Your argument works well for someone who wrote some popular books forty years ago and has faded from the limelight. What if Harper Lee (the best one-hit wonder I know of, sure there are others) had died a week after delivering To Kill A Mockingbird, but before its publication? Should her family have gotten nothing?
People don't need to be paid in perpetuity, but a minimum term isn't insane either. Not everyone dies of old age.
Baen, unlike PG, does sell copies of the same work. IOW, there's a contribution mechanism there if you feel like the work is worth some money. Not the same thing at all.
I make those sorts of contributions a lot. I pirated a lot when I was poor, justifying it with the thought that I would refuse to pirate when I could afford the work. I can afford the work now, and not only do I not pirate, I have made several attempts to go back and give people the money that I think they deserve.
No interest in leaving a house to your kids, eh? While I agree that rights should terminate somewhere within the first hundred years after the work is produced, all your solution will do is create a market for bumping off newly popular writers.
I don't post on Dutch, German, or French websites. Still, if you'd like to continue to appear indistinguishable from a total moron, go right ahead. There are a set of mistakes than non-native English speakers make. The mistakes you are making are not characteristic of them; they are characteristic of idiots who speak English as a primary language. Believe it or not, I'm trying to help you here.
Dicisne linguam Latinam? Vi znaetye Russkuyu yaziku?
Israel's claim of nukes - hardly baseless, just never formally admitted - serves a number of purposes in the ME. So long as they don't actually admit that they have them, there is much less formal pressure on the major Arab states - especially Saudi Arabia - to arm themselves with nukes. Why would SA not want nukes? Because they don't want the Persian-Arab, Shia-Sunni conflict to go nuclear.
As Wikileaks has proven, letting Iran go nuclear is the nightmare of the Middle East. The Jews and Palestinians are a sideshow by comparison - one is a truly existential threat, the other merely an annoyance.
In English, we call them Israeli(s) and Palestinian(s). And stop using the ghastly English of 4chan. "were" != "where". In fact, they sound nothing alike in any English accent I know of. (And some of us still distinguish "weir" and "where".)
That's a fair claim against a four year old, but a mature eight or nine year old is perfectly capable of taking care of themselves for a couple of hours at a time, if not a day. By that age - third grade - I was walking home from school by myself (a little over a mile) on nice days. The next year, I started riding my bicycle to school with two other neighbors that were a year younger than me. A child that knows a few basic rules is fine: don't open the door to anyone, don't answer the phone, and don't cook except in the microwave. Call your parents if anything happens.
By the time I was twelve, I was in charge of the house for the day during the summer while my mom was at work - I had to stay home and babysit my six-year-old sister. And make her lunch for her. It was no big deal.
the US has also had a very large fleet to the south of Iran for quite a while
And that's why keeping the UK on board is so essential. It's the one ally we can't do without, because they still have those little bits of territory out in the middle of the oceans that they let us use as bases.
You may laugh, but I remember driving into Dallas a decade ago and seeing a billboard for an I-have-herpes dating service. That would be a really... interesting client list.
More to the point, if they actually implement any of this stuff, it'll be an open secret the moment they start producing it, right? I mean, we're not talking about some fabulous machine that produces cars - we're talking about the cars themselves, which anyone can buy and tear down. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate someone who understands the industry letting me know, but it seems that the product engineering is the one part of car manufacturing that you can't possibly hide. Right?
I had to be in the right place at the right time to get invited
Private trackers - really private trackers - have two problems. One is getting enough content; they only have stuff when someone goes out and gets it. The other is keeping enough active members. I know of a few private P2P networks that never had memberships over a few hundred that eventually died as the old members left and new ones didn't come in (because, in a desire for secrecy, it couldn't be advertised).
How in the world does this solve the problem of media corporations having the ability - unlike every other corporation under your regime - to run politically slanted content under the guise of news right up until the end of the election? The Web and print are already this open, but most people get their news from big media corps' sites. Why? Better production quality. (Not necessarily the content, just the presentation.)
