It might not seem useful to say to somebody "fetch me every object in that room", but it's useful to say to somebody "fetch me every newspaper in that room" and not have them come back with newspapers, books, letters...
But that's what they'll do, even if you use DIV and SPAN. So there is no difference, other than a philosophical one. And, browsers don't support your philosophy uniformly. And, there is nothing to stop people from using the DIV and SPAN tag too much. There are all sorts of pages on the net that consist of nothing but DIV and SPAN tags, which I find more annoying because when I activate my user stylesheet, I get a large page of unformatted text.
And I really don't see the tragic effect this has on people. I really don't see the problem with people using a simple table layout, nothing overboard. As long as they use Headings and other tags appropriately.
The default/. is too much, but if you login and enable the light version, I'd say that it's reasonable the way the tables are used. Then I just activate my style sheet.
Yes, there is. You can do it with CSS tables. Internet Explorer doesn't understand them, but we're talking about the capabilities of CSS, not the capabilities of Internet Explorer, right?
So instead of using tables, that actually work in all browsers, we should use DIV tags, then display them as tables using CSS... and that's better how?
I'm not saying that CSS is bad.. I love CSS, I use it every day. I eventually came to realize that it is very tricky getting a page to work in all browsers the same way, and that tables are not that evil.
You say that non tabular info shouldn't be displayed in a table, then you go ahead and turn it into a table with CSS. So what's the difference? (Other than your theoretical "Oh, what if everyone used tables like I want them to, then browsers could rotate large tables!" And when will browsers do that?)
You also say that it's semantic to add a class to a DIV or SPAN..
Then why not add the class to the TD and TABLE tags. That would make them more semantic.
My opinion is that you're a bit overzealous about this table thing.
It's like pointing to a book and saying "this is a newspaper". That is incorrect. Pointing to a book and saying "this is an object" is correct, if vague.
No, it's more like saying this could be just about anything in the known universe, especially since that's what everyone uses DIV and SPAN for. The only person who really knows, is the author.
You can invent your own 'semantic' meanings for DIV and SPAN, but unless the user becomes a CSS expert and studies the source, it might as well be gibberish.
span isn't semantic? Of course it is. How else can you apply the lang and xml:lang attributes to a foreign-language word in a text in another language? This is necessary if you want text-to-speech software to work ideally, and if you want to insert, say, Chinese ideographs when the vanilla font of your stylesheet is Latin-only.
SPAN is a generic tag, unlike H1, it has no meaning. Maybe you can add meaning to it, but it would still have no standard meaning to the blind, or anyone but yourself. There is also nothing stopping bad designers from adding the wrong meaning to SPAN, making it impossible for the blind to be sure exactly what to expect from the SPAN tag.
Umm, it isn't valid semantic markup if you are using tables for layout.
Maybe table layout is not 'valid' but it works. there are box model bugs in a few browsers that make it difficult to use DIVs for structuring a page.
What I currently do is enable the Light version of/. and use opera and activate my user stylesheet. I talk about this in my two journal entries. This would be easy for/. to implement if they're looking for a quick fix to reduce bandwidth. Just add a css option to the light version, and tell the geeks why it's better. Most people are smart here and would switch.
If you're concerned about cockroach eggs, maybe try Liquid Detergent display boxes. I get them at my local budget supermarket, the ones where you have to buy your own bags and the empty boxes are at the front of the store for free.
It's not a matter of morality, it's a matter of self preservation....marriage ceremony seems to be engrained in many otherwise distinct cultures?..."sexual morality" is really just a survival trait that evolved as a result of natural selection.
I agree with you, however, promiscuity, unfaithfulness and even rape may also increase fecundity, creating a mating advantage, to some extent. So sexual "immorality" may also be a trait that evolved from natural selection.
In my opinion, Opera is better. It's smaller, faster, and has more features. The feature I find most useful is user style sheets. You can add a list of your own personal style sheets to the ones that come with opera 7 and up... In effect, you can skin web pages. Look at my Journal entries for a/. style sheet.
Mozilla's User style sheet is in a folder and you have to change the style manually, and I think the styles just cascade together with the authors, instead of overriding them. And that's if you can get it working. Right at this moment I can't get it to work at all. I think the spec says that for usability, a user should be able to override the authors styles.
Though most of Operas frequent changes are reversible, some of the changes I find annoying. Previously you could disable Iframes, but it's not the same now. The browser still accesses the net to download the iframe even when you're offline.
