I guess 75 trillion dollars is a number you just don't comprehend. It's more than the entertainment (music AND Hollywood) have EVER made. It's well over the GDP for the whole WORLD in an entire year. But yeah, their model is just fine.
Yep, I think that the music industry should see at least a few trillion dollars worth of profits for 2010 using the same model they use to claim damages.
While comparing video cards is all well and good, I make a formal nerd request that a decibel comparison be included in future reviews, say at idle fan speed, half maximum speed and full speed. Honestly it has gotten ridiculous - high end cards are just too damned loud. (switching to night-club mode) I MEAN WHAT IS THE POINT OF HAVING NICE GRAPHICS IF YOU CAN'T HEAR THE GAME YOU'RE PLAYING
The problem is that this mantle is under intense pressure because it has the weight of the Earth's crust bearing down on it. This pressure doesn't matter too much to us because of the weight of the rock being forced down by gravity is exactly balanced by the reaction force of the mantle pushing back up. Except where you get cracks and weaknesses in the rock - and some mantle seeps through, causing a volcano. This pressure is enough to drive the molten rock all the way to the surface.
Now consider drilling a hole - a hole filled with a tube and presumably some material that is not rock - like air or water (probably water since the distance to the mantle is less from the bottom of the ocean). While water has weight, it doesn't weigh as much as rock - we can prove that because undersea volcanoes exist, too. So basically what you will end up doing is creating your own instant-volcano, the minute you get close enough to the mantle that the remaining rock is weakened, all of that stuff is going to come up - following the path of least resistance.
I am not saying it's the end of the world - it's not. There are other forces at work too, the mantle will cool on its way up and might only reach the surface slowly, if at all. However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft. It will be absolutely impossible to "drop something" down there. At best what you would get is a deep hole with your radioactive waste, sitting at the bottom of the sea. At worst you would get the mother of all dirty-bombs, driven by a volcano and spreading this waste all over the ocean floor. It was virtually impossible to drop concrete into the Deepwater Horizon shaft. Imagine the pressures of going much much deeper and what's coming out isn't oil but lava.
Where lava will spew out. I don't know what they plan to accomplish short of destroying their drill/probe. Well I guess that first fraction of a second before the sensors melt will let them know what "virgin" mantle 'tastes' like...
Who pays for the prisons? I am unaware how it works in the US. Does the county/municipality get a credit from the Feds, or do the Feds pay for the prison? Or is it paid by the county? If the local government has to foot the incarceration bill then it's just mindless government unable to see further than the paper currently on the desk. However if the Feds are paying one way or another, then this is 100% a scam to keep or get money from the Feds with full prisons. Oh and by the way our prisons are full, send us more money while you're at it...
Well I guess it depends, doesn't it? There are a whole bunch of entirely subjective labels - "social drinker", "casual drinker", "occasional drinker", "alcoholic" etc. In my field (medicine) we try to classify it on a scale which again is entirely subjective, the "CAGE" method where if you answer yes to 3 out of the 4 subjective questions represented in the mnemonic "Ever feel you need to Cut down? Ever feel Angry if someone mentions drinking? Ever feel Guilty about drinking? Ever feel you need an Eye opener after drinking?" you are likely to be an alcoholic. But as you can see those questions are open to a lot of subjective interpretation. Not to mention the fact that people often lie to themselves as well as their caregiver.
So in my mind it's easier to divide the world into people who don't drink or who if they have their arm twisted by social convention and peer pressure, etc, might have a single drink which they will sip all night long, and the rest who are blissfully unaware of the slippery slope they are standing on. Having 2 drinks does not make you an alcoholic. Nor does having an entire bottle of Whiskey. The pathology is far more complex than that. There's the whole issue of why the person drinks (euphoria/self medication for affective or personality disorders/etc) and how the drinking impacts their life and the life of those around them. However avoiding drinking and never drinking makes it very likely you are NOT an alcoholic.
