we need more energy, on a personal, city, national, whatever scale you want, than renewables can provide
and as for people fighting nuclear, you are 100% correct. and so we don't build it, and so everyone will suffer with blackouts and sky high energy prices. after enough pain, they'll stop fighting the inevitable and go nuclear. simply because no other energy option out there can satisfy large scale energy efficiently and without hurting the environment needs right now
a standards body should be slow, not out front, writing standards for things no one knows will be successful or not
in fact, the commercial players SHOULD get proprietary, aggresive technologies out there, seeking new markets. let them play and crash and burn
then, after something proves successful, the standards body plods along and picks it up and makes it canon
the idea that the standards body should get out front, leads to standards being written for things no one uses. the idea that commercial companies won't try to capitalize on owning the technology presumes that corporations are interested in not making money. let a company write nonstandard tech. its a gamble for them, and could hurt them. let them get hurt then, and make space for things like firefox
so the whole basis for the story here is preposterous: ok, we have different browsers and competing platforms and different standards and proprietary tech. big. fucking. deal. get your head out of your anal retentive ass and deal with it
oh it takes 10 hours to program a page that should take 10 minutes to program were everyone fascistically devoted to standards? well then you wouldn't have a job genius. you wouldn't be needed. the mess you have to deal with is proof you are needed. if it weren't messy, you'd be downsized and replaced by a perl script
people who whine and bitch and moan about standards and noncompliance are motivated by the same shrill cloying need as grammar nazis. and if you understand why grammar nazis are essentially useless, annoying, and just don't get it, you understand whats up those who are so shrill about standards
is the amount of infrastructure you need to build to tap these sources. you say wind can answer all of our electricity needs. well, yeah. but who's going to build the billion turbines to do that? and say goodbye to birds, i guess
solar i actually am optimistic about, because the tech can be incorporated into housing construction, and improvements can be made on an individual household basis. as tech improves, everyone's roofs, windows, etc. should all be solar. this really will put a dent in consumption. however, it will take a long time to get to that nirvana, and the technology isn't there yet to get there. then what do you do for people who live in london or seattle (cloudy places)?
meanwhile, nuclear tech is well understood, we just need to build more reactors. and certainly, nuclear has a ton of negatives. its just that all other sources of energy has worse negatives. this includes renewables: for them, the worse negatives than nuclear is how fleeting and difficult they are to tap without massive infrastructure investment. with tech improvements, someday, decades from now, i hope this will change. but not today, its just not there yet
nulcear is NOT a great option. but nuclear is the best option, right now, with existing technology
and we need to figure out fusion. that's the holy grail
but i am already envisioning the late night infomercials
a little bit of knowledge + a lot of fear = $$$
"did you know that 1 out of 10 people are predisposed to diabetes genetically and don't even know it. you owe it to your loved ones to make sure that your genetic makeup is solid for their future. luckily at genestar, we have perfected the advanced diagnostic tests for your peace of mind. at some fancy genetic testing labs, they charge upwards of $1,500 for these kinds of tests. but at genestar, you can give your loved ones faith in their genetic lineage for only 3 easy payments of $49.95. act now, and we'll throw in the genetic test for alzheimers...
(quick lawyer speak voiceover) gene tests are not a replacement for sound medical advice. all genetic testing results should be discussed with a medical doctor"
specialized companies test genes. brac gene (breast cancer), apoe (alzheimer's), fragile x, etc. you can do this by mail even
just make sure to use a name like donald duck or dick johnson. you don't want this info getting to insurance companies
might as well test that little 1 year old (not any older, consider the trauma for the kid) for parentage too. it has been speculated that something like 10% of babies born before the age of genetic testing were raised by fathers oblivious to the fact they were not the real genetic father of the kid
the usa is not a capitalist country, it is a socialist country. ever hear of medicare? welfare?
as is much of the eu, as is all of the most developed nations, including canada, japan
in other words, capitalism DOES need social safety nets. we don't live in a social darwinistic society. if a financially broke guy falls and breaks his arm, you don't look at him dying on the street and walk by. if he can't pay, you have a system of social support (and no, that's not "charity" as frequently cited as the stopgap measure by people who champion pure libertarian selfishness.... contradiction there maybe?)
