Speak for yourself - half the lights in my car (US Ford Taurus) don't come up when it's started, but I've seen a number of them light up for various reasons. (e.g. the low coolant light)
I'm not against having a diagnostic mode so that if someone is interested in seeing status messages they can, but generally no one gives a crap. I mean, do you really need the computer to tell you how much ram it has whenever you boot if it's the same every time? Just give the stupid box enough of a memory of its prior state so that it can compare it to what it finds now, and it'll likely be fine.
And so far no one has managed to improve upon the CLIs developed nearly forty years ago. Good work, guys.
How the hell difficult is it to combine them. Pure GUIs are okay, but not great. Pure CLIs blow more than the blowiest thing that ever blowed blows. That includes shell windows. They ought to be joined at the hip - you cd to a directory, the gui window pops open, that kind of thing.
The paperclip thing is if the computer _fails_. You'll kindly note that 99.44% of the CD/DVD drives you'll see also have paperclip holes. No one is expected to use them regularly; if you do, your drive or your disks are probably busted.
Nor is removable, writable storage really necessary.... At least in my experience, I haven't found a 1.44MB floppy that could reliably keep data on it. I had stopped using them at all c. 1993, and had no problems whatsoever with dropping the entire mechanism. Honestly, how the hell often do you use them? I'll bet it's not daily.
Precisely- the messages are not informative at all.
Imagine you're driving in your car, and all of the sudden, buzzers and warning lights start going off, announcing EVERYTHING'S FINE. Do this enough, and you'll not only be upset by it until you can manage to ignore it (if possible) but you'll have trouble distinguishing it from NOT EVERYTHING'S FINE.
Let the status messages come up if there's something new, or different, or wrong. But as long as things are running smoothly, there's no need to hurl that in our faces. (and when warnings are displayed, also include some fricking suggestions as to how to fix it or who to ask, dammit!)
Way, way, back in the day, the original Mac only had a single 400kB floppy drive. If you had some cash, you could afford a second one. (and man, would you want it - copying floppies with the paltry amount of RAM in those things was hell otherwise)
So it was customary to eject a disk you weren't using, but *leave* a copy of the icon on the system so that if it was needed it would simply prompt you for the appropriate disk to be inserted. This made sense at the time, honestly. The icons that were left were sort of dimmed, and when you wanted to get rid of them, you'd drag the dimmed icons to the trash. Ejecting the disk though, was done with a menu command.
Some developer got tired of having to eject disks twice to get them completely off the system, so he wrote code that would eject a disk all the way if it were dragged to the trash. This conflicted with the UI, and the HCI people bitched about it, but it turned out that they used it just as much as everyone else, because it was frickin' useful.
For years the idea of having an icon for eject on the desktop, or having the trash turn into one was bandied about. OS X actually implements this. (although it also conflicts with the icon = noun rule that has underlied GUIs for ages)
Personally I would've just put on a software controllable eject button on the drives, that also sent an event to the OS. But that's just me.
wow - i haven't mentioned Bolo for ages. i'm a little surprised you dug up that comment.
anyway, a dsk-format disk image of Bolo can be found here: http://ftp.mayn.de/pub/mirrors/apple.asimov.net/ga mes/action/bolo_dsk.gz
As for an emulator that can run it... I can't help you out too much. I use Bernie 2 the Rescue, which is probably the world's best IIgs emulator, but it's Mac only. i do know that there are emulators for windows as well, but i really wouldn't know where to find them. (and i hope you haven't forgotten how to load the game:)
me, i ought to put in some time on roadwar 2000 for the iigs. i frickin loved that when i was younger.
And of course IIII is used as the Roman numeral for 'four' on clocks. (though VIIII is _not_ used for 'nine') The story goes that some king, while touring a clockmaker's, claimed that IV was incorrect, and well, who argues with the king?
Reasons for EULA enforcability are totally distinct from copying software. Signing your name to them with your own hands is probably not an issue these days. (stupid Congress thinks 'digital signature' has anything to do with signing things) The unnegotiability, the restrictive terms, and the lack of bargaining positions are all more significant reasons for finding EULA's void 99.44% of the time. Given that this EULA is presented _prior_ to dl, however, it has more of a leg to stand on than usual.
