Problem with this theory is that this sort of material is increasingly being left out to cut production costs(though I haven't seen prices go down any). CD's have been shipping without lyrics much of anything in the way of liner notes(and then on occaision suing sites which provide them) for years, and it's not much better with games. I've seen games which have the manual included on the cd, or which have a 6 page manual with no useful information, or which have no manual at all.
That's not to say that I don't agree with your original idea, I too like to buy things for those perks, but it might be a good idea for publishers to look at where trimming their costs can be a detriment. I know that manuals and the like make up a larger chunk of production cost than cd's, but they have to look at what benefits(besides legality which most people don't seem to care about) a fully licensed copy offers them. If there is no material difference between a pirated game and the $50 retail version outside of the cardboard box it comes in, then there is no real incentive to spend the $50.
Worst I ever saw was sometime last spring looking for 5 years of experience with.NET. The fact that even the eduactional version which had come out a good year or so earlier than the commercial product had not yet been out for two years didn't seem to bother them.
I'm not even entirely sure whether they had a version of VS.NET which would compile(as in the program not stuff it created) in the spring of 1998. Ahh well, such is lunacy.
Problem with this is that, as I recall, most of the time people screw up and miss or can't get the shot off quickly. In real life(excluding those who have had firearms training which should be a requirement for having one anyway, but isn't) all a gun really does is turn someone who just wanted to burgle your house into someone who sees you as a threat which needs to be removed.
Yes there are circumstances in which the protection of a gun can be of major assistance, but as things stand now(for the most part unregulated) guns seem to be more destructive tha helpful. Not to mention the fact that no one has the need for something like an assault rifle unless they're a soldier in hostile territory.
Well, if you have enough of it, anything is poisonous, even things we need to live like water and oxygen are deadly if you overdose. The dose for nicotine just happens to be lower than that for some other substances, the nicotine isn't what makes cigarettes deadly anyway, only addictive. If we're going to go after addictive substances which are deadly with the wrong dose we can always go after caffeine.
For the matter of that, assuming your target wasn't also at warp speed you could probably drop a rock from a ship at warp speed to destroy things, force being mass times acceleration(or in this case deceleration) which would be something rather nasty.
Well this might be viable except that all that "cheaper" is money going to someone, usually someone in government.
The way I see it is we're going to get decriminalization which is worse because the only way to get it will still be through the criminal scum bags which currently sell it(rather than the corporate scum bags who could sell it if it were legal). Because of this, drugs will continue to fund crime and do all of the horrible things they do now, except that all of the people who are currently massively anti-drugs(read the people making money off the war on drugs) will be able to say, look, we tried it your way and it didn't work", then we'll be back to the same old garbage.
Well technically since Rupert Murdoch owns Newscorp which owns fox, and since Murdoch started his media empire by buying up Australian radio stations and comericalizing them(turning local radio into crap), and since newscorp also happens to own at least a half a dozen US radio stations, it already has.
No offense intended, but Linux isn't about substance over style so much as it's about programmers who don't like designing GUI's and don't have anyone to force them to.
I like OSS as much as the next guy(well so long as the next guy isn't a slashdotter), but even KDE, which is IMHO the most attractive piece of OSS I've ever seen, has some clunky aspects to it's GUI.
Some would of course argue that a good GUI isn't the same thing as a good program, but those people aren't going to see office workers or home users using their product any time soon. Ever been to a cube farm? You think the kind of people who decorate their office to the point of madness are going to put up with staring at something unecessarily ugly all day if they don't have to?
First of all, the size of the US has nothing to do with the impossibility of direct vote. It makes it more difficult, but with the internet we can fix that. The problem with direct vote comes from the fact that many of the American people are, on at least one important issue, either ignorant morons, or ignorant zealots. A thousand ignorant jackanapes is no easier to rule democratically than 150 million or so.
As for people asking for legal copyright violation, that's not what anyone is asking for, at least not anyone sane. What they're asking for is that, rather than just simply voting the way the companies tell them, they tried to understand the actual issues involved. Whether you want to pirate music or not, the DMCA is crap, for that matter copyright no longer serves the same purpose it once did anyhoo.
As for your continued whining on behalf of "the creators", other than independent artists, for whome file sharing and the marketing opportunities it offers are a lifesblood, most "creators" don't make any money anyway. Move actors are somewhat of an exception since they rarely sign long term deals and sell movies simply by their presence, but programmers, most musicians, inventors etc, get paid a rather small percentage of what you pay for their work. If we want to protect the artist we need to stop large conglomerates from stealing the rights to their work in exchange for a relative pittance and then selling their work in a way which is no longer effective.