the real problem is fundamentalism: from the communist or capitalist camps. you need to reward innovation and hard work, and you also need to have social safety nets funded by a central government
mankind is not 100% selfish. mankind is not also 100% altruistic. the real mistake is to think pure capitalism, or pure communism, is the answer
like most problems in life, the answer is complex, and a mixture of both views, and the people who create all the real trouble are the loud, dumb, fundamentalists from the extremes of pure capitalism or pure communism
but if you are digging holes that deep (in the 99.999999999% of the areas that need power but aren't near the hot springs) you might as well just dig up more hydrocarbon, and get more bang for your buck
as for nukes, if you use breeder reactors, the thorium and uranium in the world will last everyone centuries. furthermore, breeder reactors use 10x the amount of energy in fuel the reactors from the 60s (that you are basing your opinion on) use, they produce 10x less waste, and the waste lasts a century or two, rather than 10,000 years
and german tech like pebble bed reactors, just don't have accidents. you can walk away from them, they require no active safety effort. you need to update your opinion of nuclear from the 1960s tech you are basing it on
of course, breeders also produce plutonium, which is why they are shunned. but i think if we spent 100x less of the amount of security outlay we spend in iraq on reactor protection instead, we will still be plenty safe, certainly a lot safer than funding islamic fundamentalist wackjobs, like we do with petrodollars now
can trace their success to that one weekend or month or season where things really took off
additionally, you misunderstand that the flash crowd is not something that comes and goes, but something that comes and stays
but sure, you are correct: a good innovative idea will find a way regardless of inability to scale quickly. some other guy will make work what you can't. you could retard your growth for awhile while you tinker with how to scale. but if some other guy takes your good, innovative idea and runs with it further and faster than you do, you are doomed to obscurity while he reaps the benefits of your good idea
so you shouldn't be giving advice on how the market works, because the fickleness you dismiss really is a big deal and is not to be taken lightly
crudely expressing anger at a confessed murderer on an online forum: wrong
murdering someone: "Maybe Nina had it coming."
zzz
don't feed the troll folks. and if this guy isn't actually trolling and actually believes what he wrote, he'll be in jail himself at some point, with those priorities
no access to the web, but he may be able to successfully request an offline computer for coding purposes
coding is such a monklike existence anyway, he may actually get a lot of work done in prison
he could wind up like this guy in terms of being a murdering asshole but still contributing to the world in the realm of scholarly pursuits
I purchased this book while in London recently under its British title THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE. Apparently for American readers, the publishers felt it necessary to "tart up" the title to THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN. Regardless, Simon Winchester's story between the covers is splendidly told, without sensationalising even the most horrific details, revealed matter of factly well into the book. The story is that of Dr. Minor - an American Civil War surgeon - who went mad amid the horrors of "The Wilderness." Pursued by his nightly demons, he later wound up in grim South London where he shot dead a totally innocent man. Sent to Broadmoor - a sprawling lunatic asylum near London - he became one of the most valuable contributors to the compilation of the magisterial Oxford English Dictionary. Winchester recounts - correcting but not spoiling a wonderful story - the meeting between the OED's legendary James Murray and his reclusive contributor. While ultimately Dr Minor's story is a tragic one - not the least for his hapless victim - it is also a tribute to the persistence of the human mind. Cleverly presented with appropriate OED citings, this book is not to be missed for anyone interested in words. If you'll excuse the expression, this is the "definitive" work.
'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.'
and called the anaconda?
i don't know if this scheme will work, but hands down, that is the most sexual innuendo i've heard in an energy generation scheme in a long time
some enemies you simply have to burn off the face of the earth. they don't understand defeat. the only way to truly defeat them is to utterly destroy them. they are too proud to accept defeat, no matter how wrong they are
as a sort of intellectual modesty, a reverence for the pursuit of science and the natural world
of course, this modesty doesn't translate well into a religious culture of simpletons who only talk in arrogant absolute laws on topics, like human sexuality, or crime and punishment, that are inherently subtle and complex. such that all these scientific "theories" to them can't possibly ring true, as flimsy and modestly phrased as they are. what they need is some cruel visage of a god to threaten fire and brimstone before something is respected
loud ugly morons need crude mental hammers in order process their world. morons ruin the world for the rest of us
the internet is useful because it provides two way communication. if you make the internet a one way system, you basically have nothing more than a fancy form of television. you also therefore strip the internet of all meaning and value that you can think up examples of yourself: email, chat, interactive content, forms, etc.