The mortality of kids named Azaria by both hanging and dingo attacks in Australia is three fold that of the normal mortality rates, therefore, naming your kid Azaria is another way of getting them to commit suicide, which makes you a criminal mastermind in Australia.
I think your first sentence is trying to say that violence exists throughout society and therefore it is pointless to analyse and manage violent activities in the real world.
I'm just going to guess here, but I think that he was saying that B happened before A, and therefore video games as causality can't be established.
My question is this: at what point would YOU accept that shoot-em ups have become so realistic, and so violent that they should not be made. There has to be a line that will eventually be crossed, won't there? Let's say from now until the point where you can switch on a VR chip stuck in your head and *really* go and strangle, rape, and dismember people in full glorious virtual reality.
That's a good question. Maybe the line is crossed when it is no longer a game, or when a very strong piece of evidence can prove these newer, more and more violent games can turn normal people into killing machines. Violent people tend to have a brain pattern towards violence to begin with. It's not the video games that make them that way.
But I think most people would get grossed out if the game is too real, but maybe that's what they want, to be entertained. Obviously, if someone really gets hurt, or if it's too painful and realistic as you mentioned with VR chips, but video gaming hasn't reached that level yet.
Surely there has to be a point where SANE people start to realise that we don't need studies to tell us these games aren't contributing to healthy mental activities.
Lots of sane people think you're wrong. I don't think it would be a good idea to let people make rules based on false correlations and zero evidence.
People have always enjoyed getting scared, thrilled, entertained, and playing make believe. That's why they love sports, chess, murder mysteries, horror movies, and video games. That doesn't make those people murderers. It just so happens that some peoples brains are wired differently, some may potentially get addicted to killing and want to do it in real life, but their brains are already primed to do that.
I used to have the same teen-gamer attitude as you, and scoff at any notion that there are ill effects from these games. But after seeing my 13 year old cousin showing how he can shoot and hack and dismember people in such vivid, realistic ways I was really stunned. Sure the kid isn't going to turn into a serial killer, but is it really contributing to his development as a happy, peaceful, and non-aggressive soul?
We all have chemicals in our brain that need or want to be exercised from time to time. Humans have very few predators to exercise those skills on. Stress relief can be very therapeutic. I think the vast majority of people who play video games turn out happy, peaceful, and non-aggressive. The same witch hunt thing could be said about sports, books, religion, etc.. as being responsible for the worlds ills. Would you ban anything that didn't have absolute proof of only making people non-aggressive. Anyway, when was it a law that we have to do things that turn us into kittens and rainbows.
Surely your nephew finds some entertainment from the game. And entertainment is of some value to people. It's very easy to sit back and say "I don't like that, therefore it is wrong and bad." People do it all the time. Whether it's sports, video games, religion, sexuality. It's really a personal opinion and not fact.
It has nothing to do with rights. Let's all get that straight. It's not like a bunch of teenagers have been lobbying congress for increasingly violent video games and taking to the streets to get their voices heard.
Well, someone is buying those video games? If you don't want your children to play violent games, then don't let them. I don't see why you have to mandate it for everyone else. Adults play games too. It seems more plausible to me that criminal deviants gravitate towards violence without video games. Kids don't discover violence from video games, they discover it on their own when they swing about in the playground. The fact is that some kids are more aggressive than others. That has nothing to do with video games.
Wow science, that's great, but what if one of these falling robots falls on your dog? Then what?
Avoiding things is the one advantage to calculated robot moving, unless they make them able to avoid things as they fall, but then they potentially will stumble into something else valuable.
I diplore the actions of bigots, not the bigots themselves. Bigots, on the other hand, hate PEOPLE and not ACTIONS.
I'm not sure I believe in that "Love the sinner hate the sin" philosophy, because what's the difference? Hate is hate. When someone expresses hate, it's a form of hostility. This sounds like a justification for hate. Maybe you're justified in hating them, but it's still hate.
Don't be a drug fanatic with Slothful Induction towards any negative result of drug legalization, Bifurcation, and false statements with your "widespread addiction... didn't happen" comment. If I may paraphrase you: If drugs should be legalized "why are you making up lies to support it."
The causation in drug addiction is the drugs. This has been proven. Legalization of drugs will result in more people using them and therefore, more drug addiction. Period.
Maybe we can keep drugs illegal and treat addicts better. And there will always be addicts, but the last thing we need is more of them. The cost is passed to everyone else to support them.
