I'm not a biologist either, but both my brother and sister are. From my conversations with them, I came to understand that not all genes need to provide a genetic advantage to take over the population.
For example, apparently there's a new human mutation which adds an extra strand to the DNA chain, so you have 3 coming off the end instead of two. This would mean that a male would have 4 strands (diagram: --E ) while a female would have 6 (diagram: 3-E ). Those with this mutation will breed true with other holding the same mutation, and will also pass it along if they breed with older versions of humans that only have 2. So eventually, human beings with X and Y shaped DNA are going to be bred out.
That was a typo. I meant to say that this happens during the lack of threat. As in, when we are threatened, our weak die off and we lose their genetic diversity.
You're mistaken. When there is a threat, we mutate. That's what's happening now, we're mutating and developing a more diverse genetic base. When a really nasty disease comes along, that diverse genetic base gives us a wider range of options to fight it.
The genetic diversity we're accumulating will help ensure that when the inevitable "culling of the weak" comes in some form or another, there are a few people who are strong in the right sort of way to carry on.
Considering the intermixing between cultures that occurs in modern society, as a species we're better off with as much genetic diversity as we can get until we manage to get off planet and remove the risk of a single superbug wiping us all out.
By the way, you're sorely misguided about the whole "stupid people breeding out of control" issue too. The problem isn't the stupid people breeding too much, it's the so-called "smart" people not breeding enough. We're on our way to a societal collapse because of it.
If you're running a 333 MHz box, and are intending to stick with Windows, you should be running W2K Professional. The extra stability is worth the upgrade... W2K was the best OS MS ever made.
And what are you talking about 1000s of dollars for, you can get a computer that will stomp that one into the dirt for a couple of hundred bucks easily.
What still bugs me the most about all this is that they gave it an AO rating when there are games out there such as PLayboy: The Mansion, that get an M rating...something in the rating system is broken.
Yeah, it's broken all right... the GTA never should have gotten an M in the first place.
Why is it that anyone who's critical of this stupid game gets modded as a Troll or shouted down? It's an offensive game.
I'm not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination. Truth be told, a part of me really loves it when someone in the real world does something horrible enough to make me feel morally justified in releasing my anger and pounding the shit out of them.
I dropped out of uni when I was 17 and went hitchhiking around the country for years, and saw some pretty ugly shit climbing my way out of the streets when I stopped travelling. I've personally, in real life and with my own bare hands, hospitalized people for engaging in the kind of behavior encourages in that game, and I damn well liked doing it.
That, for me, is the great thing about violent video games that is never appreciated by defenders of either side of this debate. They don't, generally, just have violence for violences sake, but acutally set up situations where, were you placed in them, you could turn loose your vicious side in good conscience and without guilt.
But that's not what this game is about at all. This game is about going out and engaging your violent side for fun and money. It's in a very small group, populated by the likes of Postal, and distinct within that small group in that it takes itself seriously.
I feel there is a place in this society for games that encourage you to express the heroic warrior inside. I do not feel there is a place for games that encourage you to express the anti-social violent psychopath inside. I expect I'll feel the same ugly thrill I did beating up pimps and rapists should I ever be forced to beat the shit out of some shopkeeper for selling one to my kid because I couldn't legally have them shut down.
What still bugs me the most about all this is that they gave it an AO rating when there are games out there such as PLayboy: The Mansion, that get an M rating...something in the rating system is broken.
Yeah, it's broken all right... the GTA never should have gotten an M in the first place.
The internet will reduce the value of a good long-term memory significantly, because you can always look things up, and it will increase the value of being a quick study dramatically. Those who can learn a new task on demand via the internet, use it, and move on to something new will be more successful than those who need to spend a long time learning. Specialization will become a lot less common, but will be a lot more valuable for those areas where it exists and is necessary.
I'm a web developer. I work from home, make $28 an hour before tax, and work on average 55 hours a week. Since starting my current employment 8 months ago, I've grossed a little over 42,000.
Sorry, with the currently floating invoice included, that's a little over 48,000. Yes, that 55 hour average includes vacation time, and yes, I do actually have a life. Can't remember the last time I watched TV though...
I'm a web developer. I work from home, make $28 an hour before tax, and work on average 55 hours a week. Since starting my current employment 8 months ago, I've grossed a little over 42,000.
Oh no, I revealed my income... now the sky is going to fall.