so as soon as you accept the fact that the internet remains a two way medium, you begin to understand that the gig is up. policing the traffic that flows from one node to the next is an arms race. every single thing that those who wish to police traffic can do, can be routed around, obfuscated through, etc.
in other words, the gig is up, the effort is futile. piracy is permanent. all you can hope to do with your efforts is breed more hardy pirating applications. hardly what you seek to do
so the thing for a proper world leader to do is accept the inevitable, and recreate the legal structre surrounding intellectual property to accomodate the new technological reality we find ourselves in. the new technological reality we find ourselves in has simply antiquated copyright and other aspects of intellectual property as we know it, circa 1985
or wage war against technological progress. your choice
let's go out on a limb, and say the "internet police" can do this (as it is incredibly daunting): we are going to go out and define every node of the internet as "client" and "server". that's a leap of faith, and resources, but lets just go and say that someone can do this
the "client" can only consume, and never serve traffic. ok. so you can never make a form request. you can never upload a youtube video. you can never send an email. you can't chat
oh, ok, ok, you can serve some things... certain ports, certain packet headers are ok... we'll just filter out any unauthorized served content
wtf?
so let's make a second huge leap and say the "internet police" can (with whatever magical resources) identify all nodes as client/ server AND police all traffic formats as allowed/ not allowed. and these are two huge suspensions of disbelief, that anyone can have the willpower and the mandate and the resources to do these two things
now you STILL have issues like:
1. obfuscation. why can't i encrypt my copy of "iron man" as a bunch of supposed form requests. i can't label p2p traffic with a bogus packet header? i can't encrypt it? i can't send it down an "authorized" port? 2. gateways. rogue servers that merely reflect data to another client. perhaps taken over. perhaps just tricked into using "allowed" modes of communication to communicate "iron man" 3. spoofing. trick the watchdogs into thinking p2p traffic is actually legit server to client traffic (ip spoofing but one example, there are a dozen more spoofs) 4. etc., etc. smarter people than me can think up a myriad more ways
it's a game of whack-a-mole. it's a pointless, endless, arms race: every technical effort to kill p2p merely results in the creation of hardier versions of p2p. furthermore, on one side you have a bunch of disorganized, passively interested, technically astute, and most importantly, POOR teenagers. millions of them. on the other side, you have a bunch of expensive hired guns, funded by a pool of money that is, get this, being siphoned off by the unorganized teenager's efforts. take a wild guess where i place my bet on who is going to win this contest
morons: the ONLY way to kill p2p is to pervert the nature of the internet to the point that anything compelling and useful about the internet is not also destroyed. if the information flow is not also free, and only one way, you stifle the creation of new services, and bureaucratically choke any existing useful ones. the internet becomes stagnant, passive, just a form television delivered over tcp/ip. the internet is killed
so how about another option for you: p2p isn't going away, and fucking get used to it! reality accept it, don't fight it, you stupid twits
"We can argue around and around on what constitutes fair compensation and on what we should be able to do with a product afterward, but it doesn't change the fact that the producer gets to set the price."
pre-internet, yes. in the current era, no, his pronouncements of value have no enforceability. simply because the aavenues of distribution went form a few entrenched players to every teenager on the planet, all with the same reach and production capacity: infinite
"Whether or not a given person chooses to purchase at that price is their choice, but remember that we're talking about music and movies here, not food or shelter."
exactly. we're talking about digital media, an unlimited resource, not food or shelter, which are limited. therefore, digital media is woth $0, because the supply is infinite. unlike copyright law, based on an era where vinyl presses and tape recorders ruled, there is no need to burn diesel to ship plastic media to store shelves anymore. such that, the economics have changed to fall in line with the real production value of media. which happens to be: point, click, voila, 100 copies in 100 hard drives around the world with zero effort. the price point merely falls into line with the production and distribution costs. there's no choke point for a union of producers to set a price point at. as such, their pronouncements on price point have ceased to have real world effect, regardless of what the law is
"Every producer of copyrighted material gets to choose how and where it will be published."