Verdana is wide to make it more legible at small sizes, distance, or for visually impaired. Unfortunately, as the size of a font increases, font's need less and less letter spacing.
Tahoma is the brother of Verdana, and it is less wide, in both letter spacing and letter width, but I find it produces moiré patterns, as the letters are too close together. But it's good at Big sizes or on laser printouts.
Then why is it that I find it easier to read sans-serif fonts? I really can't read Georgia at all. Perhaps the answer is simply that people learn to read fonts. The ones they learn are the ones they find easier to read. 1000 years of usage would just reinforce that.
Although perhaps you could answer this: Why are sans-serif fonts the standard highway font? The answer is that they stand up under halation and have been proven more legible in tests. With it's extra letter spacing Verdana acts much like the highway font.
Perhaps you don't like it because you're brain is familiar with Serif fonts so you simply don't want to change. I think that's what it is because I remember a time when I didn't like sans fonts and now I only use Verdana, Tahoma and Trebuchet. They simply hold up better under small sizes, and Georgia I use for headings, or small bits of text.
When I visit a page I don't like, I just use one of my user style sheets to override the pages fonts. This is easy to do with the Opera browser.
And the answer is that you don't do it via pay per listen. That would be incredibly unfair and totally unreasonable.
How is it unfair, I find it more unfair when I have to pay for a song that I never listen to, or pay the same price for a song that I listen to once, as opposed to one I listen to 500 times. A per listening is fair in that it approximates payment for usage.
As I said already, the artist can be adequately compensated and long dead. There is no burden on the artist when I play my CD repeatedly. And again, cost of production and distribution make it unfeasible to sell an individual CD for each song. That would be like wanting to pay for only the parts of a concert that you liked.
Paying each time per listen would result in more than $5 for songs you listen to frequently and would also give the artist too much compensation that they don't deserve.
So its up to you to decide what compensation artists deserve? If you really enjoy a song so much you would be willing to pay more money.
In a sense, the market place decides, and hopefully a fair compromise is reached. If people don't like your music they're not obligated to buy it. And I don't think that paying per listen is fair because it costs the artist nothing for my CD to repeatedly play a track. I would never be willing to pay for that.
Also, the per listening method saves you money on the songs you only listen to a few times, so it's not so much of an economic burden to explore new songs, if you listen once and don't like it, it only costs you 1 cent to try it out.
I don't think you should have to pay for any song you only listen to once, with the exception I listed earlier. You can listen to, (even record) the radio; go to your local record shop and hear samples, even on the net. That's how it should be.
Actually, go after the big fish, and more big fish will appear to replace them. If there's a demand, someone will find a way to supply it. Period... The only rational option is legalization.
Isn't that like saying, "We can't stop murder so we might as well legalize it." or "We have little privacy as it is, we might as well give it all up voluntarily.
Before the early part of the 20th Century, a 12 year old girl could walk into a general store and walk out with as much heroine, cocaine and morphine as she could carry in one arm and a 12-gauge shotgun in the other. If drug legalization would cause widespread addiction now, why didn't it back then?
Before you deny widespread addiction, get your facts straight. It did cause widespread addiction, fool. I don't understand how, with the addiction problem we have now, you expect that legalization will not increase addiction. It will and it did. And that's why public opinion changed towards Opium, Cocaine and speed.
The reason these drugs were legal was that little was known about how addictive they were. The invention of the hypodermic needle, and isolation of the active ingredients, the use in Civil War, WWII and all the other things that popularized drugs also increased put the problem of addiction into the spotlight and swayed opinion. Etc, read the Drug Lecture..
Why should people be forced to pay each time when it costs the author nothing per listening. It does cost something, there is an initial cost that needs to be recovered.
Of course it costs something to make music, you're not entitled to recover that cost through any means you desire, but that's not what I asked. You're changing the subject again.
The question is how do you distribute those costs over a large enough body, per CD compilation, per song, per listening.
And the answer is that you don't do it via pay per listen. That would be incredibly unfair and totally unreasonable.
The technology exists... Using a per-usage model match my payment to my usage, if I enjoy listening to a song alot, I would be happy to pay $5 or more.
The technology exists to sell air, and while that would create jobs, it would be wrong.
The point is that you shouldn't have to pay repeatedly to listen to a CD when it costs nothing to replay except electricity, which is the responsibility of the listener. Paying each time per listen would result in more than $5 for songs you listen to frequently and would also give the artist too much compensation that they don't deserve. Since replaying a CD is such a burdenless thing, I see nothing wrong with everybody replaying their CDs however many times they please.
