I'll have to take your word on that, then. I was down near Rome in a similar time frame and never saw them once. In fact, the last time I saw one of those monstrosities was in France back in the 1980s! Maybe northern Italy isn't quite so touristy...
Those exercises are not for beginners, though. If you aren't already in pretty good shape, two of them are outright dangerous: the bridge will wreck your neck, and squats with the heels coming up will wreck your knees. And even if you're in good shape, I've never met either a qualified doctor, physio or professional sports coach who advocates bridging, because of the risk of neck injury.
Simply going to the OOo issue tracker and searching for issues with "pdf" in the summary would find you several examples. Try issue 43029 as a starting point: it dates from 2005, has 194 votes, and appears to have finally come onto the radar for the dev team more than three years and a few dozen comments later.
And no, it's not some specific thing with a printer driver. OOo PDF is export is simply broken, fundamentally and completely, if you want to use pro grade fonts in the most popular format available today.
I wish things were that nice here in the UK, but you've missed a few key factors.
For one thing, on top of the income tax and National Insurance (the "health insurance tax"), we pay VAT (similar to US sales taxes in practice, but a bit more complicated in the details) at 17.5% on most goods at the time of purchase. Then there are numerous other significant taxes, of which the one on petrol is perhaps the most loathed (nearly half the price paid at the pump is tax, and you even get double-taxed on it with the VAT as well — and that's after the huge oil price rises recently, before which the tax take was a much higher proportion of the price at the pump). There are also controversial taxes on inherited wealth, house purchasing, and numerous other things.
For another thing, the tax rate is rather misleading because of all the different credits, allowances and changes as you earn more. For example, under the current scheme, someone working full time on the legal minimum wage appears to pay an effective income tax rate of slightly below zero. After the tax free allowance (a few thousand pounds), everyone then pays 20% on the excess income, but then it goes up to 40% beyond a certain threshold. (Higher rate tax used to apply only to those with very high relative incomes, but the thresholds have been allowed to slide over the years such that the higher rate band now includes part of the earnings of many skilled professions, senior civil servants, and the like.)
The other thing people forget is that the NHS doesn't provide everything for free. Emergency care at hospitals and consultations with GPs, sure, but everything from prescriptions for asthma inhalers to routine sight and dental check-ups cost some sort of fee. The NHS does pay a bit of the cost, but you don't get the choice to opt out, take out private health insurance and pay full price, which would save thousands of pounds per year for most people.
In other words, the 26.38% quite literally isn't even the half of it. It's all the so-called stealth taxes that are the kicker here in the UK, and well over half of most people's income goes right back to the government.
She probably could, but (a) only for a fee, (b) there's no guarantee the same won't happen with the new number plate next week, and (c) it won't clear the numerous outstanding fines threatening to bankrupt her anyway, and (d) the same could happen to anyone else, too. It might be a pragmatic step to take in her position, but it's far from a robust way to fix the underlying mess.
It's not the maths that worries me about OOo PDF export. It has basic font handling bugs, so you can produce a decent document, export it ready to send it to the printers, and only then find that the fonts you've been using come out as some obscure script font instead. There is no easy workaround and the bug has been in the system for years and has many votes, yet it hasn't been fixed.
Relative to the old one, sure. Relative to a serious, TeX-based tool? It's got a way to go.
Admittedly I'm not a big fan of Cambria, so equations set using Cambria Math don't look particularly nice to me anyway, and this part is just personal prejudice and not really the fault of the equation editor per se. For the record, I'm not a huge fan of Computer Modern as a text font, either. However, its general balance is good, and thanks to both the general glyph design and the optical sizing, its legibility at smaller sizes as used in various mathematical contexts is unmatched.
In any case, there are still some basic limitations with Word's equation editor. For one thing, it doesn't really do in-line rather than displayed equations. It's also quite buggy: try inserting one of the sample equations that uses trig functions, and then playing with the options like Professional/Linear a bit, and you wind up with either "cos" or "cos" depending on whether there is a J in the month or it's raining outside.