it isn't about choice, it is about what the market will bear. you can choose to buy eggs at $5 an egg if you want, but it just makes you a statistical outlying anomaly. you can't "choose" to say that eggs are worth $5 each. the market chooses, no human being has the power to artificially set an arbitrary price point that then everyone falls into line behind. study basic economics and history to see the effects of a government articificially setting a price point for a good and what actually happens in reality, rathe rthan simply yeilding to what the market will bear
"Musicians are free to use a creative commons license or to choose not to burden their product with a copyright at all. They are also free to sell it in a traditional packaged form and retain a reasonable expectation that some legal avenue exists to enforce against those who would infringe."
musicians are free to create music. once the music is created, there is no model that exists anymore under which they retain control of how it is consumed. sure, they can talk about how things should work, but that doesn't mean anything about what actually does work. technology has changed. the internet did that
"You are not the arbiter of morality."
and neither are you. who is? no one one. what is? the marketplace. supply, and demand. infinite supply=zero value. i'm not deciding morality, i'm informing you of simple economic reality
"The democratic system (and our US Constitution) has established that copyright is legal, and it is not infringing any of your personal rights."
the ussr said prices were decided by central committee. the iranian constitution says some grumpy old men speak on god's behalf on the earth. the chinese communist party says a bunch of technocrats sets policy. the usa has a bunch of guys arguing in a room and voting. but who cares what laws are written by men. let them issue all the decrees they want. the decrees are unenforceable. the laws of economics decides. the issue is simply what actually works, not what somebody thinks should work. the usa can pass any law it wants. and the laws on copyright it did pass, are pre-internet, when the distribution players were a small easily controlled group. that reality is now history. and so the laws concerning that reality simply don't work anymore. the legal framework lags behind, and is invalid. not because i say so, but because of simple economics and technological change
"You may argue that it is unwise for copyright holders
there always people who want a pristine copy right now, and they will put money on that
and good for them
but the existence of such people doesn't mean it is moral or wise to go after those getting it for free
there's this strange convolution in your logic, where just because someone will pay for something, that copyright is still a valid concept
if copyright disappears off the face of the earth today, or never existed, there will still be people willing to buy what can be had for free, because it takes more effort
there are people who buy $1,000 handbags rather than $10 handbags. does that give handbag manufacturers the right to force the $10 guys to buy the $1,000 ones or force people who would rather just use plastic bags for free to upgrade to $1,000 handbags?
wtf?
the existence of people who would spend money on what is free and should be free does not in any way support the validity of copyright
Slashdot Mirror
doesn't solve the problem
we need more energy, on a personal, city, national, whatever scale you want, than renewables can provide
and as for people fighting nuclear, you are 100% correct. and so we don't build it, and so everyone will suffer with blackouts and sky high energy prices. after enough pain, they'll stop fighting the inevitable and go nuclear. simply because no other energy option out there can satisfy large scale energy efficiently and without hurting the environment needs right now
virtual reality markup language. didn't think so
a standards body should be slow, not out front, writing standards for things no one knows will be successful or not
in fact, the commercial players SHOULD get proprietary, aggresive technologies out there, seeking new markets. let them play and crash and burn
then, after something proves successful, the standards body plods along and picks it up and makes it canon
the idea that the standards body should get out front, leads to standards being written for things no one uses. the idea that commercial companies won't try to capitalize on owning the technology presumes that corporations are interested in not making money. let a company write nonstandard tech. its a gamble for them, and could hurt them. let them get hurt then, and make space for things like firefox
so the whole basis for the story here is preposterous: ok, we have different browsers and competing platforms and different standards and proprietary tech. big. fucking. deal. get your head out of your anal retentive ass and deal with it
oh it takes 10 hours to program a page that should take 10 minutes to program were everyone fascistically devoted to standards? well then you wouldn't have a job genius. you wouldn't be needed. the mess you have to deal with is proof you are needed. if it weren't messy, you'd be downsized and replaced by a perl script
people who whine and bitch and moan about standards and noncompliance are motivated by the same shrill cloying need as grammar nazis. and if you understand why grammar nazis are essentially useless, annoying, and just don't get it, you understand whats up those who are so shrill about standardsthe world is a messy place. get used to it
is the amount of infrastructure you need to build to tap these sources. you say wind can answer all of our electricity needs. well, yeah. but who's going to build the billion turbines to do that? and say goodbye to birds, i guess
solar i actually am optimistic about, because the tech can be incorporated into housing construction, and improvements can be made on an individual household basis. as tech improves, everyone's roofs, windows, etc. should all be solar. this really will put a dent in consumption. however, it will take a long time to get to that nirvana, and the technology isn't there yet to get there. then what do you do for people who live in london or seattle (cloudy places)?