That's why it is proposed as an alternative. Instead of buying a CD with 15 songs now people are buying the one or two songs they want. If you extend that why should somebody pay the same amount for a song they listen to once, as they do for one they listen to 100 times?
People shouldn't have to pay anything for a song they don't want, but sometimes they have to, when you consider the production cost and distribution limitations of CDs and the simple fact that you can't please everyone with a CD compilation.
The situation you are describing of artificial scarcity doesn't have those limitations and therefore it is unreasonable to charge for those limitations anymore.
Maybe with a monopoly on technology you can force them to pay-per listen, but the reality is that there is no market for people who want to pay for songs they don't want to listen to, or for songs that can be listened to only once. Why should people be forced to pay each time when it costs the author nothing per listening.
Years ago people would have laughed at a per-song model for selling, so a 1 cent per play service isn't out of the realm of reason, as we become more connected.
It is out of the realm of reason, especially today because it is easier to record and copy, making the cost of re-performance and distribution next to nothing, and because there is no logical reason why I should pay to hear a recording again and again to a purchased CD, which are exorbitantly priced to begin with.
Perhaps you should read the discussion I had with mOdQuArK.
Like I said, I already did.
And I will only say a few things. Just because something is a law does not make it justifiable, and a laws existence does not indicate absolute sanction by all members of society. I know that most people would laugh at your suggestion that someone should be paid every time they listen to their CDs.
And I don't care what the law says or how you mutilate the definition of Capitalism, when I play a CD, I'm the one paying for the electricity, not the original performer. The original performer is not being over worked and nor should they be paid for my playing the CD that I own. In fact, they don't even need to be alive.
You can keep your IP to yourself, or you can submit it to the public, but when you do, you relinquish some of your rights to the public. There should be a fair compromise, and eventually you work should enter the public domain, but ultimately the Government and society owns your work once you submit it. In fact, the Government may even steal your Idea if it decides it's to the greater good of the world.
No one is forcing to you buy an iPod or use iTunes. Perhaps some of you put your money where your mouth is, but most of you are hypocrites. And the worst among you are those who think you can steal things who don't belong to you.
And no one is forcing you to have a flawed business plan, but they may force you out of business, as well they should. But, if you're saying that no one is forcing you to choose between having iTunes with DRM or to not have iTunes, then I would say that you are being forced.
And yes, it is stealing. An apt excerpt:
[...] different types of stealing are covered by different laws because they differ in the details. Theft through breaking and entering: burglary. Theft from one's employer: embezzlement. Theft by committing fraud through the mail: the aptly named mail fraud. Theft by the unlawful copying of somebody else's property: copyright infringement.
OK, so let's say different types of stealing are different, such as stealing a car vs stealing a song, naturally they should be treated differently. And you haven't convinced me that copying/stealing MP3's is wrong.
Now tell us why you think that copying MP3's is wrong, after all, I could justifiably steal an assailants weapon. Maybe copying IP is a way of saying I refuse to pay more for a CD than is justifiable, a way of disarming people who are taking too much for an outdated technology.
I've read all of your arguments, and they are shoddy. You keep equivocating property to IP and anything that has the word property in it. Different forms of property are treated differently.
They are the same thing. It's breaking the fundamentals of capitalism you are consuming without contributing.
So then, are you steeling when you breathe air? You're consuming without contributing. Someone is not getting paid for the service of free air. It's a crime wave!
And your theory that even after buying a CD, listening to that CD is a "service" is absurd and equally absurd to suggest that people be compensated every time one listens to CDs they own. A million people can listen to a million CDs and no effort is being expended on the part of the musician, nor distributer.
I gave up on the Internet for a while, then I came back with multiple computers. One for the Internet, and the others for applications. I only brows with opera and Mozilla and I have everything turned off. I use ad-aware programs and I delete webcheck.dll, loadwc.exe, and set reg keys : "RegDone"="1" "EnableDCOM"="N" and delete c:\windows\wscript.exe
I disable something with ad-aware's LSP Explorer plugin, forget what... It's still not enough. I shouldn't have to do all this crap.
One thing I have given up on is e-mail. I change my e-mail every few months and I almost never use it, and I never give it to anyone. I also never use IM or IRC.
Slashdot Mirror
It might not seem useful to say to somebody "fetch me every object in that room", but it's useful to say to somebody "fetch me every newspaper in that room" and not have them come back with newspapers, books, letters...