However, the court system felt that the argument that copying software to RAM (or whatever) in order to use it without a license was in fact copyright infringement. *BUT* Congress rendered the point moot years ago, by amending copyright law so that copyrights do not exist with respect to copying legally acquired pieces of software for the purposes of using it (e.g. to RAM, HD, whatever) or for backing it up. Check out 17 USC 117 for the specifics (not that I'm a lawyer either)
It wouldn't be hard to check. Disney did a fair amount of work on Jungle King back in the 60's. If they haven't totally gutted their animation department, there may be some old timers who actually worked on it.
IIRC there were several versions of Hamlet floating around prior to Shakespeare's as well. Wish I could confirm this, but I'm presently on the wrong side of the country.... At any rate, ol' Will was not exactly well known for having original plots, I agree.
There was also a movie (or was it an OAV?) that takes place after the end of the TV series. However, I understand that it's incredibly bad. Given that Nadia incorporated elements from Jules Verne, the Atlantis myth and even some ufology, I'm not sweating the similarities.
Even assuming that all of the massive technical issues with micropayments vanish overnight, there's still no good reason why it would work out well.
I _don't_ like the idea of paying/. a penny every single time I load up a new article. It doesn't sound like much, but over the course of the year, it would alone eat up more money than I'd ever spend on it. And when every single site on the web decides that each one of their pages is worth cash? Usage drops like a rock. Maybe even faster. And I wind up with no money, which makes me unhappy as well.
Not to mention that it's a hassle to have to click on a dialog all the time, or to try to do the bit of math in your head, or to deal with dialogs that are disguised as something else.
There is a wall of difference between things that are free, and things that cost any money whatsoever. It doesn't even matter how little. Attempts to breach this wall are basically scams to get people to no longer be aware of how much they spend, and to just let money flow through their fingers. It is _not_ admirable.
No, the payments of paychecks and the payments of copyrights are different.
When you work for a paycheck, you are contractually agreed to be paid at certain intervals for the work you've done.
The government makes no such guarantees about copyrights; you could spend your whole life making a piece of art and never get a dime for it. The government cannot compel there to be an audience for your work, or one that is willing to pay for it.
What copyright is, is the guarantee that if someone does pay for the work, they'll be paying you, and not someone else. (unless you've done something to legally involve another of course) Again that is - if anyone cares to pay.
But wait again! The government is specifically required to only make that guarantee on the condition that it promotes the arts and sciences. But your survivors were not artists (or if they were, they'd have their own copyrights) and helping them does nothing to cause you to do more work.
Copyright is not only intended NOT to help anyone but the artist, or at least someone who has bought it off the artist, but is too much of a crap shoot to have your family rely upon anyway. If you're worried about them, get life insurance, and save your money, and try not to die. It works better for everyone.
Copyright functions as a bribe to authors to publish creative works and have the potential to be able to license them to anyone you choose for compensation.
As far as science has been able to determine, bribes are spectacularly ineffective in inducing the dead to publish creative works.
You should help provide for your family with life insurance, with an actual estate, with pensions and saved funds that can go to them; you should not screw up the art world or deny the public who granted you the copyright in the first place their reward for their offer.
In truth, it needs two things - first, the script to munge data from various guides (hopefully not _just_ tvguide) and secondly some kind of detection script that can see if it's failing for some reason and poke around for a replacement script automatically to help foil attempts to impair the use of the things, and alert people when such attempts are being made.
(Truly good would be the ability to read it out of the cable feed for digital cable systems, but the legality of that is unknown to me, though I wouldn't expect copyrights to protect it; it's factual data)
I'd be very interested in a homemade box - I have no desire to line the pockets of big companies when I can do things myself in in open cooperation with others, and I LOATHE advertising.
Hell yeah. A number of people escaped from the Hindenberg by just jumping out as it crashed. It's been a while since I read about it, but I seem to recall a few brave souls going back in to get others out.
No, I mean that their service must be better on its own merits than a competing compatable service. Particularly if the competitor scores a big win by having it be free. (as in the case of a hack for the Tivo that lets it get info from many various free sources on the net)
Threatening more or less to deny the ability to do such things in the future if they're done at all is not a merit.