Origin: 1910–15; ir-2 (probably after irrespective ) + regardless
—Can be confused: irregardless, regardless (see usage note at the current entry ).
—Usage note
Irregardless is considered nonstandard because of the two negative elements ir- and -less. It was probably formed on the analogy of such words as irrespective, irrelevant, and irreparable. Those who use it, including on occasion educated speakers, may do so from a desire to add emphasis. Irregardless first appeared in the early 20th century and was perhaps popularized by its use in a comic radio program of the 1930s.
Thank you for making me look this up. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of all the words in the 5 languages I speak fluently. In this case irregardless came from irrespectivo, since I am currently in Spanish mode in a Spanish country. It most certainly is a common word in Spanish.
As for the rest of your post: n/a, I am not American, not in North America, and certainly not a "Tea Party" member. However my comment has a US slant since that's where I get most of my news and it's still the economy that runs (and will sink) the world.
I'm sorry you feel defensive of your political views. I understand that party slogans (which certainly are not at all related to party performance) in the US are bleated immediately whenever a political comment is made. From your comment I deduce you favor the "Democratic/Big government" point of view. Well whatever, because you are getting big government and big deficits REGARDLESS of which party is in charge. I was trying to appeal to reason, not to politics.
I would argue that a fiscal policy even more sane says: don't spend more money than you have. Taxpayers will live and die independently of fiscal policy.
Well I disagree. You want more people to "pay into the system". I think the "system" is designed to swallow all money you throw at it and beg for more, regardless of quantities. It's a bottomless pit. Saying you will fill it with more people doesn't stop it from being bottomless.
An example - 2008. There was a HUGE outcry about TARP which was going to be $700 billion dollars in 2 payments of $350 billion. It made the news. There were protests. People were angry. Fast forward to Nov 2010 - the Fed spends another $600 billion, almost matching the original $700 billion that got everyone so worked up. What happened? The sound of crickets. Spending more encourages more spending. This is history. Every fiat currency EVER has destroyed itself, sooner or later. Irregardless of population or production or technology.
No, they discourage the seizure of vehicles and assets because of reduced drunk driving prosecutions. Because somehow politicians have it in their head that taking your car and auctioning it, and imposing a 5 or 6 digit fine on you, will somehow bring more income than the lost tax revenue while you're in jail plus the cost of keeping you in jail.
Meh - forgot to multiply by 30 - at 30mph you travel around 22 feet in half a second. My bad. But then again I think you lose 0.1 seconds or so off your reaction time. Much less than a car length.
Well alcohol inhibits inhibitory (GABAergic) neurons first - the problem is not so much one of reaction time (the classic yet false argument) or not being aware of your surroundings. You need far more than 0.08mg/dl for that. There is minimal reflex loss but in a vehicle it always comes down to speed and braking distance. 0.5 seconds (I exaggerate, you don't lose half a second from your reflex time with 2 beers in you) or so is not the end of the world at 30mph - that's not even a foot of distance traveled. If you drive with less than a foot of "spare" braking distance at that speed you don't deserve a license. The real argument is more one of "I don't care about the consequences" that will send you down a 35mph zone at 65mph, or around the curve slightly in the other lane, or too close to that car in front, or take that chance at the yellow traffic light. It's same mechanism that will make you talk a little louder, make the jokes a little funnier, and make you have that third drink that you know you're going to regret later - because the third will lead to a fourth and a fifth and...
As you keep drinking, of course, the regular neurons become depressed too, and you start losing coordination, reflexes, awareness, etc - what people typically associate with drunkenness.
And of course the effect of alcohol on any individual is highly subjective, depending on the person's genetics/ethnic background, chronic alcohol use, medication, weight, etc. But the law is the law and ours is not to reason why.
keeping them alive and healthy does cut the deficit.