Gold doesn't have a fixed relation to a valuable physical item either - how much gold I'll demand from you for a loaf of bread can change pretty fast. Gold is pretty, and it doesn't tarnish, and people have always liked it, but when shit really hits the fan there's nothing like ammunition and a good knife.
There's only one problem: when leaves become currency, everyone becomes immensely rich. But there is a small inflation problem owing to high leaf availability. Unfortunately, it takes something like three major deciduous forests to buy one ship's peanut.
Well, if nothing else, thank you for the tour through Cold War spymasters. Schabowski deserves a dozen medals for what he did for humanity, even if it was inadvertent.
Nor can I use my newspaper or TV company to stump for them
What, you can't use your reporters to dig up dirt on their opposition? Or write a series of editorials in favor of their positions on a few critical issues? Or maybe do a puff piece on the hard-working US Attorney that's running for the House, and how he's a rising star in his party who's also taken down some pretty bad guys?
Just look at the last US presidential election and think about the candidates' coverage. The television networks, Fox excepted, were just insanely pro-Obama, and not just because he was a Democrat - Hillary's press wasn't any better than McCain's. A guy who can't deliver an extemporaneous speech got a reputation as a good orator. Why? Because media people liked him, and they are able to choose how to portray people.
I am not a computer scientist, nor an electrical engineer, but as I understand it, the mathematical routines necessary to divide floating points in a processor are much more difficult to design correctly than the ones for multiplying integers. And the FDIV bug wasn't exactly something encountered "frequently".
Still doesn't solve the problem of the media corporations being this special (and not particularly more trustworthy) category of corporation that, unlike every other corporation out there, gets to say what it wants.
Slashdot Mirror
How much money has JK Rowling made from books, vs from movie licensing deals? What if the latter were suddenly free?
Sometimes you people have no imagination.
Your argument works well for someone who wrote some popular books forty years ago and has faded from the limelight. What if Harper Lee (the best one-hit wonder I know of, sure there are others) had died a week after delivering To Kill A Mockingbird, but before its publication? Should her family have gotten nothing?
People don't need to be paid in perpetuity, but a minimum term isn't insane either. Not everyone dies of old age.
Baen, unlike PG, does sell copies of the same work. IOW, there's a contribution mechanism there if you feel like the work is worth some money. Not the same thing at all.
I make those sorts of contributions a lot. I pirated a lot when I was poor, justifying it with the thought that I would refuse to pirate when I could afford the work. I can afford the work now, and not only do I not pirate, I have made several attempts to go back and give people the money that I think they deserve.
No interest in leaving a house to your kids, eh? While I agree that rights should terminate somewhere within the first hundred years after the work is produced, all your solution will do is create a market for bumping off newly popular writers.
I don't post on Dutch, German, or French websites. Still, if you'd like to continue to appear indistinguishable from a total moron, go right ahead. There are a set of mistakes than non-native English speakers make. The mistakes you are making are not characteristic of them; they are characteristic of idiots who speak English as a primary language. Believe it or not, I'm trying to help you here.
Dicisne linguam Latinam? Vi znaetye Russkuyu yaziku?
Israel's claim of nukes - hardly baseless, just never formally admitted - serves a number of purposes in the ME. So long as they don't actually admit that they have them, there is much less formal pressure on the major Arab states - especially Saudi Arabia - to arm themselves with nukes. Why would SA not want nukes? Because they don't want the Persian-Arab, Shia-Sunni conflict to go nuclear.
As Wikileaks has proven, letting Iran go nuclear is the nightmare of the Middle East. The Jews and Palestinians are a sideshow by comparison - one is a truly existential threat, the other merely an annoyance.
In English, we call them Israeli(s) and Palestinian(s). And stop using the ghastly English of 4chan. "were" != "where". In fact, they sound nothing alike in any English accent I know of. (And some of us still distinguish "weir" and "where".)