/. is too much, but if you login and enable the light version, I'd say that it's reasonable the way the tables are used. Then I just activate my style sheet.
But that's what they'll do, even if you use DIV and SPAN. So there is no difference, other than a philosophical one. And, browsers don't support your philosophy uniformly. And, there is nothing to stop people from using the DIV and SPAN tag too much. There are all sorts of pages on the net that consist of nothing but DIV and SPAN tags, which I find more annoying because when I activate my user stylesheet, I get a large page of unformatted text.
And I really don't see the tragic effect this has on people. I really don't see the problem with people using a simple table layout, nothing overboard. As long as they use Headings and other tags appropriately.
The default
Yes, there is. You can do it with CSS tables. Internet Explorer doesn't understand them, but we're talking about the capabilities of CSS, not the capabilities of Internet Explorer, right?
So instead of using tables, that actually work in all browsers, we should use DIV tags, then display them as tables using CSS... and that's better how?
I'm not saying that CSS is bad.. I love CSS, I use it every day. I eventually came to realize that it is very tricky getting a page to work in all browsers the same way, and that tables are not that evil.
You say that non tabular info shouldn't be displayed in a table, then you go ahead and turn it into a table with CSS. So what's the difference? (Other than your theoretical "Oh, what if everyone used tables like I want them to, then browsers could rotate large tables!" And when will browsers do that?)
You also say that it's semantic to add a class to a DIV or SPAN..
Then why not add the class to the TD and TABLE tags. That would make them more semantic.
My opinion is that you're a bit overzealous about this table thing.
It's like pointing to a book and saying "this is a newspaper". That is incorrect. Pointing to a book and saying "this is an object" is correct, if vague.
No, it's more like saying this could be just about anything in the known universe, especially since that's what everyone uses DIV and SPAN for. The only person who really knows, is the author.
You can invent your own 'semantic' meanings for DIV and SPAN, but unless the user becomes a CSS expert and studies the source, it might as well be gibberish.
span isn't semantic? Of course it is. How else can you apply the lang and xml:lang attributes to a foreign-language word in a text in another language? This is necessary if you want text-to-speech software to work ideally, and if you want to insert, say, Chinese ideographs when the vanilla font of your stylesheet is Latin-only.
SPAN is a generic tag, unlike H1, it has no meaning. Maybe you can add meaning to it, but it would still have no standard meaning to the blind, or anyone but yourself. There is also nothing stopping bad designers from adding the wrong meaning to SPAN, making it impossible for the blind to be sure exactly what to expect from the SPAN tag.
CSS is not a panacea to the disabled.
Umm, it isn't valid semantic markup if you are using tables for layout.
/. and use opera and activate my user stylesheet. I talk about this in my two journal entries. This would be easy for /. to implement if they're looking for a quick fix to reduce bandwidth. Just add a css option to the light version, and tell the geeks why it's better. Most people are smart here and would switch.
Maybe table layout is not 'valid' but it works. there are box model bugs in a few browsers that make it difficult to use DIVs for structuring a page.
What I currently do is enable the Light version of
If you're concerned about cockroach eggs, maybe try Liquid Detergent display boxes. I get them at my local budget supermarket, the ones where you have to buy your own bags and the empty boxes are at the front of the store for free.
It's not a matter of morality, it's a matter of self preservation. ...marriage ceremony seems to be engrained in many otherwise distinct cultures?..."sexual morality" is really just a survival trait that evolved as a result of natural selection.
I agree with you, however, promiscuity, unfaithfulness and even rape may also increase fecundity, creating a mating advantage, to some extent. So sexual "immorality" may also be a trait that evolved from natural selection.
Trashing your PC doesn't really solve the problem. Using another web browser does. I don't really see many people recommending Opera or Mozilla.
In my opinion, Opera is better. It's smaller, faster, and has more features. The feature I find most useful is user style sheets. You can add a list of your own personal style sheets to the ones that come with opera 7 and up... In effect, you can skin web pages. Look at my Journal entries for a /. style sheet.
Mozilla's User style sheet is in a folder and you have to change the style manually, and I think the styles just cascade together with the authors, instead of overriding them. And that's if you can get it working. Right at this moment I can't get it to work at all. I think the spec says that for usability, a user should be able to override the authors styles.
Though most of Operas frequent changes are reversible, some of the changes I find annoying. Previously you could disable Iframes, but it's not the same now. The browser still accesses the net to download the iframe even when you're offline.