Considering that the deficit has increased over time along with population, I'm not sure I follow your logic. More people = more services demanded = more spending. And more spending means it's easier to hide frivolous spending, which means the overall efficiency goes down too.
The tax base in no way approaches the deficit - which is why there is a deficit in the first place. So "keeping them alive and healthy" will not reduce the deficit and in fact may contribute to the deficit. But of course something like this would get laughed at by government - the same government that "knows what it's doing" and has gotten us where we are in the first place. Sure, laugh.
the money is out there to be made if I want to work for it
Eh no, see, that's where the game is closed to you and me. You either have to have extraordinary talent (ie, you know which cock to suck at the movie/record studio) and/or you need to be the son or daughter of someone famous - like Angelina Jolie is. In fact it's amazing how many 2nd and 3rd generation "movie" and "pop" stars there are. Quite disproportionate, really. It gets better when you compare the Jew/Gentile ratio in Hollywood. Equal Opportunity my ass. Don't kid yourself, neither you nor I will EVER see that kind of money. And frankly we're better people for it. The number of individuals who continue to act rationally with vast fortunes is rather small.
Go ahead with your peer-to-peer creativity
Oh I am. I find it quite exciting that I can find so many different flavors of very good operating systems for free. Each one was a "creation", a labor of love. And each one arrived to me via peer-to-peer. Oh I'm sorry, is Apache not mainstream enough? How about Linux? Java? How about the free multi-player games I play? Not pirated, but designed to be free. And the movies I watch - distributed free on the internet? There is content out there. It's not my job to point you to it - you won't have my taste. But if you look, you will find. I am not being hypocritical at all. I pay for some of my games - the ones I want on impulse. The ones I play most often are free. I go to the movies sometimes. Often I watch original movies online - yeah there's no million dollar special effects but so what? I read the classics I want thanks to the Gutenberg project, and I paid for a few thousand books here on my shelves. I downloaded my compiler with Microsoft's blessing and write my programs. My database is free. My office suite is free. Oh wow holy crap, there IS decent peer-to-peer stuff out there at no charge at all. It doesn't take billions to make these things. You don't have to pay $300 per copy. And you can have it within less time than some traffic lights. We're at a crossroads today.
But you refuse to see that tomorrow is going to be different.
I'm sorry, you are switching analogies mid analogy. That's against the rules. You said:
and shoplifting undermines a shops business model
Anyone standing on the sidewalk in front of your store giving away the same merchandise which you stock is not giving away YOUR merchandise. You do not own that merchandise. You own your inventory, which you (perhaps foolishly) paid for and hoped to sell for a profit - human greed says a "healthy" profit.
people are using it to distribute that industries products.
If you look at the sum total of media available on the internet TODAY, in the post YouTube "bandwidth is cheap and anyone can upload anything" era, you will find that there is an awful lot of creation and an awful lot of original content - moreso than "industry" content. After all the movie "industry" probably puts out what - say 50 movies a year? At an average of 2 hours per movie let's say they create 100 hours per year. While this content gets duplicated endless times on endless websites, there is a far greater volume of absolutely original content being created and shared on the internet. Whether you like it or not is a matter of taste. And maybe one day we'll be able to efficiently sort out the crap from the good stuff.
Because the creation part is hard, so why bother creating at all
No, creation is easy. Getting Charlie Sheen to sign off on it, at $2 million per episode - yeah, that's hard. You probably won't get Charlie Sheen in your video. But you strike me as the kind of person that hasn't actually explored what's out there on the internet. It's absolutely full of creation, and this flies into the face of your argument. Creating is easy. It's DISTRIBUTION that used to be hard. No more.
However you seem to be content to suck at the teat that is offered to you, for a price. You never wonder why Angelina Jolie should have hundreds of millions of dollars while you might be struggling to eat, or why some "artists" with immense and suddenly acquired wealth just can't wait to flaunt it, believing themselves to be 'elite'. These idols are created by the top down business model. However they have absolutely no value in themselves - case in point: they are easily replaced. A show is canceled, an actor is written out, a song is "covered" by a different band. But when it all comes down to it, there has been a limited number of plots since ancient Greece, and there are only 8 basic musical notes. I think it's time we explore peer to peer creativity. And screw those who want cash up front for content that always fails to deliver.