Frankly I agree. Although I appreciate the fact that doing so will harm the environment that the Tivo exists within - DVR manufacturers et al will be less prone to make their systems easy to get into - if someone is still interested in doing so, it's their right to and it's perfectly reasonable.
If Tivo wants people to use their service, they need to make it worthwhile. Not effectively manditory.
Re:GIMP has it's work cut out for it...
on
GIMP And OS X
·
· Score: 1
Well, I disagree slightly. GUIs are not very good at certain tasks - regular expressions, for example - which CLIs excel at. The real problem, I think, is that the two are not combined properly, with enough support that either one or the other could be ignored altogether with no loss of functionality.
But then, the second that the CLI is limited to a terminal window and not the GUI window with the icons in it, you've already pretty much lost your chance.
AFAIK, there aren't any serious integrations of the two, though there are lesser bits here and there. Example: on your Mac, open a folder, then type in letters corresponding to a file you want; the GUI will be responsive to this, selecting files incrementally as you type. This is fundementally a CLI function, but it's more or less invisible. I'd like to see more of such thoughtful combinations of the two, however.
(but do know that the CLI and GUI are more or less equally old. The GUI was fundementally developed in the 60's at SRI, and significantly refined in the 70's at PARC and Apple. IIRC, there was a/. story not long ago about it, the CLI is not a hell of a lot older. It'll be a while before there's truly a 21st century UI)
Honestly, I've been using Photoshop day in day out since the mid-90's. I even remember having to do collaging without real layers. (shudder)
That said, yeah, Photoshop is pretty much $600 better than nearly anything you could care to name that does the same job. Partially because you'd be surprised how much graphic artists get away with charging. If a RIP costs thousands of dollars and is even slightly faster than the old one, it'll pay for itself pretty rapidly.
Hell, you're talking about Mac users - obviously we aren't extremely worried about paying a premium if we think it's worth it. Who did you think was buying high-end Macs since the days of the Plus? Those things were pricey as hell, and you had to fill it up with RAM, add hard disks, get a laser printer worth as much as a car, fonts, etc. And it was _still_ better than the alternatives!
Re:TurboTop lets Win32 GIMP's menus float
on
GIMP And OS X
·
· Score: 1
Hah! If what you're talking about is what I think you're talking about, it's a non-issue anyway. (unless the port is really lame, which will be evident immediately)
Macs normally run with windows that are children of a particular application grouped together. (so if you clicked on a Gimp editing window, you get all the rest. Roughly it's like a Windows MDI interface, except there's no stupid gigantic container window. Tear off menus - which the Mac should've kept/adopted from NeXTStep IMO - tend to function as floating palettes, which are pretty standard, and sit above document windows.
On the other hand, I have gigs and gigs of archived jobs in Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark, PageMaker, etc. I do need to get into them from time to time - the Gimp isn't useful unless I can chuck/stop upgrading the various commercial programs.
Meh. I never really liked a lot of the things Freehand does. Personally Illustrator seems a lot nicer, although there are PLENTY of UI flaws and a decent number of features that could all use work.
Does make working with Flash a bit of a PITA, though.
Well, I truly believe in freedom. But you're backwards, my friend.
In a state of perfect freedom, *everyone* can disseminate works, provided that they have them. In a state of total oppression, only the creator can disseminate works - others have the ability to, as granted by God, and the natural right to, which we call Freedom of Speech, but the exercise of their rights and abilities are denied them by an interfering authority.
Your freedom is oppression, and your oppression is freedom.
That said, there may be, and in fact _are_ socially desirable consequences of enacting a carefully devised and moderate system wherein rights are circumscribed, but it is impossible to call this freedom. It's just practical - don't flaunt it as anything but.
The real point of copyright is not to enshrine natural moral rights artists posess, since there simply are none. It is to encourage artists to create as many useful works as possible, in order that they may be freely used without regard to the artist. A temporary and limited monopoly on certain instances of dissemination is granted to the artist, but it is a means to an end, and never ever an end in itself.
And even then, the real system is not like you describe. Artists do not have absolute rights to dictate how their works are disseminated. No artist can rightfully deny a fair use of their work. (such as its inclusion within a transformative work) No artist can rightfully prevent their work from entering the public domain, whereupon the limits that people willingly suffer are lifted.
