Equating the enforcement of copyright to censorship of free speech is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest thing the piracy crowd have tried to do.
The assumption that no one respects copyright laws is wishful thinking, extrapolating from "none of my friends" or "no one I know" to assume that everyone thinks that way. It's incorrect.
I respect copyright, for one. So do many people I know, including - not coincidentally - a lot of musicians, writers, artists, and actors. Not just as it applies to their own work, but as it applies to others' work. It isn't just faceless corporations on one side of the debate, and people on the other.
I used to ignore copyright... until I started producing works of my own, and realized that the effort that goes into creating a really great song, an entertaining movie, a well-crafted story, or a well-rendered illustration deserves compensation. I also happen to think that copyright terms are ridiculously long, and often too restrictive. But those problems don't negate the worthwhile goal outlined in the US Constitution: to promote the arts by giving creators temporary control over their work.
But even a not-great one routinely outperforms the US system. There are horror stories to be found in both, but they're a lot easier to find in the US.
There's literally no reason anybody should ever buy one.
And yet, I have taken thousands of wonderful pictures with them.
"All of the drawbacks of DSLR?" Like price and bulk?
"None of the benefits?" Like optical wide-angle/telephoto capability, manual exposure control, sometimes even manual focus?
I'm not saying they're perfect; like any other camera, they offer a set of compromises. The results have been very good at meeting my wants and needs. If you can't grasp that some people don't mind a little distortion for the convenience of not having to change lenses, or are happy with lesser image quality if it gives them a more portable and less expensive camera, then there's literally no reason why anybody should ever listen to your advice. Probably about anything.
Google "digital bridge camera". These are cameras that fill the gap between crappy point-and-shoot cameras and expensive DSLRs. Instead of using interchangeable lenses they include good optical zoom lenses, with ratios from 10x to 30x.
One of the things I loved about the C64 (even more so in retrospect) is the fact that entire address space of it (including the ROM OS) was mapped and documented. The background color of the display could be read from this byte in RAM. The character set was bitmapped in that address space. You could generate a sound by poking values to these addresses. You could grok the whole damn machine, which is simply impossible for any human dealing with a 2012 desktop (or even pocket) computer.
The supply-vs-demand argument for variable pricing is based on the faulty premise that there's a finite supply of the "popular" movies, and that a higher price is necessary to reduce demand on them. As a practical matter, this isn't the case. Most cinemas these days have multiple screens and can devote as many of them to popular blockbusters on opening weekend as the demand calls for.
Movie prices are all the same because the studios/distributors set them to be the same; it's not up to the cinema owner to decide, because the box office goes almost entirely to the distributor.
So why do the studios set them the same? A big part of it is "perceived value". If they priced Young Adult at half the price of Mission Impossible, a substantial segment of the market would conclude that MI was a "better" movie than YA. It would be perceived as a demonstration that the studio doesn't have faith in YA and figures that they only way they can get people to see it is by "bribing" them with a lower price. In a market where opening-weekend sales are critical to a movie being financially successful or not, studios need to hype each product as "the best". (It's the same reason why the top-grossing half dozen movies each weekend are further hyped as "#1 gross-out comedy in America" or "#1 action dramedy" for the entire following week.) With variable pricing, you'd also have studios trying to use higher prices as a selling point. Suppose you have two CGI action films to choose from, one priced at $14, the other at $11. The first one must really be good if they're charging that much for it! And even if the cheaper film has 10% higher attendance, the more expensive film still outgrosses it and gets the bragging rights for the weekend.
XP Tablets are great for digital illustration. Since all the idiots who bought the sales pitch saying they'd be good for business use are now ditching them, they're cheap too.
Handwriting recognition is a gimmick, not a feature. And of zero value for a drawing tablet. Pen gestures are a feature, but of marginal value at best. And zero value for a drawing tablet, where gestures are used for drawing. TabletPC devices from the XP era don't support touch input. Which would also be of zero value for a drawing tablet with a perfectly good stylus. An onscreen keyboard has zero value for a drawing tablet. Getting the picture yet?
