe it's because no-one has built a machine which can read and dititise a book with minimal human involvement. At least not one which is relativly cheap and dosn't require dismantling the book.
Sure, the initial scanning is less convenient. But in a world where it only takes 1 person out of 10 billion to do that scan,
Where did those extra 4 billion people come from?
Life plus X years is very bad law. Copyright should be the same period for everyone.
It can make it hard to work out when a copyright expires, especially if X is a long period of time. Also an effectivly imortal corporation can probably wait X years more easily than a person...
Certainly life expectancies have increased in the past 200 odd years. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that considered 19 years an upper limit based on the actuarial(sp?) data available at the time.
Is like expectancy the right metric in the first place? As opposed to some measurment of "generation" either human or related to the type of creative work.
Literature from the period 1908 and 1928 will now be under the complete control of their owners, which are mostly major corporations. A work of art is now deprived from the view of the public, and will in many cases be unavailable completely.
Copyright libraries, such as the Library of Congress and the British Library, already have problems with storage. Even then they don't hold works such as films, TV, sound recordings, computer programs, etc. Copyright holders often do not take good care of works they are not activly issuing.
if you can't get renumeration in the 50 years that follows the creation of your work, then screw you.
How long is it before record companies consider a song which dosn't sell well a "miss", how long before movie companies judge a film a "flop", TV companies will cancel a TV series, book publishers will have unsold books destroyed? A lot less than 50 years, typically a lot less than 5, this was probably the case back in 1952 as well.
Gee, good thing Hans Christian Anderson didn't have a country that was adding 20 years of copyright extension every 5 years, or Disney would be losing billions to the very same policy they are pushing.
Actual creators don't tend to be demanding increased copyright protection. It tends to be either publishers, so they can squeeze some additional profits from their back catalogue and the descendants of popular creators (the way things are going great grandchildren) who would rather live off their ancestor than use their own talents. Indeed quite often still living, and youthfull, creators don't hold the copyright on their works.
Copyright was designed to give the creators of some kind of intellectual property a reasonable amount of time to profit from their creation before opening it to the rest of society for use in derivative works, not to tightly control use of one's works, even long after they may have been dead.
Originally copyright was designed to give the state control over who could use the newly invented printing press. The version in the US constitution is the revised version. Note that profiting from the work isn't the intended end that is that the author continue to produce. Too long a copyright will have the opposite effect and they certainly can't produce anything after they are dead. (Ghosts and vampires more often are characters than authors...)
Its bad enough Taiwan's copyright duration was increased so much...10 years does seem a little short, but 50 seems too much, its still better than 70 or 99 though.
10 years is probably actually plenty. There can't be many works which having failed to make back their costs in 10 years would magically do so if they had an extra 40-80 years to do so. Indeed in many lines of publishing (movie and music industries) if something isn't making a profit in something around 10 months (or even 10 weeks) it's considered a "flop".
They took something in the public domain and remade it, and when that entered the public domain, Disney remade it.
This is what people have done since prehistory.
Except that now, Disney's remade versions aren't passing into the public domain to allow the next generation of interpretation.
Copyright is fairly new idea. It was invented when the printing press originally as a way for the state to control who could use that then new invention. This was later revised into copyright V2 which gave rights to the author, rather than the publisher. This is the version the writers of the US constitution used as a model.
Since then copyright has grown both in length and scope, such that it is completly out of step with "the next generation of interpretation". Not a problem for the big corporate publishers though, since they can easily cross licence with each other, but a big issue for those outside that cartel.
When it comes to the greenhouse effect, biomass has no advantage over coal or oil. See, you might as well tend forests or crops in order to sequester deliberately the same amount of carbon that you release with fossil fuels. That will work just as well as switching to biomass fuels, and will cost less.
Except that if your idea is to use forests or crops to adsorb fossil carbon you need to constantly plant more and more plants. Whereas for biomass you simply need a crop grown as any other crop is grown.
Could you please explain what these "local oil prices" are? Oil is globally traded, if supply goes down prices go up - even if your particular supplier continues to have steady production.
Also oil is always priced in US dollers. Which adds currency traders into the mix. Traders can also be influenced simply by possibilities.
i'm not positive if it's the same alcohol as this, but a lot of race cars are using alcohol engines. my cousin was driving a stock car and his used it.
Indy cars use methanol, so it's perfectly possible to build a high performance car fueled by alcohol. One reason for using alcohol in race cars is that it it is safer in a crash, since it dosn't burn as hot. Even though the flames are less visible.
Actually, they already use alcohol to fuel cars in Brazil, they have been since the oil crisis in the 70's. However, then there was an alcohol crisis in 1989, so gasoline has been taking over again.
You can add a certain amount of ethanol into the mix without needing to modify the engine at all. More than a certain amount and you need to modify timings and fuel air mixture. (Though you'd think a modern engine, especially one with fuel injection and a fair amount of computer power should be able to adjust itself.) At one time ethanol was added to fuel, prior to TEL becoming popular.
If it burns cleaner it might be worth it. Also, it is much easier to grow sugar cane in the US than to talk Iraq into selling us oil when we run out.
Probably cheaper than bombing Iraq (and whoever else) in order to get a government the US happens to like. Especially since all those warplanes need oil for fuel and the explosives are probably petrochemical derived too.