Bullshit it is. Last time I checked the idea of democracy was that everyone had an equal say in government(at least in theory). This sort of garbage is basically saying that if you're rich you can vote an extra thousand times or something, which is completely unrelated to democracy or even the supposed democractic republic we currently have.
That's not to say it's not part of the system, but it's not democracy.
Well yes, but considering our leadership is so entwined with oil production that their personal wealth increases proportionally with oil wealth, they're not likely to do that are they.
If we were to tell Opec to go to hell, we'd also be telling KBR(a subsidiary of the Haliburton Corp, old CEO of Haliburton, you guessed it Dick Cheney) and Bush to go to hell. Odds that Bush and Cheney will tell themselves to go to hell, less than a snowballs chance.
Well sometimes that's a very good excuse, due to our wonderful graduated tax system which has no real idea of what constitutes wealthy and doesn't make them pay taxes when it does anyway, a raise can sometimes put you into a new tax bracked which increases your taxes by an amount greater than your actual raise so that in essence you make less money.
This doesn't so much apply to contracters and smaller buisnesses since they work on a totally different pricing scheme than medium to large sized corporations, but there is a subtle factor which you're missing. Unless the company in question has a monopoly(in which case in these days when most monopoly companies control a resource necessary in today's society they can charge whatever they want), the selling price of an item is affected far more by the pricing of their competitors equivilant than it is by the price consumers can/will pay. This being said, most serious buisness competitors are of relatively similar size, which is to say that they are likely to be in approximately the same tax bracket, and so when your cost goes up so does theirs at which point odds are, either in collaboration with each other or seperately, you both will raise your prices.
You've sort of inverted your point. If you have two farmers, the man with 10 cows is richer than the man with 1 cow which is why he gets taxed 10 times instead of once. You can say this irregardless of any additional wealth these people might possess because that additional wealth is most likely being covered by some sort of additional tax.
Even ignoring this mistake there is a fundamental problem with taxation. This problem of course is that in either case, rather than actually paying a tax on said cow, a rich(or even probably a poor farmer) will simply pass the additional expense on to his customers. It has been mentioned numerous times that buisnesses don't pay taxes, which is basically true, as many of you may have noticed lately buisnesses also don't suffer economic hardship the way that normal people do. When companies have an increase in costs(taxes) or a decrease in profits(bad economy) they either raise their prices or fire employees, regardless of which way they go only very extreme misfortune can actually decrease either the companies profit margins or the salaries of its executive officers.
This is in fact not true, however, the proof which I have witnessed on at least two occaisions requires calculus which I have done my best to remove all traces of from my mind. You will just have to trust me, as well as take into account the fact that all proofs given so far to the contrary are flawed.
Went to watch a movie today and they made a big deal about showing you this set painter and explaining how piracy doesn't really hurt the execs because they're million dollar employees, but it hurts these regular people. To me that was more an advertisement that film execs are overpaid and screw over their employees, though maybe that's just me.
No it's not, there are only three monosaccharides or simple sugars, all other sugars and carbs are made up of these three sugars. As previously stated the enzyme which breaks all complex carbohydrates down into their disacharide components is introduced in the mouth, don't believe me suck on a potato and it'll disolve. This basically means that almost immediately the carbs in beer are broken down into exactly the same components as a complex carb like starch. By the time anything is absorbed there is no difference whatsoever.
Hangovers are caused by dehydration not B vitamin loss(though you probably lose water soluble vitamins while becoming dehydrated). Alcohol is a diuretic, which is to say it inhibits some of the hormones which control your kidneys so that, rather than appropriately balancing your salt/water levels, they produce urine which has a higher water content than it usually does which dehydrates you.
As for complex versus simple carbohydrates, all complex carbs are just made up of simple carbs and have to be broken down before they can be used anyway, for that matter since the enzyme which breaks down starches and the like is present in your saliva, you're unlikely to get anything more complicated than a disaccharide past your stomach anyway.
Secret Ballots are only secret because no one looks. The information is already there, admitedly not everyone can find it out the way they could in the old days, but there's no real secret to it. If we had electronic voting you'd still have to trust that the people who could look aren't just as you have to today.
Possibly not, but spending $300 on something makes you want to use it, I know that, it's happened to me, it's happened to my friends, it's happened to lots of people. It doesn't necessarily inspire you to shoot people, but it does inspire you to do "something" with the gun you just bought and "something" can be very stupid and dangerous, especially without proper training.
How can anyone possibly object to the idea of making sure people know what they're doing before they're allowed to buy a gun?