And certainly this isn't a matter of stealing - it's a matter of copyright infringement, which could also be considered illegally exercising natural rights to which only the copyright holder and his designees have permission to exercise. (roughly)
Ideas are not property. Even works are not property, though the medium they are within may - _may_ - be. A book is property; the words are not. A statue is property; the shape is not. Yet reproduce either into another medium which you impeccably own, and you have transgressed. Words are not things, and we actually do not treat them as such. What is illegal is not the thing, but the act of copying them - the exercise of rights that you're not permitted to exercise. Thus, infringement.
As for the Roxio system itself, I can see a significant flaw. It imposes burdens for copyright holders to make use of it to exercise their own legal rights. This treads dangerously close to copyright infringement. (as copyrights must be exclusively assigned to the creator, unless he transfers or expands them) In my capacity in my job, I've made copies of CDs for musicians with ordinary equipment. Prohibiting this is just not a good thing.
Besides which, the courts have found that it is entirely outside the scope of copyright to preclude the copying of works from one medium to another, aka "space shifting." Statutory exceptions exist for many other classes of works. (for instance, any software you legally own or lease may be backed up all you please) There is no need to require that the original source be used, or that you prove to the satisfaction of an inanimate hunk of junk that you may legally do so; posession and performing the copy oneself is all.
Ultimately, no computer program in the world will _ever_ be a substitute for a court. We have perfectly good mechanisms in place for determining if copies are legally or illegally made and disseminated, and that entire framework exists within the domain that we collectively through our government allow it to. Copyrights for music could vanish tomorrow if we really wanted them to - there'd be nothing wrong with it, they aren't manditory.
Software cannot make the kinds of decisions human beings are capable of, it's not a substitute. We should not try to allow it to attempt to be one as it'll inevitably be sorely lacking.
Me, I'm an artist, and that's how I earn my daily bread. Nevertheless, I know the place that I and my bretheren occupy. It is *not* one that deserves dear privleges.
Slashdot Mirror
Speak for yourself - half the lights in my car (US Ford Taurus) don't come up when it's started, but I've seen a number of them light up for various reasons. (e.g. the low coolant light)
I'm not against having a diagnostic mode so that if someone is interested in seeing status messages they can, but generally no one gives a crap. I mean, do you really need the computer to tell you how much ram it has whenever you boot if it's the same every time? Just give the stupid box enough of a memory of its prior state so that it can compare it to what it finds now, and it'll likely be fine.
And so far no one has managed to improve upon the CLIs developed nearly forty years ago. Good work, guys.
How the hell difficult is it to combine them. Pure GUIs are okay, but not great. Pure CLIs blow more than the blowiest thing that ever blowed blows. That includes shell windows. They ought to be joined at the hip - you cd to a directory, the gui window pops open, that kind of thing.
The paperclip thing is if the computer _fails_. You'll kindly note that 99.44% of the CD/DVD drives you'll see also have paperclip holes. No one is expected to use them regularly; if you do, your drive or your disks are probably busted.
Nor is removable, writable storage really necessary.... At least in my experience, I haven't found a 1.44MB floppy that could reliably keep data on it. I had stopped using them at all c. 1993, and had no problems whatsoever with dropping the entire mechanism. Honestly, how the hell often do you use them? I'll bet it's not daily.
Precisely- the messages are not informative at all.
Imagine you're driving in your car, and all of the sudden, buzzers and warning lights start going off, announcing EVERYTHING'S FINE. Do this enough, and you'll not only be upset by it until you can manage to ignore it (if possible) but you'll have trouble distinguishing it from NOT EVERYTHING'S FINE.
Let the status messages come up if there's something new, or different, or wrong. But as long as things are running smoothly, there's no need to hurl that in our faces. (and when warnings are displayed, also include some fricking suggestions as to how to fix it or who to ask, dammit!)
It's not a metaphor.