To beat latex at typesetting requires a lot of of work
That depends on what scale you're talking about. XeTeX is far superior in its handling of modern OpenType fonts and multilingual documents. pdfTeX supports microtypography that produces significantly better output. And LaTeX's page layout algorithm looks like something from the stone age.
Moreover, DTP packages such as Adobe's InDesign have H&J features at least as powerful as TeX's famous line-breaking algorithm these days.
The TeX family is still pretty much the only game in town for serious mathematical typesetting, but some of the add-ins for DTP/word processing packages are getting there. It helps that there are now mathematical fonts in the world outside TeX, with Cambria and Cambria Math used by Word 2007's equation editor, and the more comprehensive STIX fonts in the works. Math typesetting is a relatively small market, so I suspect this will be the last hold-out for the TeX world, but remember that even WordPerfect had a better equation editor than most of what we have today, so it's not like it can't be done.
and with latex basically perfect from a bug perspective any sort of realistic replacement is going to start with it as a base.
I'm not sure which half of that joke was funnier, but ROFLMAO in both cases.
The name of Knuth's typesetting system comes from a Greek word that can be translated as both "art" and "craft". You sometimes see the Greek letters tau, epsilon and chi used; I'd type this to show you, but since Slashdot won't let me use Greek characters, you'll have to check Wikipedia if you want to see the visual similarity.
Knuth's logo, as typeset in the system itself, is written "TEX" with the "E" lowered, to distinguish it from other systems that might be abbreviated "TEX". Since you can't type a lowered "E" in plain text, the name of the system is usually written TeX instead. Derivative systems like LaTeX and XeTeX are just following the same idea, and they too have logos that are set rather differently in the systems themselves.
I learned OpenOffice five years before, why would I go back?
Because MS Office is a better product in this respect?
Esp. when it doesn't come with PDF output out of the box.
Adding PDF export to Office 2007 is trivial, and unlike the PDF export in OpenOffice, the MS Office version isn't riddled with obvious bugs that haven't been fixed for years and render it hopelessly unreliable.
And I don't trust that. Every version they say they improved something. Paying all that money just to find out is not that wise.
If you have a problem with MS Office for some philosophical reason, that's your prerogative, but please don't produce lame excuses like this and then criticise it without even trying it.
Yes, this is why any such technology must be viewed with some concern. In parallel with requiring people to change their behaviour for the benefit of the machine, we also have the danger of trusting the machine. Sooner or later, some jobsworth will decide that a beep on the machine constitutes "reasonable grounds" for suspicion, which is all that is required to stop/search or arrest someone in some places. Ironically, a 1-in-4 failure rate is probably a good thing here, since at least then such a decision is likely to be overruled by a higher authority sooner rather than later. But what is ever an acceptable failure rate, given the negative consequences for the innocent victim of the system?
You need a pretty severe penalty/compensation/appeals system to overcome the downward spiral once you start to trust the machine, perhaps something along the lines of exponentially increasing compensation payments with each false accusation of the same person and personal responsibility on the part of the operators so they could go to court and be subject to sanctions if they abuse their position. But of course, this sort of thing doesn't really happen. What really happens is that the Powers That Be, whether government or corporate interests, pretend it's OK for a minority of cases to be wrong, and most of the little people don't have the resources to fight the abuse.
Meanwhile, the person on the other end gets to be like the lady in the UK who was on a TV report recently because her car number plate was cloned: she is receiving automated fines for motoring offences at a silly rate from various government agencies, each of those fines has to be challenged individually in court, and there is no mechanism available to flag as suspect the record in the DVLA database those agencies used to find her. Her life has become an ongoing, government-sanctioned harassment campaign, and while there ought to be one hell of a due process lawsuit in the works since this is the government doing the dirty work, at the time they showed the report no lawyer had been able to advise her on how to stop the madness.
Regardless of the theory, for every mass surveillance technology we allow to be introduced, stories like that one are easy to find. And most mass surveillance technologies don't really work very well anyway: city centre CCTV hasn't been proved to reduce crime, ANPR cameras result in the real criminals investing in false number plates, etc. We would do well to remember the old saying that man should not be judged by machine, and to oppose any sort of machine-based summary "justice", lest we slide further into the hole we are digging for ourselves.