Wow, something republicans are on the record about that I actually agree with, though somehow I think that the tort reform they mean will be the kind that stops regular people from suing big companys(admitedly something that also needs work) rather than the kind which stops big companies from suing regular people for little or no reason.
Not to ruin the joke, but this is the United States, any big company has the right to sue anyone for any reason whatsoever regardless of merit, I thought that was part of the reason people chose Linux in the first place.
I will ignore the fact that instead of contradicting my opinion you chose to insult me personally. I do not own a gun, I am not worried about me shooting myself, I'm not even hugely worried about other people shooting themselves(that's just a darwin award) I'm worried about the people who shoot other people because they have access to a gun. I also said I felt that people should be trained to use guns before they were allowed to have them, which would mean that as a method of self defense they might actually work.
As for defending yourself against tyranny, if you truly believe that owning a gun can protect you from a tyrannical government, let alone one as large and well armed as that of the United States, you are sorely deluded. Besides which I'm allowed to give up any right I so desire, it's part of having rights.
That was a part of what I was attempting to say, however guns are a problem in a way which your table saw is not. Your table saw inspires idiots to go out and cut through things they shouldn't which while dangerous is 99% of the time only dangerous to the individual.
Guns on the other hand inspire people to shoot things, which is a recipe for disaster. There is nothing wrong with a gun in and of itself and as I said I've known people who respected their guns(admitedly the same guy bought a butterfly knife and played around with it like a moron, but still), but guns are designed to kill, not cut wood. There are circumstances under which killing is necessary, but there is no excuse for allowing anyone to own a tool which is used for killing without at least making sure they know how to use it properly.
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That's not to say that I don't agree with your original idea, I too like to buy things for those perks, but it might be a good idea for publishers to look at where trimming their costs can be a detriment. I know that manuals and the like make up a larger chunk of production cost than cd's, but they have to look at what benefits(besides legality which most people don't seem to care about) a fully licensed copy offers them. If there is no material difference between a pirated game and the $50 retail version outside of the cardboard box it comes in, then there is no real incentive to spend the $50.
MMMMBOP NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I'm not even entirely sure whether they had a version of VS .NET which would compile(as in the program not stuff it created) in the spring of 1998. Ahh well, such is lunacy.
Yes there are circumstances in which the protection of a gun can be of major assistance, but as things stand now(for the most part unregulated) guns seem to be more destructive tha helpful. Not to mention the fact that no one has the need for something like an assault rifle unless they're a soldier in hostile territory.
Well, if you have enough of it, anything is poisonous, even things we need to live like water and oxygen are deadly if you overdose. The dose for nicotine just happens to be lower than that for some other substances, the nicotine isn't what makes cigarettes deadly anyway, only addictive. If we're going to go after addictive substances which are deadly with the wrong dose we can always go after caffeine.
For the matter of that, assuming your target wasn't also at warp speed you could probably drop a rock from a ship at warp speed to destroy things, force being mass times acceleration(or in this case deceleration) which would be something rather nasty.
The way I see it is we're going to get decriminalization which is worse because the only way to get it will still be through the criminal scum bags which currently sell it(rather than the corporate scum bags who could sell it if it were legal). Because of this, drugs will continue to fund crime and do all of the horrible things they do now, except that all of the people who are currently massively anti-drugs(read the people making money off the war on drugs) will be able to say, look, we tried it your way and it didn't work", then we'll be back to the same old garbage.
Well technically since Rupert Murdoch owns Newscorp which owns fox, and since Murdoch started his media empire by buying up Australian radio stations and comericalizing them(turning local radio into crap), and since newscorp also happens to own at least a half a dozen US radio stations, it already has.
I like OSS as much as the next guy(well so long as the next guy isn't a slashdotter), but even KDE, which is IMHO the most attractive piece of OSS I've ever seen, has some clunky aspects to it's GUI.
Some would of course argue that a good GUI isn't the same thing as a good program, but those people aren't going to see office workers or home users using their product any time soon. Ever been to a cube farm? You think the kind of people who decorate their office to the point of madness are going to put up with staring at something unecessarily ugly all day if they don't have to?
As for people asking for legal copyright violation, that's not what anyone is asking for, at least not anyone sane. What they're asking for is that, rather than just simply voting the way the companies tell them, they tried to understand the actual issues involved. Whether you want to pirate music or not, the DMCA is crap, for that matter copyright no longer serves the same purpose it once did anyhoo.