meanwhile, nuclear tech is well understood, we just need to build more reactors. and certainly, nuclear has a ton of negatives. its just that all other sources of energy has worse negatives. this includes renewables: for them, the worse negatives than nuclear is how fleeting and difficult they are to tap without massive infrastructure investment. with tech improvements, someday, decades from now, i hope this will change. but not today, its just not there yet
nulcear is NOT a great option. but nuclear is the best option, right now, with existing technology
and we need to figure out fusion. that's the holy grail
but i am already envisioning the late night infomercials
a little bit of knowledge + a lot of fear = $$$
specialized companies test genes. brac gene (breast cancer), apoe (alzheimer's), fragile x, etc. you can do this by mail even
just make sure to use a name like donald duck or dick johnson. you don't want this info getting to insurance companies
might as well test that little 1 year old (not any older, consider the trauma for the kid) for parentage too. it has been speculated that something like 10% of babies born before the age of genetic testing were raised by fathers oblivious to the fact they were not the real genetic father of the kid
the usa is not a capitalist country, it is a socialist country. ever hear of medicare? welfare?
as is much of the eu, as is all of the most developed nations, including canada, japan
in other words, capitalism DOES need social safety nets. we don't live in a social darwinistic society. if a financially broke guy falls and breaks his arm, you don't look at him dying on the street and walk by. if he can't pay, you have a system of social support (and no, that's not "charity" as frequently cited as the stopgap measure by people who champion pure libertarian selfishness.... contradiction there maybe?)
the real problem is fundamentalism: from the communist or capitalist camps. you need to reward innovation and hard work, and you also need to have social safety nets funded by a central government
mankind is not 100% selfish. mankind is not also 100% altruistic. the real mistake is to think pure capitalism, or pure communism, is the answer
like most problems in life, the answer is complex, and a mixture of both views, and the people who create all the real trouble are the loud, dumb, fundamentalists from the extremes of pure capitalism or pure communismand use nuclear to generate the 80% of the other power you need, since boutique renewables just dont scale
but if you are digging holes that deep (in the 99.999999999% of the areas that need power but aren't near the hot springs) you might as well just dig up more hydrocarbon, and get more bang for your buck
as for nukes, if you use breeder reactors, the thorium and uranium in the world will last everyone centuries. furthermore, breeder reactors use 10x the amount of energy in fuel the reactors from the 60s (that you are basing your opinion on) use, they produce 10x less waste, and the waste lasts a century or two, rather than 10,000 years
and german tech like pebble bed reactors, just don't have accidents. you can walk away from them, they require no active safety effort. you need to update your opinion of nuclear from the 1960s tech you are basing it on
of course, breeders also produce plutonium, which is why they are shunned. but i think if we spent 100x less of the amount of security outlay we spend in iraq on reactor protection instead, we will still be plenty safe, certainly a lot safer than funding islamic fundamentalist wackjobs, like we do with petrodollars now
can trace their success to that one weekend or month or season where things really took off
additionally, you misunderstand that the flash crowd is not something that comes and goes, but something that comes and stays
but sure, you are correct: a good innovative idea will find a way regardless of inability to scale quickly. some other guy will make work what you can't. you could retard your growth for awhile while you tinker with how to scale. but if some other guy takes your good, innovative idea and runs with it further and faster than you do, you are doomed to obscurity while he reaps the benefits of your good idea
so you shouldn't be giving advice on how the market works, because the fickleness you dismiss really is a big deal and is not to be taken lightly
crudely expressing anger at a confessed murderer on an online forum: wrong
murdering someone: "Maybe Nina had it coming."
