I'm pretty sure many of those details are up there on the site. I know that Blender actually has some built in stuff for video editing, so a lot of the editing may have been done in Blender. Check the site for more details, they tend to be pretty open about what they're using.
& they offer at least Quicken and CSV. 'Course, I can't promise said bank won't go bankrupt, get absorbed into another bank, or change their back end system, in which case your history may be lost.
My suggestion is to not let 6+ months of transactions go unaccounted for. If you've your transactions for all but the last month or 3, then most banks will let you pull the rest of the transactions.
That way, if they get bought, change their back end, or whatever, you have all, or 99% of your data.
If you have your transactions saved locally and downloaded about once a month, then it shouldn't matter that you can only get 3-6 months of transaction data.
Star Wars set the bar for Sci-Fi movies, action, and special effects movies for 20 years at least, in story, acting, and special effects. It can be argued if that was the bar we should've measured things against, as opposed to more cerebral efforts - ala 2001, but it was the bar. To some, it still is, and that's not just your nerdy geeky set either.
The story of the first three was good. Nothing bookwormisghly great, but certainly not bad, and better than just about any sci-fi movie of its time. Some of the literary greats could use a little bit of...I don't know, movement. Maybe actually talk to that guy you're pining over for chapters... There's only so many pages of court backbiting or noble gossip I'm willing to put up with, even from the "greats". Star Wars wasn't a great when compared to literary movies, but it certainly still is when compared to Sci-Fi or Fantasy.
The dialog was certainly campy, and I don't know if anyone other than Harrison Ford could've pulled off some of the lines as well as he did, but he did do it, and audiences loved it. Not just the geeky 15 year old set. Simply put, it was a fun movie!
If that wasn't enough, it was the movie that pulled us into the era of modern special effects. For its day it was revolutionary. Many will bemoan that transition, and certainly Hollywood has done less with more effects - see the prequels - because of these movies, but that doesn't mean Star Wars wasn't the movie that raised the visual bar for certain classes of movies. Heck, a lot of the modern CGI looks flat and stale compared to the models from the original 3.
Sure, held against today's movies Star Wars isn't the visual bonanza it was back when. Its pace was about perfect given the genre. It's story is still better than most of the action, sci-fi, or fantasy movies we're getting today. Or romances. Or..well, let's face it. There just aren't that many great movies out there. Dozens of okay movies, but revolutionary or groundbreaking in one fashion or another? That doesn't often happen, and just shrugging that off in a movie? It might not be the movie for you, but it certainly influenced cinematography for a couple generations of "summer blockbuster" movie makers. Not many movies can claim to hold an audiences attention beyond the release of the next film one is looking forward to seeing. The original trilogy held the attention span of several generations of movie goers.
Man, now I gotta MOVE. I'll have to arrange to pay rent for that leaky attic space.:-b Won't have to worry 'bout fumigation, the place just reeks of moth balls, but I'll have to find a way to convince mom it's better that she move her boxes down the basement than having me do it...
This whole thing making me exhausted just thinking about it. Thanks!
Umm.... B&N, Borders, and their ilk ran out most of the medium and small mom & pops devoted to popular fiction before Amazon came along and made things worse, even when the mom & pops sold used books so you could get new fiction for less than even Amazon offers it. Maybe they're making a comeback, but certainly B&N and Borders ran a whole slew of them out of town before this happened.
Where mom & pops seem to thrive is around the niches, if they do a good job of filling those niches.
There are exceptions to this rule, and there are some larger bookstores - like Powell's in Portland - that put B&N to shame. 4 stories of books, a map to the store, real sections devoted to specialties, rare books, beats, an actual history section, etc., a large bit of their warehouse moved to a building next door, a whole separate building devoted to tech books, and, yes, a coffee shop. Sorry you don't like them, but they're great for folk who'd like to pickup a book, and sit down and read it.
I believe Powell's is paying as much or more for all of their employees than B&N, but the employees often know and care about their sections, and tend to be very dedicated to the store.
I'm somewhere between a freeloader and a regular purchaser for them.
I used to purchase a TON of books from them. I like popular sci-fi and fantasy.
I have always been there, a LOT, doing my on line classes in their coffee shop rather than doing them at home. I buy 1 or 2 coffees for several hours of free internet access.
I bought a Kindle DX, so a lot of the sci-fi / fantasy paperback purchases they were getting from me have dried up. Also, a lot of the classics - and I liked their classics series - are free to me now.
I have a membership card. I still buy books there, just not nearly as many, and with school and a full time job I don't have as much idle time as I did - plus I have a fairly substantial library of books I've already purchased.