The mortality of kids named Azaria by both hanging and dingo attacks in Australia is three fold that of the normal mortality rates, therefore, naming your kid Azaria is another way of getting them to commit suicide, which makes you a criminal mastermind in Australia.
Just kidding.
I think your first sentence is trying to say that violence exists throughout society and therefore it is pointless to analyse and manage violent activities in the real world.
I'm just going to guess here, but I think that he was saying that B happened before A, and therefore video games as causality can't be established.
My question is this: at what point would YOU accept that shoot-em ups have become so realistic, and so violent that they should not be made. There has to be a line that will eventually be crossed, won't there? Let's say from now until the point where you can switch on a VR chip stuck in your head and *really* go and strangle, rape, and dismember people in full glorious virtual reality.
That's a good question. Maybe the line is crossed when it is no longer a game, or when a very strong piece of evidence can prove these newer, more and more violent games can turn normal people into killing machines. Violent people tend to have a brain pattern towards violence to begin with. It's not the video games that make them that way.
But I think most people would get grossed out if the game is too real, but maybe that's what they want, to be entertained. Obviously, if someone really gets hurt, or if it's too painful and realistic as you mentioned with VR chips, but video gaming hasn't reached that level yet.
Surely there has to be a point where SANE people start to realise that we don't need studies to tell us these games aren't contributing to healthy mental activities.
Lots of sane people think you're wrong. I don't think it would be a good idea to let people make rules based on false correlations and zero evidence.
People have always enjoyed getting scared, thrilled, entertained, and playing make believe. That's why they love sports, chess, murder mysteries, horror movies, and video games. That doesn't make those people murderers. It just so happens that some peoples brains are wired differently, some may potentially get addicted to killing and want to do it in real life, but their brains are already primed to do that.
I used to have the same teen-gamer attitude as you, and scoff at any notion that there are ill effects from these games. But after seeing my 13 year old cousin showing how he can shoot and hack and dismember people in such vivid, realistic ways I was really stunned. Sure the kid isn't going to turn into a serial killer, but is it really contributing to his development as a happy, peaceful, and non-aggressive soul?
We all have chemicals in our brain that need or want to be exercised from time to time. Humans have very few predators to exercise those skills on. Stress relief can be very therapeutic. I think the vast majority of people who play video games turn out happy, peaceful, and non-aggressive. The same witch hunt thing could be said about sports, books, religion, etc.. as being responsible for the worlds ills. Would you ban anything that didn't have absolute proof of only making people non-aggressive. Anyway, when was it a law that we have to do things that turn us into kittens and rainbows.
Surely your nephew finds some entertainment from the game. And entertainment is of some value to people. It's very easy to sit back and say "I don't like that, therefore it is wrong and bad." People do it all the time. Whether it's sports, video games, religion, sexuality. It's really a personal opinion and not fact.
It has nothing to do with rights. Let's all get that straight. It's not like a bunch of teenagers have been lobbying congress for increasingly violent video games and taking to the streets to get their voices heard.
Well, someone is buying those video games? If you don't want your children to play violent games, then don't let them. I don't see why you have to mandate it for everyone else. Adults play games too. It seems more plausible to me that criminal deviants gravitate towards violence without video games. Kids don't discover violence from video games, they discover it on their own when they swing about in the playground. The fact is that some kids are more aggressive than others. That has nothing to do with video games.
Wow science, that's great, but what if one of these falling robots falls on your dog? Then what?
Avoiding things is the one advantage to calculated robot moving, unless they make them able to avoid things as they fall, but then they potentially will stumble into something else valuable.
I diplore the actions of bigots, not the bigots themselves. Bigots, on the other hand, hate PEOPLE and not ACTIONS.
I'm not sure I believe in that "Love the sinner hate the sin" philosophy, because what's the difference? Hate is hate. When someone expresses hate, it's a form of hostility. This sounds like a justification for hate. Maybe you're justified in hating them, but it's still hate.
Don't be a drug fanatic with Slothful Induction towards any negative result of drug legalization, Bifurcation, and false statements with your "widespread addiction... didn't happen" comment. If I may paraphrase you: If drugs should be legalized "why are you making up lies to support it."
The causation in drug addiction is the drugs. This has been proven. Legalization of drugs will result in more people using them and therefore, more drug addiction. Period.
Maybe we can keep drugs illegal and treat addicts better. And there will always be addicts, but the last thing we need is more of them. The cost is passed to everyone else to support them.