zzz
don't feed the troll folks. and if this guy isn't actually trolling and actually believes what he wrote, he'll be in jail himself at some point, with those priorities
maybe they'll let him code in prison
no access to the web, but he may be able to successfully request an offline computer for coding purposes
coding is such a monklike existence anyway, he may actually get a lot of work done in prison
he could wind up like this guy in terms of being a murdering asshole but still contributing to the world in the realm of scholarly pursuits
there certainly are dating sites with fake ads
but anyone actually doing that is smart enough not to brag about it online
just go nuclear and conserve
going nuclear should give us enough time to figure out fusion. and if we don't, it's curtains
but renewables: geothermal, wind, tidal, etc... it's all tiny fractions of demand
except for solar. but that's a huge infrastructure outlay
nuclear is the best option before us to kick our hydrocarbon habit
'long sea waves to excite bulge waves which travel along the wall of a submersed rubber tube. These are then converted into flows of water passing through a turbine to generate electricity.'
and called the anaconda?
i don't know if this scheme will work, but hands down, that is the most sexual innuendo i've heard in an energy generation scheme in a long time
i'm suddenly reminded of the opening scene of ridley scott's gladiator:
Quintus: People should know when they are conquered.
Maximus: Would you, Quintus? Would I?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0172495/quotes
some enemies you simply have to burn off the face of the earth. they don't understand defeat. the only way to truly defeat them is to utterly destroy them. they are too proud to accept defeat, no matter how wrong they are
the war is on
as a sort of intellectual modesty, a reverence for the pursuit of science and the natural world
of course, this modesty doesn't translate well into a religious culture of simpletons who only talk in arrogant absolute laws on topics, like human sexuality, or crime and punishment, that are inherently subtle and complex. such that all these scientific "theories" to them can't possibly ring true, as flimsy and modestly phrased as they are. what they need is some cruel visage of a god to threaten fire and brimstone before something is respected
loud ugly morons need crude mental hammers in order process their world. morons ruin the world for the rest of us
i don't believe it. he's bluffing
let the dice roll
those $40/ hr steelworkers in pittsburg don't look so crappy anymore
no war needed, just peak oil
globalization: reversed
the internet is useful because it provides two way communication. if you make the internet a one way system, you basically have nothing more than a fancy form of television. you also therefore strip the internet of all meaning and value that you can think up examples of yourself: email, chat, interactive content, forms, etc.
so as soon as you accept the fact that the internet remains a two way medium, you begin to understand that the gig is up. policing the traffic that flows from one node to the next is an arms race. every single thing that those who wish to police traffic can do, can be routed around, obfuscated through, etc.
in other words, the gig is up, the effort is futile. piracy is permanent. all you can hope to do with your efforts is breed more hardy pirating applications. hardly what you seek to do
so the thing for a proper world leader to do is accept the inevitable, and recreate the legal structre surrounding intellectual property to accomodate the new technological reality we find ourselves in. the new technological reality we find ourselves in has simply antiquated copyright and other aspects of intellectual property as we know it, circa 1985
or wage war against technological progress. your choice
let's go out on a limb, and say the "internet police" can do this (as it is incredibly daunting): we are going to go out and define every node of the internet as "client" and "server". that's a leap of faith, and resources, but lets just go and say that someone can do this
the "client" can only consume, and never serve traffic. ok. so you can never make a form request. you can never upload a youtube video. you can never send an email. you can't chat
oh, ok, ok, you can serve some things... certain ports, certain packet headers are ok... we'll just filter out any unauthorized served content
wtf?
so let's make a second huge leap and say the "internet police" can (with whatever magical resources) identify all nodes as client/ server AND police all traffic formats as allowed/ not allowed. and these are two huge suspensions of disbelief, that anyone can have the willpower and the mandate and the resources to do these two things
now you STILL have issues like:
1. obfuscation. why can't i encrypt my copy of "iron man" as a bunch of supposed form requests. i can't label p2p traffic with a bogus packet header? i can't encrypt it? i can't send it down an "authorized" port?