One would hope an Ivy League kid would have taken the time to check his or her understanding using an authoritative reference before criticising. All of the dictionaries I have to hand list both the classic and the modern plural as acceptable alternatives.
As it is now though, it isn't really recognised as that important in the business world just because so few people have that accreditation.
I suspect it's not important in the business world simply because, in today's economic climate, a lot of people are willing to pay for crap. Quality control is only important to a business that is trying to keep up the quality of its products. If they never intend to fix the bugs at all, fixing them early isn't more efficient, it's a waste of time.
I expect this to change sooner rather than later, as (a) people are getting fed up of software just not working, (b) community-developed alternatives for basic needs continue to improve, requiring professional products to be better to maintain competitiveness, and (c) businesses come to understand that if you are going to have to fix the bugs at some point, it's cheaper, faster and better PR to do it before you release than in some hastily-uploaded patch on a web server a few weeks later.
Now, if you don't want to invest in companies that depend on a key man or group, that's you're prerogative. No risk, no reward. But there are people that do (and from the list above you can see it does pay off), and to them knowing Steve Job's health is an important concern.
I'm sure knowing the forthcoming trading update a few seconds before everyone else gets it would be an important concern as well, but some information you just aren't entitled to have. You make your investment decisions accordingly, and take the risks you consider justified in light of the information you do or do not possess. But you don't get to have arbitrary information about what's going on inside a company just because you might consider it desirable to know from an investor's perspective.
I have trouble believing we're seriously having a discussion comparing the importance of an individual's right to privacy over something as sensitive as medical records and the importance of information to an investor in a corporation. IMNSHO, this is a complete no-brainer. But the very fact that we're having this discussion suggests to me that businesses should be prohibited from disclosing any such information about their staff (assuming privacy laws don't already do so, which again IMNSHO they should), in order to prevent any attempts to use this as a competitive advantage by starting rumours or otherwise making competitors look bad artificially rather than on legitimate business merit.
I can't speak for the USA, but here in the UK, as far as I'm aware the restricted act of of issuing copies to the public still specifically includes rental of sound recordings, films and computer programs. [Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 18(2).]
which number basis are you using for your order of magnitude ?
Nothing clever, just anecdotal discussions with the staff at a rental place a few years ago. At that time, buying a new VHS tape for a major movie would have cost around 8–10 GBP, and the guys at the shop reckoned it cost them about 60–70 GBP for a rental version. DVDs were still relatively new back then, and cost significantly more for both rental and sale at the time.
Of course, prices for DVDs have come down a lot since then, as the technology has been adopted widely and we've had the likes of Amazon selling things at well under their official price (which is pretty much meaningless nowadays as a result). I would imagine the margin between rental and sale has come down as well, so if you have recent data suggested a factor of four, I have no reason to doubt you. It's also possible that as with absolute prices, the rental/sale price ratio has been very different in different parts of the world.
In my opinion not there either because really, why does it matter if you keep the copy and can watch it forever or can only see it one time? Where is the lost?
One obvious loss is that you are over-ruling market forces, in the sense that a company might want to offer consumers a choice between paying full-price for a permanent copy of a work and paying a reduced fee for a one-off use (the rental model). This worked well for a long time with physical media, and may be in a consumer's interest. However, if you prohibit the use of DRM under any circumstances, the supplier's only option is to price on the assumption that every copy is a permanent one.
I don't get renting either, how much goes back to the company which produced the movie? Do they really earn much on a rented copy?
Yes, a DVD sold to a rental company (with suitable accompanying rights) normally costs a lot more than the ones you buy in the shops that are labelled "not for rental". I don't have any recent figures, but a few years ago the difference was roughly an order of magnitude, depending on the product.
Given the two points above, it is pretty clear that a rental model may be in the interests of both the consumer (who pays less if they only want to view something once anyway) and the producer (who gains access to a consumer market that might not be willing to pay full price for a permanent copy but would still like to watch the film).