If not, let me explain it again: WinXP does everything I actually want and need an OS to do for this device. Everything. Whatever other bells and whistles Microsoft added in Win7 that go beyond that, no matter how much they've managed to impress you.... have zero value to me.
But thanks for taking a (dis)interest in my needs and suggesting a solution to problems that I don't have.:)
So should judges to just sit on their hands and stall until the Supreme Court has told them how to decide the cases in front of them? Or should they do their job and decide those cases promptly, based on their understanding of the existing case law? If the Supreme Court later says that their interpretation is incorrect then it gets overturned, if not then it stays in force. I hate to break it to you, but there are countless legal questions where the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on them, such as one Court of Appeals ruling one way, and another ruling differently. Until a case makes its way to the Supreme Court to settle the question, judges are supposed to continue hear and decide cases; that's their job.
I still use WinXP and I expect to continue using it for quite some time to come. It's the operating system that the TabletPC slate I use for drawing runs on, and it does everything I need it to do: load my graphics application, provide storage and TCP/IP services to that app, and support drivers for the stylus and other input devices on it. I could upgrade it to Windows 7... but would gain absolutely nothing from doing so. The OS serves quite nicely as an operating system for the device, and that's all I ask of it. By the time the security updates from Redmond stop, WXP should be such a niche OS that the minimal exposure that this device has, should be a tiny risk.
In the US, we threw out the whole notion of titles a few hundred years ago.
We did? Then why are there four unemployed men wandering the country being addressed as "President _____"? And countless retired "Governor"s and "Senator"s and "General"s and "Admiral"s? While almost every university graduation ceremony involves someone walking away with the title "Doctor" despite never practicing medicine or pursuing grad-school studies? Just because they aren't assigned by order of a monarch doesn't mean these aren't honorific titles for life.
"Were I ever to meet Jonathan Ive, or any of the other "knights," I would call him Mr., lest he have a higher degree (MD, PhD, etc.).
And no one would bat an eye at that. As I explained, you can call him whatever you want. But if you choose to use his title, and call him "Sir Ive", you're doing it wrong. That isn't his name.
The first comment already got this wrong, so a quick primer on how to use the title "sir". He can be referred to as simply "Jonathan Ive", or "Jonathan", or "Jony" or whatever; you don't have to use the title. You can call him "Sir Jonathan Ive" or "Sir Jonathan". However, "Sir Ive" is not correct; honorifics of this sort don't work like "doctor" or "president". It'd be like calling the current monarch "Queen Windsor". For women who are knighted, you'd simply substitute "Dame".
The Nazis also did other evil things, in addition to the attempted extermination of the Jews. In fact, several nations declared war on them before they knew that the German state was doing that. The mindset that you have to go out and commit genocide before your actions qualify as "dehumanizing" sets the bar for that rather dangerously high.
What's most remarkable about this is that people who would wail and howl about the government directing you what to eat and when, apparently think that it would be appropriate for the corporations most people depend upon for employment to do so.
"have society slowly adopt it over time" is the part of your plan that's impossible. You can't have some people using a calendar in which September has 30 days and others using one in which it has 31 days. That would be a train wreck. Probably literally. The Julian and Gregorian calendars coexisted, but that was in a world without instantaneous global communication and commerce.
OK, maybe aliens are more likely to have visited the Earth than the Moon.
So: Where on the Earth are we likely to be able to see undisturbed footprints (or pawprints or tentacleprints or whatever) dating back more than a few days, weeks, months, or (if we're lucky) years? It would have to be some place without other living things that would obscure those footprints by walking all over them, and a place without air or water to erode them. It would also have to be lacking in indigenous lifeforms (ever) that could have created those prints themselves.
Sorry, but I'm coming up blank.
But if we look at the next closest planetoid.... Hey! It's a moon with a dry, lifeless, tectonically inert, vacuum-surrounded surface that's been visited by only a dozen ambulatory organisms, which disturbed only a tiny and well-documented fraction of the surface! Maybe we could look there?
Slashdot Mirror
That loose change was mine. I'd like to reclaim it.