2. gateways. rogue servers that merely reflect data to another client. perhaps taken over. perhaps just tricked into using "allowed" modes of communication to communicate "iron man"
3. spoofing. trick the watchdogs into thinking p2p traffic is actually legit server to client traffic (ip spoofing but one example, there are a dozen more spoofs)
4. etc., etc. smarter people than me can think up a myriad more ways
it's a game of whack-a-mole. it's a pointless, endless, arms race: every technical effort to kill p2p merely results in the creation of hardier versions of p2p. furthermore, on one side you have a bunch of disorganized, passively interested, technically astute, and most importantly, POOR teenagers. millions of them. on the other side, you have a bunch of expensive hired guns, funded by a pool of money that is, get this, being siphoned off by the unorganized teenager's efforts. take a wild guess where i place my bet on who is going to win this contest
morons: the ONLY way to kill p2p is to pervert the nature of the internet to the point that anything compelling and useful about the internet is not also destroyed. if the information flow is not also free, and only one way, you stifle the creation of new services, and bureaucratically choke any existing useful ones. the internet becomes stagnant, passive, just a form television delivered over tcp/ip. the internet is killed
so how about another option for you: p2p isn't going away, and fucking get used to it! reality accept it, don't fight it, you stupid twits
"We can argue around and around on what constitutes fair compensation and on what we should be able to do with a product afterward, but it doesn't change the fact that the producer gets to set the price."
pre-internet, yes. in the current era, no, his pronouncements of value have no enforceability. simply because the aavenues of distribution went form a few entrenched players to every teenager on the planet, all with the same reach and production capacity: infinite
"Whether or not a given person chooses to purchase at that price is their choice, but remember that we're talking about music and movies here, not food or shelter."
exactly. we're talking about digital media, an unlimited resource, not food or shelter, which are limited. therefore, digital media is woth $0, because the supply is infinite. unlike copyright law, based on an era where vinyl presses and tape recorders ruled, there is no need to burn diesel to ship plastic media to store shelves anymore. such that, the economics have changed to fall in line with the real production value of media. which happens to be: point, click, voila, 100 copies in 100 hard drives around the world with zero effort. the price point merely falls into line with the production and distribution costs. there's no choke point for a union of producers to set a price point at. as such, their pronouncements on price point have ceased to have real world effect, regardless of what the law is
"Every producer of copyrighted material gets to choose how and where it will be published."
it isn't about choice, it is about what the market will bear. you can choose to buy eggs at $5 an egg if you want, but it just makes you a statistical outlying anomaly. you can't "choose" to say that eggs are worth $5 each. the market chooses, no human being has the power to artificially set an arbitrary price point that then everyone falls into line behind. study basic economics and history to see the effects of a government articificially setting a price point for a good and what actually happens in reality, rathe rthan simply yeilding to what the market will bear
"Musicians are free to use a creative commons license or to choose not to burden their product with a copyright at all. They are also free to sell it in a traditional packaged form and retain a reasonable expectation that some legal avenue exists to enforce against those who would infringe."
musicians are free to create music. once the music is created, there is no model that exists anymore under which they retain control of how it is consumed. sure, they can talk about how things should work, but that doesn't mean anything about what actually does work. technology has changed. the internet did that
"You are not the arbiter of morality."
and neither are you. who is? no one one. what is? the marketplace. supply, and demand. infinite supply=zero value. i'm not deciding morality, i'm informing you of simple economic reality
"The democratic system (and our US Constitution) has established that copyright is legal, and it is not infringing any of your personal rights."
the ussr said prices were decided by central committee. the iranian constitution says some grumpy old men speak on god's behalf on the earth. the chinese communist party says a bunch of technocrats sets policy. the usa has a bunch of guys arguing in a room and voting. but who cares what laws are written by men. let them issue all the decrees they want. the decrees are unenforceable. the laws of economics decides. the issue is simply what actually works, not what somebody thinks should work. the usa can pass any law it wants. and the laws on copyright it did pass, are pre-internet, when the distribution players were a small easily controlled group. that reality is now history. and so the laws concerning that reality simply don't work anymore. the legal framework lags behind, and is invalid. not because i say so, but because of simple economics and technological change
"You may argue that it is unwise for copyright holders
the stomach?
who is modding this crap as interesting?
yes, people will always buy cds
yes, people will always buy books
there always people who want a pristine copy right now, and they will put money on that
and good for them
but the existence of such people doesn't mean it is moral or wise to go after those getting it for free
there's this strange convolution in your logic, where just because someone will pay for something, that copyright is still a valid concept
if copyright disappears off the face of the earth today, or never existed, there will still be people willing to buy what can be had for free, because it takes more effort
there are people who buy $1,000 handbags rather than $10 handbags. does that give handbag manufacturers the right to force the $10 guys to buy the $1,000 ones or force people who would rather just use plastic bags for free to upgrade to $1,000 handbags?
wtf?
the existence of people who would spend money on what is free and should be free does not in any way support the validity of copyright