It is only about saving money, and not even very much money at that. No-one dies if copyright infringement doesn't happen. No-one gets hurt. No-one loses their home unjustly. No-one gets locked up without due process. No-one's family goes hungry because they refused to say "the right thing". These consequences are worthy of civil disobedience. Take a look around the world, and think of what you take for granted, and how much you have because we have legal systems that, at least for the most part, do their job. Copyright infringement is nothing in the grand scheme of things, nothing at all. I suggest anyone who really thinks copyright laws are so evil that they justify criminal behaviour should go take a summer holiday in Harare, and get some perspective.
Your argument would carry a lot more weight if the material shared over P2P and resulting in lawsuits was older material, perhaps pulled back into copyright by all the artificial extensions lobbied for by Big Media, or where many people have already paid for the content in another format. But that is not the case: most of the song and movie swapping we're talking about is sharing the latest pop hit, Hollywood blockbuster or big budget TV drama. These are precisely the things copyright should cover, so that those who invested huge sums of money in producing them can make a reasonable return on their investment.
In any case, the ability to use P2P software to share recently released entertainment products, a market that is overflowing with legally obtainable alternatives anyway, is hardly an essential human right. Civil disobedience can be justified when it is used to counter the kind of life-changing abuses of law we have recently seen in Zimbabwe, or to protect our fundamental freedoms and the balance of power between people and state against threats such as the ID cards being implemented in the UK right now. Trying to elevate saving a bit of money on entertainment products to the same category is just... well, I don't have a word for it, but demonstrating spectacularly screwed up priorities and a total lack of perspective is a start.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll have to take your word on that, then. I was down near Rome in a similar time frame and never saw them once. In fact, the last time I saw one of those monstrosities was in France back in the 1980s! Maybe northern Italy isn't quite so touristy...
Those exercises are not for beginners, though. If you aren't already in pretty good shape, two of them are outright dangerous: the bridge will wreck your neck, and squats with the heels coming up will wreck your knees. And even if you're in good shape, I've never met either a qualified doctor, physio or professional sports coach who advocates bridging, because of the risk of neck injury.
Simply going to the OOo issue tracker and searching for issues with "pdf" in the summary would find you several examples. Try issue 43029 as a starting point: it dates from 2005, has 194 votes, and appears to have finally come onto the radar for the dev team more than three years and a few dozen comments later.
And no, it's not some specific thing with a printer driver. OOo PDF is export is simply broken, fundamentally and completely, if you want to use pro grade fonts in the most popular format available today.
No, I haven't. Perhaps that's because when I went to Italy, it was the 21st century.
I wish things were that nice here in the UK, but you've missed a few key factors.
For one thing, on top of the income tax and National Insurance (the "health insurance tax"), we pay VAT (similar to US sales taxes in practice, but a bit more complicated in the details) at 17.5% on most goods at the time of purchase. Then there are numerous other significant taxes, of which the one on petrol is perhaps the most loathed (nearly half the price paid at the pump is tax, and you even get double-taxed on it with the VAT as well — and that's after the huge oil price rises recently, before which the tax take was a much higher proportion of the price at the pump). There are also controversial taxes on inherited wealth, house purchasing, and numerous other things.
For another thing, the tax rate is rather misleading because of all the different credits, allowances and changes as you earn more. For example, under the current scheme, someone working full time on the legal minimum wage appears to pay an effective income tax rate of slightly below zero. After the tax free allowance (a few thousand pounds), everyone then pays 20% on the excess income, but then it goes up to 40% beyond a certain threshold. (Higher rate tax used to apply only to those with very high relative incomes, but the thresholds have been allowed to slide over the years such that the higher rate band now includes part of the earnings of many skilled professions, senior civil servants, and the like.)
The other thing people forget is that the NHS doesn't provide everything for free. Emergency care at hospitals and consultations with GPs, sure, but everything from prescriptions for asthma inhalers to routine sight and dental check-ups cost some sort of fee. The NHS does pay a bit of the cost, but you don't get the choice to opt out, take out private health insurance and pay full price, which would save thousands of pounds per year for most people.