I offer this as a hook near the top for opinions and discussions about PostgreSQL and MySQL, since the soap opera fans seem to have completely flooded the thread with discussions about SCO.
Have MySQL sorted out their data corruption stuff yet? Is there clustering support for Postgres yet? Does anyone have anything more useful to contribute than more ranting and conspiracy theories about SCO?
Ok, let me spell it out for you, since you don't seem to have been hit with the clue stick quite hard enough. Most of the public web has been designed by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Just like all those FrontPage "web developers". To defend doing something the wrong way because everyone else is doing it wrong too is absolutely retarded.
MySQL is popular because back when it didn't have support for ANY of the features that are considered standard in a modern database it was, for that reason, very fast and lightweight. It sucked balls, but you could have a lot of people paying $10-20 a month for hosting on a single box, and if they wanted to use a real database, they could bloody well pay more for it.
So lots of people learned to use a database with their $20 a month plan, and learned all sorts of clever ways to deal with its shortcomings, and now they're proud of these skills and will argue with you till they're blue in the face about how the shortcomings aren't shortcomings and the clever hacks are a better way to do things. There isn't really much you can say to such people, because if they acknowledge that you're right, they have to concede that their vaunted skills amount to nothing more than making smelly purses out of sows ears. If you can find someone with enough humility to do THAT on slashdot, I'll strike the goatse pose on national television.
Hmm, interesting. Here's an experiment to try. Go to all of the non-banking sites that you frequently visit and type in a super huge string. See what the behavior is. I bet more sites truncate data (or give a really ugly error message) than trap and handle the long string.
Lots of the web is made using FrontPage. What was your point again?
Actually you give the perfect example of something that won't work. A gun type nuclear bomb requires U235 since Plutonium would pre-detonate (creating a very dirty but not so strong explosion).
Did you even read what you cited? The problem you are referring to is the tendency of non-weapons grade plutonium, (Pu-240) to predetonate and cause dispersion of the materials before critical is reached by reason of it being much more likely to spontaneously release neutrons. Modern nuke design does NOT use the design you gave as your example, and is instead based around increasing the efficiency by using reflectors and high compression via conventional explosive (a la "Fat Man")
I am not a nuclear physicist, and I've never actually built a nuclear bomb or anything, but from my understanding of the physics involved, you do not NEED to go to all this trouble if you are 1) going to be planting your bomb rather than dropping it, 2) have high quality plutonium, and 3) aren't worried about conserving it by making use of the most efficient methods.
Hell, you could take two 10 kilo chunks of quality weapons grade plutonium, put one on the ground and suspend the other above it by a rope, then sever the rope with a cherry bomb and that would most likely work.
Yup, all the Americans pay for their oil is cost plus tax. Oh, wait, what about those ships protecting tanker lanes, troops in Iraq, subsidies to oil companies, tax breaks for refineries, etc etc etc?
Yep, I don't pay for things from the liquor store down in my hood. Oh, wait, what about all my homies patrolling the streets down there, or the previous owner I put a cap into because he tried to make me pay, or the large discount I gave the new owner on his "protection fees" etc etc etc?
I guess you have no qualifications yourself, and are unconsciously bitter about it, so you try to find satisfaction by using your "powers" of recruitment to humble those who have graduated.
Or perhaps he's annoyed at the unwarrented respect accorded to and expected by dimwits who got university degrees because they were told it was a money ticket and then end up having to be taught how to tie their shoes on the job.
Nukes are easy to make. Take plutonium, add more plutonium, add more plutionium, that's enough plutonium, boom. All you need to do is keep a critical mass amount of it separated in your bomb until the moment you want to detonate it, then use conventional explosives to break the separator and allow the separated plutonium to come into contact.
You're more likely to fuck up and blow yourself up at the wrong time or give yourself lukemia than to fail to make a nuke once you've got the plutonium.
Increasing the number of creative works available to humanity by motivating and supporting artists and intellectuals is a lofty goal, and I'm in favour of it. But not if it means cutting myself and everyone else out there off from 98% of those works and only allowing them access to the 2% that they could personally afford to fund. The ends do not justify the means.
You sound like someone who has never been in court before. If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that perception counts for a lot and in a courtroom everything is subjective. If a judge decides that intentionally and systematically cutting off wide portions of the internet does not meet the criteria of "internet access" then the ISPs lose, regardless of any boilerplate terms and conditions.
If you ask me, there's a big difference between "not guaranteeing" and "intentionally and perpetually undermining the functionality in a clandestine way", but it doesn't really matter what I think, only what you can convince a judge to think.