And shoplifting undermines a shops business model - should we also make that legal again?
Is it shoplifting? Or is it more like someone opened a business right next to yours and is giving away the exact same merchandise as you stock, for free? While you can complain about your new neighbor and wonder how the hell he can finance this - there really is nothing you can do about it. Perhaps you should take a long hard look at your supplier and start wondering exactly why he charges you what he does. Trying to talk your neighbor into charging the same as you do is actually a crime called "price fixing", among other things. So who is in the wrong?
You know they've perverted the meaning of "limited times" to essentially make an end run around the original intent of the Constitution, right? I mean, 99999 years is a limited time, if you consider geological time. Eventually I'm sure Mickey Mouse's copyright will be stretched to this definition.
and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.
Bullshit. People create for the joy of creation, not for profit. It's the publishers that have turned the argument on its head to make you think that creativity is something "rare". Here we go again back to the same old argument of artificial scarcity that has been pushed by monopolies since the dawn of time.
Please tell me, sir, how many billions of net profit have been made by the "entertainment" industries in say, the past 10 years - DESPITE the existence of "free sharing of information". As far as I can tell actors are earning more every year, movies are making more every year, and singers are certainly not short of cash even if they ran out of decent songs a long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
It's your logic that is faulty, not their model.
I guess 75 trillion dollars is a number you just don't comprehend. It's more than the entertainment (music AND Hollywood) have EVER made. It's well over the GDP for the whole WORLD in an entire year. But yeah, their model is just fine.
Yep, I think that the music industry should see at least a few trillion dollars worth of profits for 2010 using the same model they use to claim damages.
OK - I'm not a geologist. Still I assume that stuff must be pretty darned hot...
Ah well, in true slashdot style I RTFA after making my post and, er, there is one. Still, this should be standard in all reviews nowadays.
While comparing video cards is all well and good, I make a formal nerd request that a decibel comparison be included in future reviews, say at idle fan speed, half maximum speed and full speed. Honestly it has gotten ridiculous - high end cards are just too damned loud. (switching to night-club mode) I MEAN WHAT IS THE POINT OF HAVING NICE GRAPHICS IF YOU CAN'T HEAR THE GAME YOU'RE PLAYING
The problem is that this mantle is under intense pressure because it has the weight of the Earth's crust bearing down on it. This pressure doesn't matter too much to us because of the weight of the rock being forced down by gravity is exactly balanced by the reaction force of the mantle pushing back up. Except where you get cracks and weaknesses in the rock - and some mantle seeps through, causing a volcano. This pressure is enough to drive the molten rock all the way to the surface.
Now consider drilling a hole - a hole filled with a tube and presumably some material that is not rock - like air or water (probably water since the distance to the mantle is less from the bottom of the ocean). While water has weight, it doesn't weigh as much as rock - we can prove that because undersea volcanoes exist, too. So basically what you will end up doing is creating your own instant-volcano, the minute you get close enough to the mantle that the remaining rock is weakened, all of that stuff is going to come up - following the path of least resistance.
I am not saying it's the end of the world - it's not. There are other forces at work too, the mantle will cool on its way up and might only reach the surface slowly, if at all. However you must understand that there will be a tremendous amount of upwards pressure in the shaft. It will be absolutely impossible to "drop something" down there. At best what you would get is a deep hole with your radioactive waste, sitting at the bottom of the sea. At worst you would get the mother of all dirty-bombs, driven by a volcano and spreading this waste all over the ocean floor. It was virtually impossible to drop concrete into the Deepwater Horizon shaft. Imagine the pressures of going much much deeper and what's coming out isn't oil but lava.
parallel universes with the British military in Nazi-esque uniforms
Not all that different than our universe, then. The only thing missing really is the uniform. The police state mechanism is already in place.
where lava can spew out
Where lava will spew out. I don't know what they plan to accomplish short of destroying their drill/probe. Well I guess that first fraction of a second before the sensors melt will let them know what "virgin" mantle 'tastes' like...