Equating the enforcement of copyright to censorship of free speech is perhaps the most intellectually dishonest thing the piracy crowd have tried to do.
The assumption that no one respects copyright laws is wishful thinking, extrapolating from "none of my friends" or "no one I know" to assume that everyone thinks that way. It's incorrect.
I respect copyright, for one. So do many people I know, including - not coincidentally - a lot of musicians, writers, artists, and actors. Not just as it applies to their own work, but as it applies to others' work. It isn't just faceless corporations on one side of the debate, and people on the other.
I used to ignore copyright... until I started producing works of my own, and realized that the effort that goes into creating a really great song, an entertaining movie, a well-crafted story, or a well-rendered illustration deserves compensation. I also happen to think that copyright terms are ridiculously long, and often too restrictive. But those problems don't negate the worthwhile goal outlined in the US Constitution: to promote the arts by giving creators temporary control over their work.
But even a not-great one routinely outperforms the US system. There are horror stories to be found in both, but they're a lot easier to find in the US.
And yet, I have taken thousands of wonderful pictures with them.
"All of the drawbacks of DSLR?" Like price and bulk?
"None of the benefits?" Like optical wide-angle/telephoto capability, manual exposure control, sometimes even manual focus?
I'm not saying they're perfect; like any other camera, they offer a set of compromises. The results have been very good at meeting my wants and needs. If you can't grasp that some people don't mind a little distortion for the convenience of not having to change lenses, or are happy with lesser image quality if it gives them a more portable and less expensive camera, then there's literally no reason why anybody should ever listen to your advice. Probably about anything.
Google "digital bridge camera". These are cameras that fill the gap between crappy point-and-shoot cameras and expensive DSLRs. Instead of using interchangeable lenses they include good optical zoom lenses, with ratios from 10x to 30x.
One of the things I loved about the C64 (even more so in retrospect) is the fact that entire address space of it (including the ROM OS) was mapped and documented. The background color of the display could be read from this byte in RAM. The character set was bitmapped in that address space. You could generate a sound by poking values to these addresses. You could grok the whole damn machine, which is simply impossible for any human dealing with a 2012 desktop (or even pocket) computer.
So they've figured out that they should be doing something that anyone with any sense whatsoever would have been doing from Square One?
People have been predicting the imminent demise of TiVo for longer than that.
Which just demonstrates how live theater and cinema are different from each other.
The supply-vs-demand argument for variable pricing is based on the faulty premise that there's a finite supply of the "popular" movies, and that a higher price is necessary to reduce demand on them. As a practical matter, this isn't the case. Most cinemas these days have multiple screens and can devote as many of them to popular blockbusters on opening weekend as the demand calls for.
Movie prices are all the same because the studios/distributors set them to be the same; it's not up to the cinema owner to decide, because the box office goes almost entirely to the distributor.
So why do the studios set them the same? A big part of it is "perceived value". If they priced Young Adult at half the price of Mission Impossible, a substantial segment of the market would conclude that MI was a "better" movie than YA. It would be perceived as a demonstration that the studio doesn't have faith in YA and figures that they only way they can get people to see it is by "bribing" them with a lower price. In a market where opening-weekend sales are critical to a movie being financially successful or not, studios need to hype each product as "the best". (It's the same reason why the top-grossing half dozen movies each weekend are further hyped as "#1 gross-out comedy in America" or "#1 action dramedy" for the entire following week.) With variable pricing, you'd also have studios trying to use higher prices as a selling point. Suppose you have two CGI action films to choose from, one priced at $14, the other at $11. The first one must really be good if they're charging that much for it! And even if the cheaper film has 10% higher attendance, the more expensive film still outgrosses it and gets the bragging rights for the weekend.
Thank you for that heartfelt - but completely off-topic - rant.
XP Tablets are great for digital illustration. Since all the idiots who bought the sales pitch saying they'd be good for business use are now ditching them, they're cheap too.
Handwriting recognition is a gimmick, not a feature. And of zero value for a drawing tablet.
Pen gestures are a feature, but of marginal value at best. And zero value for a drawing tablet, where gestures are used for drawing.