Robotix, like Lego with motors... these are great for robot wars, stick all the pieces in the middle, everyone takes turns picking a piece from the pile till they're all gone, 15 minutes to build your robo-gladiator, and last robot standing is the winner.
Armatrons, one of which I recently scored for free when a buddies GF decided it was time to clean house. My daughter loves this one, we play a game where one of us uses a remote control robot to try and steal small objects from the Armatron, and the other uses the Armatron to try and catch the "thief" by grabbing it and lifting it off the ground. We take 3 turns as each robot, and whoever scores the most loot wins:)
Potato guns. Ok, they're not very technological, but with hundreds of shots from a single potato, you had to love them.
Yeah, I do that too when I can, but it doesn't help much when you're dealing with Excel spreadsheets full of lookups and macros, nor when you need the bookmarks, text form fields, embedded objects etc in Word.
I solved the Word problem last time by making a COM+ component that listens on MSMQ, and when it recieves a message, it copies a template word doc to a temporary folder, opens it, does a search/replace for a series of keywords, saves to the network share, updates the database, and optionally emails the new file to whoever asked for its creation.
Ugly, but keeps the server from being brought to its knees by a dozen running instances of Word, and when there's a problem, the messages sit in the queue until you get it fixed rather than just being lost.
Nice thing about this is that when they want their documents changed around they can just replace the template with a new one and as long as the keywords are properly done and no new ones are necessary, I don't need to be involved.
Mmm... try passing an excel spreadsheet full of macros back and forth between OO.o Calc and MS Excel. Not to be dismissive of the work OO.o has done, but there is a lot of room for improvement where interoperability is concerned.
How many web developers out there have been called upon to make their servers spit out Word and Excel documents? Did you just automate Office on the server despite being warned repeatedly to the contrary? Did you decouple it from the web server using COM+ and MSMQ like you're supposed to so the server doesn't crash when 3 people hit it at once? Was anyone actually fool enough to pay you to spend the time to try and write to Offices so-called XML format?
Please make Office work with OO.o XML Bill, the web is where it's at, and your ugly-ass document format is so shitty to work with on the server it makes me want to tear out my hair when they inevitably ask me to do so.
If Office opened and saved OO.o documents, there would be a flood of people migrating away from it.
Think about it, if you knew you could download OO.o for free and anyone with Office could open/edit/save the files you'd made in it, would you spend hundreds of dollars for Office? Hell, what could possibly motivate you to buy it at that point?
I would say that if MS opens the door to OO.o formats, they may as well just shoot themselves in the head and be done with it, because they're toast.
Are you saying that it is alright to pirate music then? Is it also ok to steal cable television?
Copyright, and for that matter intellectual property law in all its forms are obsolete. They cause harm to society. Therefore, it goes beyond "alright". You have a moral obligation to pirate music and steal cable rather than paying for it, because if you do pay for it, you're a contributing factor in the harm that it does.
How does it cause harm? Well, it goes like this:
As time goes on, the number of people in the world increases. Due to societal advancements, their education levels also increase. And they have more free time than before, or they should. And they have wider access to the creative tools that used to only be available for professionals.
So the number of creators in the world increases, and the number of creative works in existance dramatically and continually increases. And the cost of distribution of those works shrinks ever closer to zero.
But here's the kicker: the price of creative works keeps up with inflation. People now cannot legally afford to own much more than they could in the early 80s. Books and CDs are not much different in price than books and tapes were back then, once you take inflation into account.
So the wealth of knowledge and art grows and grows and grows, but the size of the chunk of it that you get to expose yourself to does not. From a relative standpoint, it shrinks as time goes on.
Intellectual property laws and copyright laws make us less knowledgable, cultured and informed by their existance. They do not enrich our society, they impoverish it.
We are very near the point, from a technological standpoint, where it would be cheaper to deliver a copy of every intellectual work, every song, every movie, every book, all of it, to every single man woman and child on the face of the earth than it would be to deliver each of them a slice of bread.
Think about that... the library of alexandria in the hands of everyone on earth, using the 3D holographic storage that IBM is developing, or something of that ilk and a cheap reader device. This is no longer some hippie pipe dream, this is something we can practically achieve.
Can you really argue in defense of a system that would prevent such a thing from happening?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a biologist either, but both my brother and sister are. From my conversations with them, I came to understand that not all genes need to provide a genetic advantage to take over the population.