Hah - don't worry. The only thing the LHC is destroying is budgets, deadlines and large sums of money.
Who pays for the prisons? I am unaware how it works in the US. Does the county/municipality get a credit from the Feds, or do the Feds pay for the prison? Or is it paid by the county? If the local government has to foot the incarceration bill then it's just mindless government unable to see further than the paper currently on the desk. However if the Feds are paying one way or another, then this is 100% a scam to keep or get money from the Feds with full prisons. Oh and by the way our prisons are full, send us more money while you're at it...
Well I guess it depends, doesn't it? There are a whole bunch of entirely subjective labels - "social drinker", "casual drinker", "occasional drinker", "alcoholic" etc. In my field (medicine) we try to classify it on a scale which again is entirely subjective, the "CAGE" method where if you answer yes to 3 out of the 4 subjective questions represented in the mnemonic "Ever feel you need to Cut down? Ever feel Angry if someone mentions drinking? Ever feel Guilty about drinking? Ever feel you need an Eye opener after drinking?" you are likely to be an alcoholic. But as you can see those questions are open to a lot of subjective interpretation. Not to mention the fact that people often lie to themselves as well as their caregiver.
So in my mind it's easier to divide the world into people who don't drink or who if they have their arm twisted by social convention and peer pressure, etc, might have a single drink which they will sip all night long, and the rest who are blissfully unaware of the slippery slope they are standing on. Having 2 drinks does not make you an alcoholic. Nor does having an entire bottle of Whiskey. The pathology is far more complex than that. There's the whole issue of why the person drinks (euphoria/self medication for affective or personality disorders/etc) and how the drinking impacts their life and the life of those around them. However avoiding drinking and never drinking makes it very likely you are NOT an alcoholic.
–adverb Nonstandard .
Use irregardless in a Sentence
Origin: 1910–15; ir-2 (probably after irrespective ) + regardless
—Can be confused: irregardless, regardless (see usage note at the current entry ).
—Usage note
Irregardless is considered nonstandard because of the two negative elements ir- and -less. It was probably formed on the analogy of such words as irrespective, irrelevant, and irreparable. Those who use it, including on occasion educated speakers, may do so from a desire to add emphasis. Irregardless first appeared in the early 20th century and was perhaps popularized by its use in a comic radio program of the 1930s.
Thank you for making me look this up. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of all the words in the 5 languages I speak fluently. In this case irregardless came from irrespectivo, since I am currently in Spanish mode in a Spanish country. It most certainly is a common word in Spanish.
As for the rest of your post: n/a, I am not American, not in North America, and certainly not a "Tea Party" member. However my comment has a US slant since that's where I get most of my news and it's still the economy that runs (and will sink) the world.
I'm sorry you feel defensive of your political views. I understand that party slogans (which certainly are not at all related to party performance) in the US are bleated immediately whenever a political comment is made. From your comment I deduce you favor the "Democratic/Big government" point of view. Well whatever, because you are getting big government and big deficits REGARDLESS of which party is in charge. I was trying to appeal to reason, not to politics.
I would argue that a fiscal policy even more sane says: don't spend more money than you have. Taxpayers will live and die independently of fiscal policy.
Non alcoholics don't generally drink more than one drink, if that. The rest is just varying degrees and stages of alcoholism.
Well I disagree. You want more people to "pay into the system". I think the "system" is designed to swallow all money you throw at it and beg for more, regardless of quantities. It's a bottomless pit. Saying you will fill it with more people doesn't stop it from being bottomless.