HOPEFULLY whoever purchases them keeps them up and running. I'd like to see it where I can buy e-books from them that work on the Kindle...but I doubt that will happen. I'd buy them, even if they were a little more expensive, to keep the bits of the store going that I enjoy. (I like the physical book, but books take up space, and I'm seriously looking at cutting down the number of phsyical items I actually own.)
This isn't a problem with just B&N, of course. Every time we go to a retail outlet, peruse what they have, then buy it online we cause said retail outlet grief. I guess the same could be said if we bypass them all together, but the online retailers benefit from us being able to review things at an actual store without purchasing them from that store.
The flip side of that, unfortunately, is if the price is too high at the retail store...there's only so much of a premium most are willing to pay to support it.
Yeah, well, the electronic book is here, but the college version of it.... *shudder*. You might spend less for that book - but only have access to it while the class is running...or in my case up to 1 or 2 days before the last day you can schedule your final that counts for 70% of your grade. (Yes, I've been studying, but there's always some last minute niggling thing I want to go over.)
If it were public domain - and CA is trying to do just this - and unencumbered by DRM, or even an e-pub, mobi, or PDF where you can keep the book, that might work, but it seems the mighty scholastic publishers are looking for ways to make you rent books for short periods rather than buy them. The funny thing about that is if they'd just let me have the silly thing I'd only access their site once to get the book, rather than every time I wanted to read it during the course of the class.
If you want to record a particular lecture so it can be re-broadcast, better to have somebody who knows how to do the recording to it then force a professor who doesn't want to try to learn it. Every piece of recording equipment I've ever come across is different, and uses different interfaces, and there are tons of different front end programs to make an end product of the recording. Further, unless you're trained, lighting, placing the mic, etc., etc. aren't things the teacher is going to know how to do, nor should we be wasting their time forcing them to learn. Finally, in a lot of schools, even some universities, many computers the profs have aren't setup to be media editing machines, so they're going to be slow and unwieldy.
Recording a lecture by somebody who knows how and has the equipment - cool.
Trying to record the lecture by somebody who doesn't know how, who should be teaching the class, who doesn't have the time to edit it, etc.? Why bother? You're actually detracting from the class and frustrating both your professor and your students.
The founders believed in the principle that once an idea is shared, even if it's simply one person relating a story to another, the second person has a copy of the idea in his head, and that both people now "own" the idea. That person can then share the idea with others, and that ideas, whether they be musical, artistic, pure science, or engineering should be shared - and in fact could not be owned. That society and one's ideas are built on the foundations of the ideas that came before them.
They also recognized that if an author, engineer, or what have you couldn't make money off of his ideas, he was much less likely to bother to create them in the first place, or if he did create them, he'd do it in the guise of trade secrets that would never become part of the public domain, or private showings in the case of copyright. If an idea isn't shared, the public domain doesn't grow, and advances in the sciences can actually regress because an individual or corporation never shared how to create something.
To encourage works to eventually enter the public domain patents and copyrights were created, granting the author a monopoly of the distribution of his works for a limited time to gain a return on his works. In return, when that time expired his ideas would be available, for free, to everybody. The government makes sure of this by keeping a copy of the registered copyright or patent.
I'm perfectly willing to argue the benefits of a much reduced copyright term, and to explicit DMCA exemptions to allow fair use. That playing the radio at a restaurant doesn't equate to a live performance, and that the adds on the radio are sufficient payment for the rights to play the radio at a work premises. The copyright term could be as little as the founder's 14 years. I believe life of the author OR 25 years, whichever is longer, is equitable, but the term of the copyright could certainly be expanded or contracted. I have no problem with copyright being longer than patents as a patent generally will be used in the creation of other things, while the copyright is very specific and only protects a very specific work.
What I'm not willing to grant is that anything that's ever been written or produced is free game for everybody to download, gratis, the moment the work is published. Even if I were willing to grant this, and lawmakers embraced it, I doubt that freeloaders would get what they wanted. Quality works of art, music, video games, and other media, as well as inventions, take a TON of work. Not as a hobby. Not as something to be done for fun outside of your "real" job or just for the love of it, but AS your real job, and more often as the real job of a whole host of people.
I think a ton of people would stop producing media, or do it in such a fashion that the media becomes much more exclusive. Live concerts only, no pressed CDs, for instance. "Yeah, that's the way it should be man!" Never mind the guy saying this might have gigs of downloaded, studio produced CDs. Forget the PC unless the game requires a net connection. We're into console games only, or games where all the content is run off of some centralized servers and you have to pay to get access to said content. A lot of the applied sciences would dry up as corporations become even more cliquish, hording all of their secrets, rather than protecting them for 25 years - or hording them more than they currently do. And, no, I don't think killing off whole industries or types of content so that we can all get everything for free is healthy. It won't be free, and it'll be MUCH more encumbered than what we currently have.