That's a fair claim against a four year old, but a mature eight or nine year old is perfectly capable of taking care of themselves for a couple of hours at a time, if not a day. By that age - third grade - I was walking home from school by myself (a little over a mile) on nice days. The next year, I started riding my bicycle to school with two other neighbors that were a year younger than me. A child that knows a few basic rules is fine: don't open the door to anyone, don't answer the phone, and don't cook except in the microwave. Call your parents if anything happens.
By the time I was twelve, I was in charge of the house for the day during the summer while my mom was at work - I had to stay home and babysit my six-year-old sister. And make her lunch for her. It was no big deal.
the US has also had a very large fleet to the south of Iran for quite a while
And that's why keeping the UK on board is so essential. It's the one ally we can't do without, because they still have those little bits of territory out in the middle of the oceans that they let us use as bases.
Iran is a strategic opponent of the US. The US was already in Afghanistan, to its east. Now it's in Iraq, to its west.
You may laugh, but I remember driving into Dallas a decade ago and seeing a billboard for an I-have-herpes dating service. That would be a really... interesting client list.
More to the point, if they actually implement any of this stuff, it'll be an open secret the moment they start producing it, right? I mean, we're not talking about some fabulous machine that produces cars - we're talking about the cars themselves, which anyone can buy and tear down. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate someone who understands the industry letting me know, but it seems that the product engineering is the one part of car manufacturing that you can't possibly hide. Right?
Never having open signups is private enough. Still, it sounds like you've got a good thing going there. If you have books, my email's in my profile ;)
I had to be in the right place at the right time to get invited
Private trackers - really private trackers - have two problems. One is getting enough content; they only have stuff when someone goes out and gets it. The other is keeping enough active members. I know of a few private P2P networks that never had memberships over a few hundred that eventually died as the old members left and new ones didn't come in (because, in a desire for secrecy, it couldn't be advertised).
How in the world does this solve the problem of media corporations having the ability - unlike every other corporation under your regime - to run politically slanted content under the guise of news right up until the end of the election? The Web and print are already this open, but most people get their news from big media corps' sites. Why? Better production quality. (Not necessarily the content, just the presentation.)
Gold doesn't have a fixed relation to a valuable physical item either - how much gold I'll demand from you for a loaf of bread can change pretty fast. Gold is pretty, and it doesn't tarnish, and people have always liked it, but when shit really hits the fan there's nothing like ammunition and a good knife.
It's just a Douglas Adams reference. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
One person gets the joke...
There's only one problem: when leaves become currency, everyone becomes immensely rich. But there is a small inflation problem owing to high leaf availability. Unfortunately, it takes something like three major deciduous forests to buy one ship's peanut.
Well, if nothing else, thank you for the tour through Cold War spymasters. Schabowski deserves a dozen medals for what he did for humanity, even if it was inadvertent.
Nor can I use my newspaper or TV company to stump for them
What, you can't use your reporters to dig up dirt on their opposition? Or write a series of editorials in favor of their positions on a few critical issues? Or maybe do a puff piece on the hard-working US Attorney that's running for the House, and how he's a rising star in his party who's also taken down some pretty bad guys?
Just look at the last US presidential election and think about the candidates' coverage. The television networks, Fox excepted, were just insanely pro-Obama, and not just because he was a Democrat - Hillary's press wasn't any better than McCain's. A guy who can't deliver an extemporaneous speech got a reputation as a good orator. Why? Because media people liked him, and they are able to choose how to portray people.
I am not a computer scientist, nor an electrical engineer, but as I understand it, the mathematical routines necessary to divide floating points in a processor are much more difficult to design correctly than the ones for multiplying integers. And the FDIV bug wasn't exactly something encountered "frequently".
Stuff that, unlike websites, has a long history of case law supporting it.
Still doesn't solve the problem of the media corporations being this special (and not particularly more trustworthy) category of corporation that, unlike every other corporation out there, gets to say what it wants.
Buy an account on a real news provider, and don't be the guy uploading?