In other words, the 26.38% quite literally isn't even the half of it. It's all the so-called stealth taxes that are the kicker here in the UK, and well over half of most people's income goes right back to the government.
Damn, that was the best comeback I've seen here in weeks. I wish I could mod you (+3, Funny, Insightful and Informative).
She probably could, but (a) only for a fee, (b) there's no guarantee the same won't happen with the new number plate next week, and (c) it won't clear the numerous outstanding fines threatening to bankrupt her anyway, and (d) the same could happen to anyone else, too. It might be a pragmatic step to take in her position, but it's far from a robust way to fix the underlying mess.
It's not the maths that worries me about OOo PDF export. It has basic font handling bugs, so you can produce a decent document, export it ready to send it to the printers, and only then find that the fonts you've been using come out as some obscure script font instead. There is no easy workaround and the bug has been in the system for years and has many votes, yet it hasn't been fixed.
I can only guess that a "Knuth-pass" algorithm gives you the benefits of an infinite number of passes in only one pass.
No, but each extra pass gets one digit closer to converging on the solution you want.
It's supposedly multi-platform now:
XeTeX is certainly up and running on Windows via MiKTeX.
Yeah, but the new one is pretty good.
Relative to the old one, sure. Relative to a serious, TeX-based tool? It's got a way to go.
Admittedly I'm not a big fan of Cambria, so equations set using Cambria Math don't look particularly nice to me anyway, and this part is just personal prejudice and not really the fault of the equation editor per se. For the record, I'm not a huge fan of Computer Modern as a text font, either. However, its general balance is good, and thanks to both the general glyph design and the optical sizing, its legibility at smaller sizes as used in various mathematical contexts is unmatched.
In any case, there are still some basic limitations with Word's equation editor. For one thing, it doesn't really do in-line rather than displayed equations. It's also quite buggy: try inserting one of the sample equations that uses trig functions, and then playing with the options like Professional/Linear a bit, and you wind up with either "cos" or "cos" depending on whether there is a J in the month or it's raining outside.
To beat latex at typesetting requires a lot of of work
That depends on what scale you're talking about. XeTeX is far superior in its handling of modern OpenType fonts and multilingual documents. pdfTeX supports microtypography that produces significantly better output. And LaTeX's page layout algorithm looks like something from the stone age.
Moreover, DTP packages such as Adobe's InDesign have H&J features at least as powerful as TeX's famous line-breaking algorithm these days.
The TeX family is still pretty much the only game in town for serious mathematical typesetting, but some of the add-ins for DTP/word processing packages are getting there. It helps that there are now mathematical fonts in the world outside TeX, with Cambria and Cambria Math used by Word 2007's equation editor, and the more comprehensive STIX fonts in the works. Math typesetting is a relatively small market, so I suspect this will be the last hold-out for the TeX world, but remember that even WordPerfect had a better equation editor than most of what we have today, so it's not like it can't be done.
and with latex basically perfect from a bug perspective any sort of realistic replacement is going to start with it as a base.
I'm not sure which half of that joke was funnier, but ROFLMAO in both cases.
Assuming that's an honest question...
The name of Knuth's typesetting system comes from a Greek word that can be translated as both "art" and "craft". You sometimes see the Greek letters tau, epsilon and chi used; I'd type this to show you, but since Slashdot won't let me use Greek characters, you'll have to check Wikipedia if you want to see the visual similarity.
Knuth's logo, as typeset in the system itself, is written "TEX" with the "E" lowered, to distinguish it from other systems that might be abbreviated "TEX". Since you can't type a lowered "E" in plain text, the name of the system is usually written TeX instead. Derivative systems like LaTeX and XeTeX are just following the same idea, and they too have logos that are set rather differently in the systems themselves.
Word uses essentially the same algorithm to manage paragraph flow as TeX does
Sorry, I don't follow. Are you talking about line-breaking in a paragraph, or building columns/pages from paragraphs?
I learned OpenOffice five years before, why would I go back?
Because MS Office is a better product in this respect?