For example, apparently there's a new human mutation which adds an extra strand to the DNA chain, so you have 3 coming off the end instead of two. This would mean that a male would have 4 strands (diagram: --E ) while a female would have 6 (diagram: 3-E ). Those with this mutation will breed true with other holding the same mutation, and will also pass it along if they breed with older versions of humans that only have 2. So eventually, human beings with X and Y shaped DNA are going to be bred out.
Just an example.
That was a typo. I meant to say that this happens during the lack of threat. As in, when we are threatened, our weak die off and we lose their genetic diversity.
You're mistaken. When there is a threat, we mutate. That's what's happening now, we're mutating and developing a more diverse genetic base. When a really nasty disease comes along, that diverse genetic base gives us a wider range of options to fight it.
The genetic diversity we're accumulating will help ensure that when the inevitable "culling of the weak" comes in some form or another, there are a few people who are strong in the right sort of way to carry on.
Considering the intermixing between cultures that occurs in modern society, as a species we're better off with as much genetic diversity as we can get until we manage to get off planet and remove the risk of a single superbug wiping us all out.
By the way, you're sorely misguided about the whole "stupid people breeding out of control" issue too. The problem isn't the stupid people breeding too much, it's the so-called "smart" people not breeding enough. We're on our way to a societal collapse because of it.
If you're running a 333 MHz box, and are intending to stick with Windows, you should be running W2K Professional. The extra stability is worth the upgrade... W2K was the best OS MS ever made.
And what are you talking about 1000s of dollars for, you can get a computer that will stomp that one into the dirt for a couple of hundred bucks easily.
What still bugs me the most about all this is that they gave it an AO rating when there are games out there such as PLayboy: The Mansion, that get an M rating...something in the rating system is broken.
Yeah, it's broken all right... the GTA never should have gotten an M in the first place.
Why is it that anyone who's critical of this stupid game gets modded as a Troll or shouted down? It's an offensive game.
I'm not a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination. Truth be told, a part of me really loves it when someone in the real world does something horrible enough to make me feel morally justified in releasing my anger and pounding the shit out of them.
I dropped out of uni when I was 17 and went hitchhiking around the country for years, and saw some pretty ugly shit climbing my way out of the streets when I stopped travelling. I've personally, in real life and with my own bare hands, hospitalized people for engaging in the kind of behavior encourages in that game, and I damn well liked doing it.
That, for me, is the great thing about violent video games that is never appreciated by defenders of either side of this debate. They don't, generally, just have violence for violences sake, but acutally set up situations where, were you placed in them, you could turn loose your vicious side in good conscience and without guilt.
But that's not what this game is about at all. This game is about going out and engaging your violent side for fun and money. It's in a very small group, populated by the likes of Postal, and distinct within that small group in that it takes itself seriously.
I feel there is a place in this society for games that encourage you to express the heroic warrior inside. I do not feel there is a place for games that encourage you to express the anti-social violent psychopath inside. I expect I'll feel the same ugly thrill I did beating up pimps and rapists should I ever be forced to beat the shit out of some shopkeeper for selling one to my kid because I couldn't legally have them shut down.
Enjoy your game.
What still bugs me the most about all this is that they gave it an AO rating when there are games out there such as PLayboy: The Mansion, that get an M rating...something in the rating system is broken.
Yeah, it's broken all right... the GTA never should have gotten an M in the first place.
The internet will reduce the value of a good long-term memory significantly, because you can always look things up, and it will increase the value of being a quick study dramatically. Those who can learn a new task on demand via the internet, use it, and move on to something new will be more successful than those who need to spend a long time learning. Specialization will become a lot less common, but will be a lot more valuable for those areas where it exists and is necessary.
I'm a web developer. I work from home, make $28 an hour before tax, and work on average 55 hours a week. Since starting my current employment 8 months ago, I've grossed a little over 42,000.
Sorry, with the currently floating invoice included, that's a little over 48,000. Yes, that 55 hour average includes vacation time, and yes, I do actually have a life. Can't remember the last time I watched TV though...
I'm a web developer. I work from home, make $28 an hour before tax, and work on average 55 hours a week. Since starting my current employment 8 months ago, I've grossed a little over 42,000.
Oh no, I revealed my income... now the sky is going to fall.
I offer this as a hook near the top for opinions and discussions about PostgreSQL and MySQL, since the soap opera fans seem to have completely flooded the thread with discussions about SCO.