Verdana is wide to make it more legible at small sizes, distance, or for visually impaired. Unfortunately, as the size of a font increases, font's need less and less letter spacing.
Tahoma is the brother of Verdana, and it is less wide, in both letter spacing and letter width, but I find it produces moiré patterns, as the letters are too close together. But it's good at Big sizes or on laser printouts.
Then why is it that I find it easier to read sans-serif fonts? I really can't read Georgia at all. Perhaps the answer is simply that people learn to read fonts. The ones they learn are the ones they find easier to read. 1000 years of usage would just reinforce that.
Although perhaps you could answer this: Why are sans-serif fonts the standard highway font? The answer is that they stand up under halation and have been proven more legible in tests. With it's extra letter spacing Verdana acts much like the highway font.
Perhaps you don't like it because you're brain is familiar with Serif fonts so you simply don't want to change. I think that's what it is because I remember a time when I didn't like sans fonts and now I only use Verdana, Tahoma and Trebuchet. They simply hold up better under small sizes, and Georgia I use for headings, or small bits of text.
When I visit a page I don't like, I just use one of my user style sheets to override the pages fonts. This is easy to do with the Opera browser.
And the answer is that you don't do it via pay per listen. That would be incredibly unfair and totally unreasonable.
How is it unfair, I find it more unfair when I have to pay for a song that I never listen to, or pay the same price for a song that I listen to once, as opposed to one I listen to 500 times. A per listening is fair in that it approximates payment for usage.
As I said already, the artist can be adequately compensated and long dead. There is no burden on the artist when I play my CD repeatedly. And again, cost of production and distribution make it unfeasible to sell an individual CD for each song. That would be like wanting to pay for only the parts of a concert that you liked.
Paying each time per listen would result in more than $5 for songs you listen to frequently and would also give the artist too much compensation that they don't deserve.
So its up to you to decide what compensation artists deserve? If you really enjoy a song so much you would be willing to pay more money.
In a sense, the market place decides, and hopefully a fair compromise is reached. If people don't like your music they're not obligated to buy it. And I don't think that paying per listen is fair because it costs the artist nothing for my CD to repeatedly play a track. I would never be willing to pay for that.
Also, the per listening method saves you money on the songs you only listen to a few times, so it's not so much of an economic burden to explore new songs, if you listen once and don't like it, it only costs you 1 cent to try it out.
I don't think you should have to pay for any song you only listen to once, with the exception I listed earlier. You can listen to, (even record) the radio; go to your local record shop and hear samples, even on the net. That's how it should be.
Actually, go after the big fish, and more big fish will appear to replace them. If there's a demand, someone will find a way to supply it. Period... The only rational option is legalization.
Isn't that like saying, "We can't stop murder so we might as well legalize it." or "We have little privacy as it is, we might as well give it all up voluntarily.
Before the early part of the 20th Century, a 12 year old girl could walk into a general store and walk out with as much heroine, cocaine and morphine as she could carry in one arm and a 12-gauge shotgun in the other. If drug legalization would cause widespread addiction now, why didn't it back then?
Before you deny widespread addiction, get your facts straight. It did cause widespread addiction, fool. I don't understand how, with the addiction problem we have now, you expect that legalization will not increase addiction. It will and it did. And that's why public opinion changed towards Opium, Cocaine and speed.
The reason these drugs were legal was that little was known about how addictive they were. The invention of the hypodermic needle, and isolation of the active ingredients, the use in Civil War, WWII and all the other things that popularized drugs also increased put the problem of addiction into the spotlight and swayed opinion. Etc, read the Drug Lecture..
Why should people be forced to pay each time when it costs the author nothing per listening.
... Using a per-usage model match my payment to my usage, if I enjoy listening to a song alot, I would be happy to pay $5 or more.
It does cost something, there is an initial cost that needs to be recovered.
Of course it costs something to make music, you're not entitled to recover that cost through any means you desire, but that's not what I asked. You're changing the subject again.
The question is how do you distribute those costs over a large enough body, per CD compilation, per song, per listening.
And the answer is that you don't do it via pay per listen. That would be incredibly unfair and totally unreasonable.
The technology exists
The technology exists to sell air, and while that would create jobs, it would be wrong.