Way, way, back in the day, the original Mac only had a single 400kB floppy drive. If you had some cash, you could afford a second one. (and man, would you want it - copying floppies with the paltry amount of RAM in those things was hell otherwise)
So it was customary to eject a disk you weren't using, but *leave* a copy of the icon on the system so that if it was needed it would simply prompt you for the appropriate disk to be inserted. This made sense at the time, honestly. The icons that were left were sort of dimmed, and when you wanted to get rid of them, you'd drag the dimmed icons to the trash. Ejecting the disk though, was done with a menu command.
Some developer got tired of having to eject disks twice to get them completely off the system, so he wrote code that would eject a disk all the way if it were dragged to the trash. This conflicted with the UI, and the HCI people bitched about it, but it turned out that they used it just as much as everyone else, because it was frickin' useful.
For years the idea of having an icon for eject on the desktop, or having the trash turn into one was bandied about. OS X actually implements this. (although it also conflicts with the icon = noun rule that has underlied GUIs for ages)
Personally I would've just put on a software controllable eject button on the drives, that also sent an event to the OS. But that's just me.
wow - i haven't mentioned Bolo for ages. i'm a little surprised you dug up that comment.
a mes/action/bolo_dsk.gz
:)
anyway, a dsk-format disk image of Bolo can be found here: http://ftp.mayn.de/pub/mirrors/apple.asimov.net/g
As for an emulator that can run it... I can't help you out too much. I use Bernie 2 the Rescue, which is probably the world's best IIgs emulator, but it's Mac only. i do know that there are emulators for windows as well, but i really wouldn't know where to find them. (and i hope you haven't forgotten how to load the game
me, i ought to put in some time on roadwar 2000 for the iigs. i frickin loved that when i was younger.
And of course IIII is used as the Roman numeral for 'four' on clocks. (though VIIII is _not_ used for 'nine') The story goes that some king, while touring a clockmaker's, claimed that IV was incorrect, and well, who argues with the king?
Not this again. Sigh.
Reasons for EULA enforcability are totally distinct from copying software. Signing your name to them with your own hands is probably not an issue these days. (stupid Congress thinks 'digital signature' has anything to do with signing things) The unnegotiability, the restrictive terms, and the lack of bargaining positions are all more significant reasons for finding EULA's void 99.44% of the time. Given that this EULA is presented _prior_ to dl, however, it has more of a leg to stand on than usual.
However, the court system felt that the argument that copying software to RAM (or whatever) in order to use it without a license was in fact copyright infringement. *BUT* Congress rendered the point moot years ago, by amending copyright law so that copyrights do not exist with respect to copying legally acquired pieces of software for the purposes of using it (e.g. to RAM, HD, whatever) or for backing it up. Check out 17 USC 117 for the specifics (not that I'm a lawyer either)
Nadia is a pretty long TV series. You would've gotten just to the Nautilus, I think. Needless to say, Atlantis does play a very significant role.
It wouldn't be hard to check. Disney did a fair amount of work on Jungle King back in the 60's. If they haven't totally gutted their animation department, there may be some old timers who actually worked on it.
IIRC there were several versions of Hamlet floating around prior to Shakespeare's as well. Wish I could confirm this, but I'm presently on the wrong side of the country.... At any rate, ol' Will was not exactly well known for having original plots, I agree.
There was also a movie (or was it an OAV?) that takes place after the end of the TV series. However, I understand that it's incredibly bad. Given that Nadia incorporated elements from Jules Verne, the Atlantis myth and even some ufology, I'm not sweating the similarities.
Even assuming that all of the massive technical issues with micropayments vanish overnight, there's still no good reason why it would work out well.
/. a penny every single time I load up a new article. It doesn't sound like much, but over the course of the year, it would alone eat up more money than I'd ever spend on it. And when every single site on the web decides that each one of their pages is worth cash? Usage drops like a rock. Maybe even faster. And I wind up with no money, which makes me unhappy as well.
I _don't_ like the idea of paying
Not to mention that it's a hassle to have to click on a dialog all the time, or to try to do the bit of math in your head, or to deal with dialogs that are disguised as something else.
There is a wall of difference between things that are free, and things that cost any money whatsoever. It doesn't even matter how little. Attempts to breach this wall are basically scams to get people to no longer be aware of how much they spend, and to just let money flow through their fingers. It is _not_ admirable.
No, the payments of paychecks and the payments of copyrights are different.