An example - 2008. There was a HUGE outcry about TARP which was going to be $700 billion dollars in 2 payments of $350 billion. It made the news. There were protests. People were angry. Fast forward to Nov 2010 - the Fed spends another $600 billion, almost matching the original $700 billion that got everyone so worked up. What happened? The sound of crickets. Spending more encourages more spending. This is history. Every fiat currency EVER has destroyed itself, sooner or later. Irregardless of population or production or technology.
No, they discourage the seizure of vehicles and assets because of reduced drunk driving prosecutions. Because somehow politicians have it in their head that taking your car and auctioning it, and imposing a 5 or 6 digit fine on you, will somehow bring more income than the lost tax revenue while you're in jail plus the cost of keeping you in jail.
Meh - forgot to multiply by 30 - at 30mph you travel around 22 feet in half a second. My bad. But then again I think you lose 0.1 seconds or so off your reaction time. Much less than a car length.
Well alcohol inhibits inhibitory (GABAergic) neurons first - the problem is not so much one of reaction time (the classic yet false argument) or not being aware of your surroundings. You need far more than 0.08mg/dl for that. There is minimal reflex loss but in a vehicle it always comes down to speed and braking distance. 0.5 seconds (I exaggerate, you don't lose half a second from your reflex time with 2 beers in you) or so is not the end of the world at 30mph - that's not even a foot of distance traveled. If you drive with less than a foot of "spare" braking distance at that speed you don't deserve a license. The real argument is more one of "I don't care about the consequences" that will send you down a 35mph zone at 65mph, or around the curve slightly in the other lane, or too close to that car in front, or take that chance at the yellow traffic light. It's same mechanism that will make you talk a little louder, make the jokes a little funnier, and make you have that third drink that you know you're going to regret later - because the third will lead to a fourth and a fifth and...
As you keep drinking, of course, the regular neurons become depressed too, and you start losing coordination, reflexes, awareness, etc - what people typically associate with drunkenness.
And of course the effect of alcohol on any individual is highly subjective, depending on the person's genetics/ethnic background, chronic alcohol use, medication, weight, etc. But the law is the law and ours is not to reason why.
keeping them alive and healthy does cut the deficit.
Considering that the deficit has increased over time along with population, I'm not sure I follow your logic. More people = more services demanded = more spending. And more spending means it's easier to hide frivolous spending, which means the overall efficiency goes down too. The tax base in no way approaches the deficit - which is why there is a deficit in the first place. So "keeping them alive and healthy" will not reduce the deficit and in fact may contribute to the deficit. But of course something like this would get laughed at by government - the same government that "knows what it's doing" and has gotten us where we are in the first place. Sure, laugh.
the money is out there to be made if I want to work for it
Eh no, see, that's where the game is closed to you and me. You either have to have extraordinary talent (ie, you know which cock to suck at the movie/record studio) and/or you need to be the son or daughter of someone famous - like Angelina Jolie is. In fact it's amazing how many 2nd and 3rd generation "movie" and "pop" stars there are. Quite disproportionate, really. It gets better when you compare the Jew/Gentile ratio in Hollywood. Equal Opportunity my ass. Don't kid yourself, neither you nor I will EVER see that kind of money. And frankly we're better people for it. The number of individuals who continue to act rationally with vast fortunes is rather small.
Go ahead with your peer-to-peer creativity
Oh I am. I find it quite exciting that I can find so many different flavors of very good operating systems for free. Each one was a "creation", a labor of love. And each one arrived to me via peer-to-peer. Oh I'm sorry, is Apache not mainstream enough? How about Linux? Java? How about the free multi-player games I play? Not pirated, but designed to be free. And the movies I watch - distributed free on the internet? There is content out there. It's not my job to point you to it - you won't have my taste. But if you look, you will find. I am not being hypocritical at all. I pay for some of my games - the ones I want on impulse. The ones I play most often are free. I go to the movies sometimes. Often I watch original movies online - yeah there's no million dollar special effects but so what? I read the classics I want thanks to the Gutenberg project, and I paid for a few thousand books here on my shelves. I downloaded my compiler with Microsoft's blessing and write my programs. My database is free. My office suite is free. Oh wow holy crap, there IS decent peer-to-peer stuff out there at no charge at all. It doesn't take billions to make these things. You don't have to pay $300 per copy. And you can have it within less time than some traffic lights. We're at a crossroads today.