The point is that you shouldn't have to pay repeatedly to listen to a CD when it costs nothing to replay except electricity, which is the responsibility of the listener. Paying each time per listen would result in more than $5 for songs you listen to frequently and would also give the artist too much compensation that they don't deserve. Since replaying a CD is such a burdenless thing, I see nothing wrong with everybody replaying their CDs however many times they please.
That's why it is proposed as an alternative. Instead of buying a CD with 15 songs now people are buying the one or two songs they want. If you extend that why should somebody pay the same amount for a song they listen to once, as they do for one they listen to 100 times?
People shouldn't have to pay anything for a song they don't want, but sometimes they have to, when you consider the production cost and distribution limitations of CDs and the simple fact that you can't please everyone with a CD compilation.
The situation you are describing of artificial scarcity doesn't have those limitations and therefore it is unreasonable to charge for those limitations anymore.
Maybe with a monopoly on technology you can force them to pay-per listen, but the reality is that there is no market for people who want to pay for songs they don't want to listen to, or for songs that can be listened to only once. Why should people be forced to pay each time when it costs the author nothing per listening.
Years ago people would have laughed at a per-song model for selling, so a 1 cent per play service isn't out of the realm of reason, as we become more connected.
It is out of the realm of reason, especially today because it is easier to record and copy, making the cost of re-performance and distribution next to nothing, and because there is no logical reason why I should pay to hear a recording again and again to a purchased CD, which are exorbitantly priced to begin with.
Perhaps you should read the discussion I had with mOdQuArK.
Like I said, I already did.
And I will only say a few things. Just because something is a law does not make it justifiable, and a laws existence does not indicate absolute sanction by all members of society. I know that most people would laugh at your suggestion that someone should be paid every time they listen to their CDs.
And I don't care what the law says or how you mutilate the definition of Capitalism, when I play a CD, I'm the one paying for the electricity, not the original performer. The original performer is not being over worked and nor should they be paid for my playing the CD that I own. In fact, they don't even need to be alive.
You can keep your IP to yourself, or you can submit it to the public, but when you do, you relinquish some of your rights to the public. There should be a fair compromise, and eventually you work should enter the public domain, but ultimately the Government and society owns your work once you submit it. In fact, the Government may even steal your Idea if it decides it's to the greater good of the world.
Why don't you use line breaks.
No one is forcing to you buy an iPod or use iTunes. Perhaps some of you put your money where your mouth is, but most of you are hypocrites. And the worst among you are those who think you can steal things who don't belong to you.
And no one is forcing you to have a flawed business plan, but they may force you out of business, as well they should. But, if you're saying that no one is forcing you to choose between having iTunes with DRM or to not have iTunes, then I would say that you are being forced.
And yes, it is stealing. An apt excerpt:
[...] different types of stealing are covered by different laws because they differ in the details. Theft through breaking and entering: burglary. Theft from one's employer: embezzlement. Theft by committing fraud through the mail: the aptly named mail fraud. Theft by the unlawful copying of somebody else's property: copyright infringement.
OK, so let's say different types of stealing are different, such as stealing a car vs stealing a song, naturally they should be treated differently. And you haven't convinced me that copying/stealing MP3's is wrong.
Now tell us why you think that copying MP3's is wrong, after all, I could justifiably steal an assailants weapon. Maybe copying IP is a way of saying I refuse to pay more for a CD than is justifiable, a way of disarming people who are taking too much for an outdated technology.
I've read all of your arguments, and they are shoddy. You keep equivocating property to IP and anything that has the word property in it. Different forms of property are treated differently.
They are the same thing. It's breaking the fundamentals of capitalism you are consuming without contributing.
So then, are you steeling when you breathe air? You're consuming without contributing. Someone is not getting paid for the service of free air. It's a crime wave!
And your theory that even after buying a CD, listening to that CD is a "service" is absurd and equally absurd to suggest that people be compensated every time one listens to CDs they own. A million people can listen to a million CDs and no effort is being expended on the part of the musician, nor distributer.
And use a line break.
I gave up on the Internet for a while, then I came back with multiple computers. One for the Internet, and the others for applications. I only brows with opera and Mozilla and I have everything turned off. I use ad-aware programs and I delete webcheck.dll, loadwc.exe, and set reg keys : "RegDone"="1" "EnableDCOM"="N" and delete c:\windows\wscript.exe
I disable something with ad-aware's LSP Explorer plugin, forget what...
It's still not enough. I shouldn't have to do all this crap.
One thing I have given up on is e-mail. I change my e-mail every few months and I almost never use it, and I never give it to anyone. I also never use IM or IRC.