Have MySQL sorted out their data corruption stuff yet? Is there clustering support for Postgres yet? Does anyone have anything more useful to contribute than more ranting and conspiracy theories about SCO?
Ok, let me spell it out for you, since you don't seem to have been hit with the clue stick quite hard enough. Most of the public web has been designed by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Just like all those FrontPage "web developers". To defend doing something the wrong way because everyone else is doing it wrong too is absolutely retarded.
MySQL is popular because back when it didn't have support for ANY of the features that are considered standard in a modern database it was, for that reason, very fast and lightweight. It sucked balls, but you could have a lot of people paying $10-20 a month for hosting on a single box, and if they wanted to use a real database, they could bloody well pay more for it.
So lots of people learned to use a database with their $20 a month plan, and learned all sorts of clever ways to deal with its shortcomings, and now they're proud of these skills and will argue with you till they're blue in the face about how the shortcomings aren't shortcomings and the clever hacks are a better way to do things. There isn't really much you can say to such people, because if they acknowledge that you're right, they have to concede that their vaunted skills amount to nothing more than making smelly purses out of sows ears. If you can find someone with enough humility to do THAT on slashdot, I'll strike the goatse pose on national television.
Hmm, interesting. Here's an experiment to try. Go to all of the non-banking sites that you frequently visit and type in a super huge string. See what the behavior is. I bet more sites truncate data (or give a really ugly error message) than trap and handle the long string.
Lots of the web is made using FrontPage. What was your point again?
Actually you give the perfect example of something that won't work. A gun type nuclear bomb requires U235 since Plutonium would pre-detonate (creating a very dirty but not so strong explosion).
Did you even read what you cited? The problem you are referring to is the tendency of non-weapons grade plutonium, (Pu-240) to predetonate and cause dispersion of the materials before critical is reached by reason of it being much more likely to spontaneously release neutrons. Modern nuke design does NOT use the design you gave as your example, and is instead based around increasing the efficiency by using reflectors and high compression via conventional explosive (a la "Fat Man")
I am not a nuclear physicist, and I've never actually built a nuclear bomb or anything, but from my understanding of the physics involved, you do not NEED to go to all this trouble if you are 1) going to be planting your bomb rather than dropping it, 2) have high quality plutonium, and 3) aren't worried about conserving it by making use of the most efficient methods.
Hell, you could take two 10 kilo chunks of quality weapons grade plutonium, put one on the ground and suspend the other above it by a rope, then sever the rope with a cherry bomb and that would most likely work.
Yup, all the Americans pay for their oil is cost plus tax. Oh, wait, what about those ships protecting tanker lanes, troops in Iraq, subsidies to oil companies, tax breaks for refineries, etc etc etc?
Yep, I don't pay for things from the liquor store down in my hood. Oh, wait, what about all my homies patrolling the streets down there, or the previous owner I put a cap into because he tried to make me pay, or the large discount I gave the new owner on his "protection fees" etc etc etc?
I guess you have no qualifications yourself, and are unconsciously bitter about it, so you try to find satisfaction by using your "powers" of recruitment to humble those who have graduated.
Or perhaps he's annoyed at the unwarrented respect accorded to and expected by dimwits who got university degrees because they were told it was a money ticket and then end up having to be taught how to tie their shoes on the job.
Nukes are easy to make. Take plutonium, add more plutonium, add more plutionium, that's enough plutonium, boom. All you need to do is keep a critical mass amount of it separated in your bomb until the moment you want to detonate it, then use conventional explosives to break the separator and allow the separated plutonium to come into contact.
You're more likely to fuck up and blow yourself up at the wrong time or give yourself lukemia than to fail to make a nuke once you've got the plutonium.
Fucking right... everyone knows that's the Atlantic provinces role!
Increasing the number of creative works available to humanity by motivating and supporting artists and intellectuals is a lofty goal, and I'm in favour of it. But not if it means cutting myself and everyone else out there off from 98% of those works and only allowing them access to the 2% that they could personally afford to fund. The ends do not justify the means.
You sound like someone who has never been in court before. If there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that perception counts for a lot and in a courtroom everything is subjective. If a judge decides that intentionally and systematically cutting off wide portions of the internet does not meet the criteria of "internet access" then the ISPs lose, regardless of any boilerplate terms and conditions.
If you ask me, there's a big difference between "not guaranteeing" and "intentionally and perpetually undermining the functionality in a clandestine way", but it doesn't really matter what I think, only what you can convince a judge to think.