TabletPC devices from the XP era don't support touch input. Which would also be of zero value for a drawing tablet with a perfectly good stylus.
An onscreen keyboard has zero value for a drawing tablet.
Getting the picture yet?
If not, let me explain it again: WinXP does everything I actually want and need an OS to do for this device. Everything. Whatever other bells and whistles Microsoft added in Win7 that go beyond that, no matter how much they've managed to impress you.... have zero value to me.
But thanks for taking a (dis)interest in my needs and suggesting a solution to problems that I don't have. :)
So should judges to just sit on their hands and stall until the Supreme Court has told them how to decide the cases in front of them? Or should they do their job and decide those cases promptly, based on their understanding of the existing case law? If the Supreme Court later says that their interpretation is incorrect then it gets overturned, if not then it stays in force. I hate to break it to you, but there are countless legal questions where the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on them, such as one Court of Appeals ruling one way, and another ruling differently. Until a case makes its way to the Supreme Court to settle the question, judges are supposed to continue hear and decide cases; that's their job.
I still use WinXP and I expect to continue using it for quite some time to come. It's the operating system that the TabletPC slate I use for drawing runs on, and it does everything I need it to do: load my graphics application, provide storage and TCP/IP services to that app, and support drivers for the stylus and other input devices on it. I could upgrade it to Windows 7... but would gain absolutely nothing from doing so. The OS serves quite nicely as an operating system for the device, and that's all I ask of it. By the time the security updates from Redmond stop, WXP should be such a niche OS that the minimal exposure that this device has, should be a tiny risk.
We did? Then why are there four unemployed men wandering the country being addressed as "President _____"? And countless retired "Governor"s and "Senator"s and "General"s and "Admiral"s? While almost every university graduation ceremony involves someone walking away with the title "Doctor" despite never practicing medicine or pursuing grad-school studies? Just because they aren't assigned by order of a monarch doesn't mean these aren't honorific titles for life.
And no one would bat an eye at that. As I explained, you can call him whatever you want. But if you choose to use his title, and call him "Sir Ive", you're doing it wrong. That isn't his name.
The first comment already got this wrong, so a quick primer on how to use the title "sir".
He can be referred to as simply "Jonathan Ive", or "Jonathan", or "Jony" or whatever; you don't have to use the title.
You can call him "Sir Jonathan Ive" or "Sir Jonathan".
However, "Sir Ive" is not correct; honorifics of this sort don't work like "doctor" or "president". It'd be like calling the current monarch "Queen Windsor".
For women who are knighted, you'd simply substitute "Dame".
Harry Knowles has an iPad?
The Nazis also did other evil things, in addition to the attempted extermination of the Jews. In fact, several nations declared war on them before they knew that the German state was doing that. The mindset that you have to go out and commit genocide before your actions qualify as "dehumanizing" sets the bar for that rather dangerously high.
What's most remarkable about this is that people who would wail and howl about the government directing you what to eat and when, apparently think that it would be appropriate for the corporations most people depend upon for employment to do so.
"have society slowly adopt it over time" is the part of your plan that's impossible. You can't have some people using a calendar in which September has 30 days and others using one in which it has 31 days. That would be a train wreck. Probably literally. The Julian and Gregorian calendars coexisted, but that was in a world without instantaneous global communication and commerce.
But that trick never works!
OK, maybe aliens are more likely to have visited the Earth than the Moon.
So: Where on the Earth are we likely to be able to see undisturbed footprints (or pawprints or tentacleprints or whatever) dating back more than a few days, weeks, months, or (if we're lucky) years? It would have to be some place without other living things that would obscure those footprints by walking all over them, and a place without air or water to erode them. It would also have to be lacking in indigenous lifeforms (ever) that could have created those prints themselves.
Sorry, but I'm coming up blank.
But if we look at the next closest planetoid.... Hey! It's a moon with a dry, lifeless, tectonically inert, vacuum-surrounded surface that's been visited by only a dozen ambulatory organisms, which disturbed only a tiny and well-documented fraction of the surface! Maybe we could look there?