Esp. when it doesn't come with PDF output out of the box.
Adding PDF export to Office 2007 is trivial, and unlike the PDF export in OpenOffice, the MS Office version isn't riddled with obvious bugs that haven't been fixed for years and render it hopelessly unreliable.
And I don't trust that. Every version they say they improved something. Paying all that money just to find out is not that wise.
If you have a problem with MS Office for some philosophical reason, that's your prerogative, but please don't produce lame excuses like this and then criticise it without even trying it.
Yes, this is why any such technology must be viewed with some concern. In parallel with requiring people to change their behaviour for the benefit of the machine, we also have the danger of trusting the machine. Sooner or later, some jobsworth will decide that a beep on the machine constitutes "reasonable grounds" for suspicion, which is all that is required to stop/search or arrest someone in some places. Ironically, a 1-in-4 failure rate is probably a good thing here, since at least then such a decision is likely to be overruled by a higher authority sooner rather than later. But what is ever an acceptable failure rate, given the negative consequences for the innocent victim of the system?
You need a pretty severe penalty/compensation/appeals system to overcome the downward spiral once you start to trust the machine, perhaps something along the lines of exponentially increasing compensation payments with each false accusation of the same person and personal responsibility on the part of the operators so they could go to court and be subject to sanctions if they abuse their position. But of course, this sort of thing doesn't really happen. What really happens is that the Powers That Be, whether government or corporate interests, pretend it's OK for a minority of cases to be wrong, and most of the little people don't have the resources to fight the abuse.
Meanwhile, the person on the other end gets to be like the lady in the UK who was on a TV report recently because her car number plate was cloned: she is receiving automated fines for motoring offences at a silly rate from various government agencies, each of those fines has to be challenged individually in court, and there is no mechanism available to flag as suspect the record in the DVLA database those agencies used to find her. Her life has become an ongoing, government-sanctioned harassment campaign, and while there ought to be one hell of a due process lawsuit in the works since this is the government doing the dirty work, at the time they showed the report no lawyer had been able to advise her on how to stop the madness.
Regardless of the theory, for every mass surveillance technology we allow to be introduced, stories like that one are easy to find. And most mass surveillance technologies don't really work very well anyway: city centre CCTV hasn't been proved to reduce crime, ANPR cameras result in the real criminals investing in false number plates, etc. We would do well to remember the old saying that man should not be judged by machine, and to oppose any sort of machine-based summary "justice", lest we slide further into the hole we are digging for ourselves.
One would hope an Ivy League kid would have taken the time to check his or her understanding using an authoritative reference before criticising. All of the dictionaries I have to hand list both the classic and the modern plural as acceptable alternatives.
As it is now though, it isn't really recognised as that important in the business world just because so few people have that accreditation.
I suspect it's not important in the business world simply because, in today's economic climate, a lot of people are willing to pay for crap. Quality control is only important to a business that is trying to keep up the quality of its products. If they never intend to fix the bugs at all, fixing them early isn't more efficient, it's a waste of time.
I expect this to change sooner rather than later, as (a) people are getting fed up of software just not working, (b) community-developed alternatives for basic needs continue to improve, requiring professional products to be better to maintain competitiveness, and (c) businesses come to understand that if you are going to have to fix the bugs at some point, it's cheaper, faster and better PR to do it before you release than in some hastily-uploaded patch on a web server a few weeks later.
Now, if you don't want to invest in companies that depend on a key man or group, that's you're prerogative. No risk, no reward. But there are people that do (and from the list above you can see it does pay off), and to them knowing Steve Job's health is an important concern.
I'm sure knowing the forthcoming trading update a few seconds before everyone else gets it would be an important concern as well, but some information you just aren't entitled to have. You make your investment decisions accordingly, and take the risks you consider justified in light of the information you do or do not possess. But you don't get to have arbitrary information about what's going on inside a company just because you might consider it desirable to know from an investor's perspective.