Commodore computers, particularly the Commodore 64... C64 + 5 1/4 floppies = Pirates Wet Dream.
:)
Robotix, like Lego with motors... these are great for robot wars, stick all the pieces in the middle, everyone takes turns picking a piece from the pile till they're all gone, 15 minutes to build your robo-gladiator, and last robot standing is the winner.
Armatrons, one of which I recently scored for free when a buddies GF decided it was time to clean house. My daughter loves this one, we play a game where one of us uses a remote control robot to try and steal small objects from the Armatron, and the other uses the Armatron to try and catch the "thief" by grabbing it and lifting it off the ground. We take 3 turns as each robot, and whoever scores the most loot wins
Potato guns. Ok, they're not very technological, but with hundreds of shots from a single potato, you had to love them.
Yeah, I do that too when I can, but it doesn't help much when you're dealing with Excel spreadsheets full of lookups and macros, nor when you need the bookmarks, text form fields, embedded objects etc in Word.
I solved the Word problem last time by making a COM+ component that listens on MSMQ, and when it recieves a message, it copies a template word doc to a temporary folder, opens it, does a search/replace for a series of keywords, saves to the network share, updates the database, and optionally emails the new file to whoever asked for its creation.
Ugly, but keeps the server from being brought to its knees by a dozen running instances of Word, and when there's a problem, the messages sit in the queue until you get it fixed rather than just being lost.
Nice thing about this is that when they want their documents changed around they can just replace the template with a new one and as long as the keywords are properly done and no new ones are necessary, I don't need to be involved.
Mmm... try passing an excel spreadsheet full of macros back and forth between OO.o Calc and MS Excel. Not to be dismissive of the work OO.o has done, but there is a lot of room for improvement where interoperability is concerned.
How many web developers out there have been called upon to make their servers spit out Word and Excel documents? Did you just automate Office on the server despite being warned repeatedly to the contrary? Did you decouple it from the web server using COM+ and MSMQ like you're supposed to so the server doesn't crash when 3 people hit it at once? Was anyone actually fool enough to pay you to spend the time to try and write to Offices so-called XML format?
Please make Office work with OO.o XML Bill, the web is where it's at, and your ugly-ass document format is so shitty to work with on the server it makes me want to tear out my hair when they inevitably ask me to do so.
If Office opened and saved OO.o documents, there would be a flood of people migrating away from it.
Think about it, if you knew you could download OO.o for free and anyone with Office could open/edit/save the files you'd made in it, would you spend hundreds of dollars for Office? Hell, what could possibly motivate you to buy it at that point?
I would say that if MS opens the door to OO.o formats, they may as well just shoot themselves in the head and be done with it, because they're toast.
Are you saying that it is alright to pirate music then? Is it also ok to steal cable television?
Copyright, and for that matter intellectual property law in all its forms are obsolete. They cause harm to society. Therefore, it goes beyond "alright". You have a moral obligation to pirate music and steal cable rather than paying for it, because if you do pay for it, you're a contributing factor in the harm that it does.
How does it cause harm? Well, it goes like this:
As time goes on, the number of people in the world increases. Due to societal advancements, their education levels also increase. And they have more free time than before, or they should. And they have wider access to the creative tools that used to only be available for professionals.
So the number of creators in the world increases, and the number of creative works in existance dramatically and continually increases. And the cost of distribution of those works shrinks ever closer to zero.
But here's the kicker: the price of creative works keeps up with inflation. People now cannot legally afford to own much more than they could in the early 80s. Books and CDs are not much different in price than books and tapes were back then, once you take inflation into account.
So the wealth of knowledge and art grows and grows and grows, but the size of the chunk of it that you get to expose yourself to does not. From a relative standpoint, it shrinks as time goes on.
Intellectual property laws and copyright laws make us less knowledgable, cultured and informed by their existance. They do not enrich our society, they impoverish it.
We are very near the point, from a technological standpoint, where it would be cheaper to deliver a copy of every intellectual work, every song, every movie, every book, all of it, to every single man woman and child on the face of the earth than it would be to deliver each of them a slice of bread.
Think about that... the library of alexandria in the hands of everyone on earth, using the 3D holographic storage that IBM is developing, or something of that ilk and a cheap reader device. This is no longer some hippie pipe dream, this is something we can practically achieve.
Can you really argue in defense of a system that would prevent such a thing from happening?