When you work for a paycheck, you are contractually agreed to be paid at certain intervals for the work you've done.
The government makes no such guarantees about copyrights; you could spend your whole life making a piece of art and never get a dime for it. The government cannot compel there to be an audience for your work, or one that is willing to pay for it.
What copyright is, is the guarantee that if someone does pay for the work, they'll be paying you, and not someone else. (unless you've done something to legally involve another of course) Again that is - if anyone cares to pay.
But wait again! The government is specifically required to only make that guarantee on the condition that it promotes the arts and sciences. But your survivors were not artists (or if they were, they'd have their own copyrights) and helping them does nothing to cause you to do more work.
Copyright is not only intended NOT to help anyone but the artist, or at least someone who has bought it off the artist, but is too much of a crap shoot to have your family rely upon anyway. If you're worried about them, get life insurance, and save your money, and try not to die. It works better for everyone.
Why?
Copyright functions as a bribe to authors to publish creative works and have the potential to be able to license them to anyone you choose for compensation.
As far as science has been able to determine, bribes are spectacularly ineffective in inducing the dead to publish creative works.
You should help provide for your family with life insurance, with an actual estate, with pensions and saved funds that can go to them; you should not screw up the art world or deny the public who granted you the copyright in the first place their reward for their offer.
In truth, it needs two things - first, the script to munge data from various guides (hopefully not _just_ tvguide) and secondly some kind of detection script that can see if it's failing for some reason and poke around for a replacement script automatically to help foil attempts to impair the use of the things, and alert people when such attempts are being made.
(Truly good would be the ability to read it out of the cable feed for digital cable systems, but the legality of that is unknown to me, though I wouldn't expect copyrights to protect it; it's factual data)
I'd be very interested in a homemade box - I have no desire to line the pockets of big companies when I can do things myself in in open cooperation with others, and I LOATHE advertising.
Hell yeah. A number of people escaped from the Hindenberg by just jumping out as it crashed. It's been a while since I read about it, but I seem to recall a few brave souls going back in to get others out.
Virtually no one survives plane crashes, OTOH.
No, I mean that their service must be better on its own merits than a competing compatable service. Particularly if the competitor scores a big win by having it be free. (as in the case of a hack for the Tivo that lets it get info from many various free sources on the net)
Threatening more or less to deny the ability to do such things in the future if they're done at all is not a merit.
Frankly I agree. Although I appreciate the fact that doing so will harm the environment that the Tivo exists within - DVR manufacturers et al will be less prone to make their systems easy to get into - if someone is still interested in doing so, it's their right to and it's perfectly reasonable.
If Tivo wants people to use their service, they need to make it worthwhile. Not effectively manditory.
Well, I disagree slightly. GUIs are not very good at certain tasks - regular expressions, for example - which CLIs excel at. The real problem, I think, is that the two are not combined properly, with enough support that either one or the other could be ignored altogether with no loss of functionality.
/. story not long ago about it, the CLI is not a hell of a lot older. It'll be a while before there's truly a 21st century UI)
But then, the second that the CLI is limited to a terminal window and not the GUI window with the icons in it, you've already pretty much lost your chance.
AFAIK, there aren't any serious integrations of the two, though there are lesser bits here and there. Example: on your Mac, open a folder, then type in letters corresponding to a file you want; the GUI will be responsive to this, selecting files incrementally as you type. This is fundementally a CLI function, but it's more or less invisible. I'd like to see more of such thoughtful combinations of the two, however.
(but do know that the CLI and GUI are more or less equally old. The GUI was fundementally developed in the 60's at SRI, and significantly refined in the 70's at PARC and Apple. IIRC, there was a
Honestly, I've been using Photoshop day in day out since the mid-90's. I even remember having to do collaging without real layers. (shudder)
That said, yeah, Photoshop is pretty much $600 better than nearly anything you could care to name that does the same job. Partially because you'd be surprised how much graphic artists get away with charging. If a RIP costs thousands of dollars and is even slightly faster than the old one, it'll pay for itself pretty rapidly.
Hell, you're talking about Mac users - obviously we aren't extremely worried about paying a premium if we think it's worth it. Who did you think was buying high-end Macs since the days of the Plus? Those things were pricey as hell, and you had to fill it up with RAM, add hard disks, get a laser printer worth as much as a car, fonts, etc. And it was _still_ better than the alternatives!