Or in the case of the UK (where we are taxed 80% on our gasoline), our government made a big deal about getting people to switch to diesel as it was taxed considerably less than regular gasoline, and was cleaner for the environment. Then, as soon as a significant quantity of people had realised the money they could save by switching over, the government inflated the tax so that it now costs MORE per gallon than regular.
Then decided to go after people who used recycled vegetable oil, for "tax evasion". Good idea, turn a waste product into something useful and get fined.
Sugar cane processing produces this distilled alcohol. That's great that is is cheaper than gasoline NOW, but what happens when the demand increases? Let's say someone builds a distilled alcohol passenger plane. Demand increases for distilled alcohol. All of a sudden, demand for distilled alcohol creates a demand for more sugar and thus more sugar cane. Sugar cane growth is limited by the land and regions it can be grown. And growing it takes some time, so there is an increase in demand and supply stays the same.
The reason the Brazilians use sugar cane is that it grows well in Brazil. Another plant used for commercial production of sugar is sugar beet which grows in temperate climates. Anyway plenty of plants can be used for production of alcohol, quite probably where the part being fermented is otherwise waste.
Distilled alcohol prices rise above gasoline quickly and all of a sudden the whole distilled alcohol plane is starting to cost you MORE than the gasoline did.
Typically passenger planess use jet A which is less volatile than the gasoline type fuels used in cars and light aircraft. Anyway if the Rusians can build a jet fighter which will run on just about anything the same technology will work with any other plane. Most likely the issue is with certification.
Diesel cars used to be hot in the early 80's because diesel was so much cheaper than unleaded or regular. Economics screwed that up because diesel cars got to be big enough that regular gas stations (not just truck stops) started to carry diesel. That increased the gas stations cost, and thus raised the price of diesel to the same or higher levels compared to unleaded.
In many parts of the world a major part of the cost of the fuel is taxation. Anyway the oil companies will use any excuse to raise profits.
it says that using sugar cane alcohol as a source of fuel also fights the greenhouse effect, because it doesn't produce C02 like regular fuel.
It's not quite that simple, buring ethanol does produce carbon dioxide.
But the important point is that the carbon released isn't "fossil carbon" which has been locked up in mineral deposits for a long time. Only a short time ago this carbon was previously in carbon dioxide which a sugar cane plant took in for photosynthesis.
The next result of using biomass fuels is that the crabon dioxide content of the atmosphere stays much the same. On average for every carbon dioxide you put in from burning the fuel one will be taken out bu the next batch of your crop.
Yeah, right. Of course you are rather stuck with them, but who cares if you can get them into a form that is not dangerous?
With heavy metals it can be difficult to find a compound which isn't harmful to living organisms. Especially amongst apex predators who tend to wind up getting the higest doses.
Effectivly you'd need for the plant to be able to create a stable organic compound which is undigestable by anything which might eat the plant.
Last summer, (we were without a junior level admin at the time) I was off work, when I got a call from my boss - someone was unable to dial into our modem bank, so he called me to ask how to check the RADIUS logs.. I told him "ssh into the machine, cd to the log directory, and type 'grep [username] radius.log |tail'"
An alternative version if he was having the user try as he was talking to them would have been "tail -f radius.log |grep [username]"
Yeah, to me, this looks like a first step. The goal should be a plant/organism that sucks up the nasty stuff and then synthesizes/metabolizes it into something benign, or even useful. Otherwise, you've cleaned things up, but still have to dispose of the stuff....
The metals in question are elements. Unless you can geneticly engineer the plant to also be a nuclear reactor you are rather stuck with them.
It's cool that people are engineering plants and critters to concentrate these potentially toxic compounds...but what happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
Which is easier said than done. We already have problems with genetically modified crop plants winding up as weeds in other farmers' fields. So it's highly likely that such plants would "escape" and quite possibly form hybrids with other plants of the same species.
I'm also an American and I resent your thinking my SUV is some sort of massive waste. First off, I live in an area where one is requisite -- in winter, people without one are called moguls.
:)
Of there were so good for winters you'd think they'd comprise the entire production of Volvo
No, this is why a new car today costs (on average) about $22,000 (US) whereas when I started driving in 1976 the average was closer to US$10,000. Cars are much better today: more reliable, safer for passengers, better on the environment, etc. That did not come for free: consumers said what they wanted and they got it but someone has to pay the bill.
How much do the prices compare once you adjust for inflation? Does the average widget cost 2.2 times what it did 26 years ago?
Haven't we ALL already paid for Microsoft security? Trojans, worms, and virii have cost my company a hell of a lot.
But you havn't paid this money to Microsoft. Remember that their business model appears to require not stable profits, not increasing profits, but profits which increase at an ever increasing rate. At least up until the inevitable crash.
The problem that underlies this dispute is that as soon as a state declares itself to be the state of people of type X then all people not of type X are at a disadvantage. I am white, Iopposed the South African Appartheid regime for people who are white. If I reject discrimination that puts me at an advantage it is very unlikely I will accept discrimination that puts me at a disadvantage.
Often things only get done about discrimination when people the discrimination puts at an advantage object to it. Since the people it places at a disadvantage typically lack effective political power.