I have trouble believing we're seriously having a discussion comparing the importance of an individual's right to privacy over something as sensitive as medical records and the importance of information to an investor in a corporation. IMNSHO, this is a complete no-brainer. But the very fact that we're having this discussion suggests to me that businesses should be prohibited from disclosing any such information about their staff (assuming privacy laws don't already do so, which again IMNSHO they should), in order to prevent any attempts to use this as a competitive advantage by starting rumours or otherwise making competitors look bad artificially rather than on legitimate business merit.
I can't speak for the USA, but here in the UK, as far as I'm aware the restricted act of of issuing copies to the public still specifically includes rental of sound recordings, films and computer programs. [Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 18(2).]
which number basis are you using for your order of magnitude ?
Nothing clever, just anecdotal discussions with the staff at a rental place a few years ago. At that time, buying a new VHS tape for a major movie would have cost around 8–10 GBP, and the guys at the shop reckoned it cost them about 60–70 GBP for a rental version. DVDs were still relatively new back then, and cost significantly more for both rental and sale at the time.
Of course, prices for DVDs have come down a lot since then, as the technology has been adopted widely and we've had the likes of Amazon selling things at well under their official price (which is pretty much meaningless nowadays as a result). I would imagine the margin between rental and sale has come down as well, so if you have recent data suggested a factor of four, I have no reason to doubt you. It's also possible that as with absolute prices, the rental/sale price ratio has been very different in different parts of the world.
In my opinion not there either because really, why does it matter if you keep the copy and can watch it forever or can only see it one time? Where is the lost?
One obvious loss is that you are over-ruling market forces, in the sense that a company might want to offer consumers a choice between paying full-price for a permanent copy of a work and paying a reduced fee for a one-off use (the rental model). This worked well for a long time with physical media, and may be in a consumer's interest. However, if you prohibit the use of DRM under any circumstances, the supplier's only option is to price on the assumption that every copy is a permanent one.
I don't get renting either, how much goes back to the company which produced the movie? Do they really earn much on a rented copy?
Yes, a DVD sold to a rental company (with suitable accompanying rights) normally costs a lot more than the ones you buy in the shops that are labelled "not for rental". I don't have any recent figures, but a few years ago the difference was roughly an order of magnitude, depending on the product.
Given the two points above, it is pretty clear that a rental model may be in the interests of both the consumer (who pays less if they only want to view something once anyway) and the producer (who gains access to a consumer market that might not be willing to pay full price for a permanent copy but would still like to watch the film).
It is only about saving money, and not even very much money at that. No-one dies if copyright infringement doesn't happen. No-one gets hurt. No-one loses their home unjustly. No-one gets locked up without due process. No-one's family goes hungry because they refused to say "the right thing". These consequences are worthy of civil disobedience. Take a look around the world, and think of what you take for granted, and how much you have because we have legal systems that, at least for the most part, do their job. Copyright infringement is nothing in the grand scheme of things, nothing at all. I suggest anyone who really thinks copyright laws are so evil that they justify criminal behaviour should go take a summer holiday in Harare, and get some perspective.
Citation: the syllabus for the first five minutes in any undergraduate law degree, for a start.
And you've heard of the Magna Carta? Or the Parliament Act, if you want a more recent example?
Your argument would carry a lot more weight if the material shared over P2P and resulting in lawsuits was older material, perhaps pulled back into copyright by all the artificial extensions lobbied for by Big Media, or where many people have already paid for the content in another format. But that is not the case: most of the song and movie swapping we're talking about is sharing the latest pop hit, Hollywood blockbuster or big budget TV drama. These are precisely the things copyright should cover, so that those who invested huge sums of money in producing them can make a reasonable return on their investment.
In any case, the ability to use P2P software to share recently released entertainment products, a market that is overflowing with legally obtainable alternatives anyway, is hardly an essential human right. Civil disobedience can be justified when it is used to counter the kind of life-changing abuses of law we have recently seen in Zimbabwe, or to protect our fundamental freedoms and the balance of power between people and state against threats such as the ID cards being implemented in the UK right now. Trying to elevate saving a bit of money on entertainment products to the same category is just... well, I don't have a word for it, but demonstrating spectacularly screwed up priorities and a total lack of perspective is a start.