Hah! If what you're talking about is what I think you're talking about, it's a non-issue anyway. (unless the port is really lame, which will be evident immediately)
Macs normally run with windows that are children of a particular application grouped together. (so if you clicked on a Gimp editing window, you get all the rest. Roughly it's like a Windows MDI interface, except there's no stupid gigantic container window. Tear off menus - which the Mac should've kept/adopted from NeXTStep IMO - tend to function as floating palettes, which are pretty standard, and sit above document windows.
On the other hand, I have gigs and gigs of archived jobs in Illustrator, Photoshop, Quark, PageMaker, etc. I do need to get into them from time to time - the Gimp isn't useful unless I can chuck/stop upgrading the various commercial programs.
Meh. I never really liked a lot of the things Freehand does. Personally Illustrator seems a lot nicer, although there are PLENTY of UI flaws and a decent number of features that could all use work.
Does make working with Flash a bit of a PITA, though.
Well, I truly believe in freedom. But you're backwards, my friend.
In a state of perfect freedom, *everyone* can disseminate works, provided that they have them. In a state of total oppression, only the creator can disseminate works - others have the ability to, as granted by God, and the natural right to, which we call Freedom of Speech, but the exercise of their rights and abilities are denied them by an interfering authority.
Your freedom is oppression, and your oppression is freedom.
That said, there may be, and in fact _are_ socially desirable consequences of enacting a carefully devised and moderate system wherein rights are circumscribed, but it is impossible to call this freedom. It's just practical - don't flaunt it as anything but.
The real point of copyright is not to enshrine natural moral rights artists posess, since there simply are none. It is to encourage artists to create as many useful works as possible, in order that they may be freely used without regard to the artist. A temporary and limited monopoly on certain instances of dissemination is granted to the artist, but it is a means to an end, and never ever an end in itself.
And even then, the real system is not like you describe. Artists do not have absolute rights to dictate how their works are disseminated. No artist can rightfully deny a fair use of their work. (such as its inclusion within a transformative work) No artist can rightfully prevent their work from entering the public domain, whereupon the limits that people willingly suffer are lifted.
And certainly this isn't a matter of stealing - it's a matter of copyright infringement, which could also be considered illegally exercising natural rights to which only the copyright holder and his designees have permission to exercise. (roughly)
Ideas are not property. Even works are not property, though the medium they are within may - _may_ - be. A book is property; the words are not. A statue is property; the shape is not. Yet reproduce either into another medium which you impeccably own, and you have transgressed. Words are not things, and we actually do not treat them as such. What is illegal is not the thing, but the act of copying them - the exercise of rights that you're not permitted to exercise. Thus, infringement.
As for the Roxio system itself, I can see a significant flaw. It imposes burdens for copyright holders to make use of it to exercise their own legal rights. This treads dangerously close to copyright infringement. (as copyrights must be exclusively assigned to the creator, unless he transfers or expands them) In my capacity in my job, I've made copies of CDs for musicians with ordinary equipment. Prohibiting this is just not a good thing.
Besides which, the courts have found that it is entirely outside the scope of copyright to preclude the copying of works from one medium to another, aka "space shifting." Statutory exceptions exist for many other classes of works. (for instance, any software you legally own or lease may be backed up all you please) There is no need to require that the original source be used, or that you prove to the satisfaction of an inanimate hunk of junk that you may legally do so; posession and performing the copy oneself is all.
Ultimately, no computer program in the world will _ever_ be a substitute for a court. We have perfectly good mechanisms in place for determining if copies are legally or illegally made and disseminated, and that entire framework exists within the domain that we collectively through our government allow it to. Copyrights for music could vanish tomorrow if we really wanted them to - there'd be nothing wrong with it, they aren't manditory.
Software cannot make the kinds of decisions human beings are capable of, it's not a substitute. We should not try to allow it to attempt to be one as it'll inevitably be sorely lacking.
Me, I'm an artist, and that's how I earn my daily bread. Nevertheless, I know the place that I and my bretheren occupy. It is *not* one that deserves dear privleges.