As for your continued whining on behalf of "the creators", other than independent artists, for whome file sharing and the marketing opportunities it offers are a lifesblood, most "creators" don't make any money anyway. Move actors are somewhat of an exception since they rarely sign long term deals and sell movies simply by their presence, but programmers, most musicians, inventors etc, get paid a rather small percentage of what you pay for their work. If we want to protect the artist we need to stop large conglomerates from stealing the rights to their work in exchange for a relative pittance and then selling their work in a way which is no longer effective.
That's not to say it's not part of the system, but it's not democracy.
If we were to tell Opec to go to hell, we'd also be telling KBR(a subsidiary of the Haliburton Corp, old CEO of Haliburton, you guessed it Dick Cheney) and Bush to go to hell. Odds that Bush and Cheney will tell themselves to go to hell, less than a snowballs chance.
Well sometimes that's a very good excuse, due to our wonderful graduated tax system which has no real idea of what constitutes wealthy and doesn't make them pay taxes when it does anyway, a raise can sometimes put you into a new tax bracked which increases your taxes by an amount greater than your actual raise so that in essence you make less money.
This doesn't so much apply to contracters and smaller buisnesses since they work on a totally different pricing scheme than medium to large sized corporations, but there is a subtle factor which you're missing. Unless the company in question has a monopoly(in which case in these days when most monopoly companies control a resource necessary in today's society they can charge whatever they want), the selling price of an item is affected far more by the pricing of their competitors equivilant than it is by the price consumers can/will pay. This being said, most serious buisness competitors are of relatively similar size, which is to say that they are likely to be in approximately the same tax bracket, and so when your cost goes up so does theirs at which point odds are, either in collaboration with each other or seperately, you both will raise your prices.
Even ignoring this mistake there is a fundamental problem with taxation. This problem of course is that in either case, rather than actually paying a tax on said cow, a rich(or even probably a poor farmer) will simply pass the additional expense on to his customers. It has been mentioned numerous times that buisnesses don't pay taxes, which is basically true, as many of you may have noticed lately buisnesses also don't suffer economic hardship the way that normal people do. When companies have an increase in costs(taxes) or a decrease in profits(bad economy) they either raise their prices or fire employees, regardless of which way they go only very extreme misfortune can actually decrease either the companies profit margins or the salaries of its executive officers.
This is in fact not true, however, the proof which I have witnessed on at least two occaisions requires calculus which I have done my best to remove all traces of from my mind. You will just have to trust me, as well as take into account the fact that all proofs given so far to the contrary are flawed.
Went to watch a movie today and they made a big deal about showing you this set painter and explaining how piracy doesn't really hurt the execs because they're million dollar employees, but it hurts these regular people. To me that was more an advertisement that film execs are overpaid and screw over their employees, though maybe that's just me.
No it's not, there are only three monosaccharides or simple sugars, all other sugars and carbs are made up of these three sugars. As previously stated the enzyme which breaks all complex carbohydrates down into their disacharide components is introduced in the mouth, don't believe me suck on a potato and it'll disolve. This basically means that almost immediately the carbs in beer are broken down into exactly the same components as a complex carb like starch. By the time anything is absorbed there is no difference whatsoever.
As for complex versus simple carbohydrates, all complex carbs are just made up of simple carbs and have to be broken down before they can be used anyway, for that matter since the enzyme which breaks down starches and the like is present in your saliva, you're unlikely to get anything more complicated than a disaccharide past your stomach anyway.
Secret Ballots are only secret because no one looks. The information is already there, admitedly not everyone can find it out the way they could in the old days, but there's no real secret to it. If we had electronic voting you'd still have to trust that the people who could look aren't just as you have to today.
How can anyone possibly object to the idea of making sure people know what they're doing before they're allowed to buy a gun?
Wow, something republicans are on the record about that I actually agree with, though somehow I think that the tort reform they mean will be the kind that stops regular people from suing big companys(admitedly something that also needs work) rather than the kind which stops big companies from suing regular people for little or no reason.
Not to ruin the joke, but this is the United States, any big company has the right to sue anyone for any reason whatsoever regardless of merit, I thought that was part of the reason people chose Linux in the first place.
As for defending yourself against tyranny, if you truly believe that owning a gun can protect you from a tyrannical government, let alone one as large and well armed as that of the United States, you are sorely deluded. Besides which I'm allowed to give up any right I so desire, it's part of having rights.
Guns on the other hand inspire people to shoot things, which is a recipe for disaster. There is nothing wrong with a gun in and of itself and as I said I've known people who respected their guns(admitedly the same guy bought a butterfly knife and played around with it like a moron, but still), but guns are designed to kill, not cut wood. There are circumstances under which killing is necessary, but there is no excuse for allowing anyone to own a tool which is used for killing without at least making sure they know how to use it properly.