But you refuse to see that tomorrow is going to be different.
I'm sorry, you are switching analogies mid analogy. That's against the rules. You said:
and shoplifting undermines a shops business model
Anyone standing on the sidewalk in front of your store giving away the same merchandise which you stock is not giving away YOUR merchandise. You do not own that merchandise. You own your inventory, which you (perhaps foolishly) paid for and hoped to sell for a profit - human greed says a "healthy" profit.
people are using it to distribute that industries products.
If you look at the sum total of media available on the internet TODAY, in the post YouTube "bandwidth is cheap and anyone can upload anything" era, you will find that there is an awful lot of creation and an awful lot of original content - moreso than "industry" content. After all the movie "industry" probably puts out what - say 50 movies a year? At an average of 2 hours per movie let's say they create 100 hours per year. While this content gets duplicated endless times on endless websites, there is a far greater volume of absolutely original content being created and shared on the internet. Whether you like it or not is a matter of taste. And maybe one day we'll be able to efficiently sort out the crap from the good stuff.
Because the creation part is hard, so why bother creating at all
No, creation is easy. Getting Charlie Sheen to sign off on it, at $2 million per episode - yeah, that's hard. You probably won't get Charlie Sheen in your video. But you strike me as the kind of person that hasn't actually explored what's out there on the internet. It's absolutely full of creation, and this flies into the face of your argument. Creating is easy. It's DISTRIBUTION that used to be hard. No more.
However you seem to be content to suck at the teat that is offered to you, for a price. You never wonder why Angelina Jolie should have hundreds of millions of dollars while you might be struggling to eat, or why some "artists" with immense and suddenly acquired wealth just can't wait to flaunt it, believing themselves to be 'elite'. These idols are created by the top down business model. However they have absolutely no value in themselves - case in point: they are easily replaced. A show is canceled, an actor is written out, a song is "covered" by a different band. But when it all comes down to it, there has been a limited number of plots since ancient Greece, and there are only 8 basic musical notes. I think it's time we explore peer to peer creativity. And screw those who want cash up front for content that always fails to deliver.
And shoplifting undermines a shops business model - should we also make that legal again?
Is it shoplifting? Or is it more like someone opened a business right next to yours and is giving away the exact same merchandise as you stock, for free? While you can complain about your new neighbor and wonder how the hell he can finance this - there really is nothing you can do about it. Perhaps you should take a long hard look at your supplier and start wondering exactly why he charges you what he does. Trying to talk your neighbor into charging the same as you do is actually a crime called "price fixing", among other things. So who is in the wrong?
You know they've perverted the meaning of "limited times" to essentially make an end run around the original intent of the Constitution, right? I mean, 99999 years is a limited time, if you consider geological time. Eventually I'm sure Mickey Mouse's copyright will be stretched to this definition.
and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.
Bullshit. People create for the joy of creation, not for profit. It's the publishers that have turned the argument on its head to make you think that creativity is something "rare". Here we go again back to the same old argument of artificial scarcity that has been pushed by monopolies since the dawn of time.
Please tell me, sir, how many billions of net profit have been made by the "entertainment" industries in say, the past 10 years - DESPITE the existence of "free sharing of information". As far as I can tell actors are earning more every year, movies are making more every year, and singers are certainly not short of cash even if they ran out of decent songs a long time ago.
With HTML5, IE9 might be able to run Win Xp?