Unfortunately there's not a great way to stop piracy, but there are ways to limit it. Having a convenient way - ala iTunes, Steam, or other popular digital distribution channel - to get ones work is one way, especially if it's more convenient and safer than torrents or rapidshare. Careful pricing is another. NOT ticking off the paying customers with adds against piracy - that the pirat
This is the problem with any DRM. The BEST one can hope for is that there is finally a Betamax, everybody with said Betamax gets screwed - heretical supporters of the evil competitors, and we eventually get "one format" that everybody can use...and hopefully it lasts long enough to matter. (If B&N had signed a similar deal, then all the Kindle folk would be in trouble.)
I own a Kindle and it still irks me that it won't read unencumbered ePUB.
Eventually I hope a tablet computer with some sort of color reflective and high refresh screen replaces the Kindle/nook/what have you and that the e-reader is just an app on it. Until then, I'm waiting to see who ends up with Betamax. (And who ends up controlling the price / availability of books on e-readers, whatever they happen to be.)
Sure there are times and places where speech can be restricted. I won't argue with you there. Heck, if protesters start doing more than simply waving banners around and calling out the protests - say starting fights or throwing things, then yes, I'd expect the police to do something about it - assuming that they aren't the ones instigating things. (Not usually the case, but it *does* happen.)
And I'll grant you that you did say it appears to be used to curtail speech.
I'm simply calling B.S. on the safety thing. We've had dissenting opinions in public gatherings for politicians for hundreds of years without having to coral people into over packed pens miles from where the where the politicians are.
Having to show support for a fearless leader when he makes a public appearance - be he Republican or Democrat - reeks a bit much of totalitarianism to me. We're not there yet, not by a long shot, but little steps like this help nudge us in that direction.
That "safety" excuse gets thrown around a lot to curtail our constitutional rights. Not just today, but in WWII, and throughout our history.
Generally, when we "come to our senses" we look back at the particular incidents with a bit of shock that we could've done such horrendous things. Japanese internment camps, for instance. Or McCarthyism.
GP - I believe you're right, it was a Supreme Court decision.
Parent - thank you for pointing out that this only limited *corporate* caps - which is the center of my argument.
A corporation *is* made up of people - the corporation itself is not a person. Unfortunately, more and more it's getting the rights of a person while maintaining all the protections of a corporation and separations of consequences that a corporation affords its majority shareholders and board.
In fact, to some extent, corporations are lobbying to become not just individuals, but investigators - without the constraints that the police have to put up with, or even the constraints about breaking and entering of computer equipment that individual must abide by, or consequences for actions of said investigations should they cause damage to the equipment they're investigating. (See Hollywood's campaigns to broaden their rights to snoop on what individuals are doing with their computers, while trying to diminish wire tapping laws, and remove any claims of damages individuals might make in regards to said investigations should the company bork your computer in the course of its "investigation", even if nothing is found on the computer.)
A small fraction of 1% of the "people" of a corporation get to decide the "voice" of said corporation. The voice of the corporation is not even its employees, in most cases, but its majority stock holders.
So here you have this massive multi-national pouring in so many millions of dollars, favors, or whatever into some campaign warchest, and the only people with a voice are the large % stock holders who elect the board, the board itself, and the very senior executives. There is *NO* representation for the minority stock holders or the corporation's employees - and the employees are what enable said corporation to have those millions to poor into campaign contributions.
There are always people who will have a "bigger" voice than others, whether it be because of money, contacts, or what have you, but a corporation is not an individual. Giving the majority stockholders the added boost to their already influential voices of all the output of all the employees and stock holders under them isn't right. It tips the balance way too far in their direction, and they didn't *need* the help making their voices heard.
That's my opinion, even if the Supreme Court disagrees by a narrow 5-4 vote.
There's no maybe about it. It *IS* restricting free speech, and it's *NOT* a safety issue.
Making sure that the protests are nowhere near the event they're protesting so that said protesters don't show up on T.V. It's not even crowd control as there are tons of people there *SUPPORTING* the event.
Should you hold up a placard protesting something - when everybody else in the crowd has been vetted as a supporter, you get hauled off to the free speech zone, or simply arrested.
Cops being inserted into crowds to act as instigators of riots to claim that the crowd is rowdy and arrest everybody when in fact the crowd had been pacific before said undercover throws something or incites something that could be riot like.
It is different if you're on private grounds and the organizers want you to be affiliated in one way or the other, but these things often happen on public ground where it *should be* expected to have both supporting and dissenting voices in the crowd.
For instance... the law that was recently passed repealing a corporation's cap on campaign contributions because it would inhibit free speech...
Never mind that the only people "speaking" are the top executives and the board, and that they probably *DO NOT* represent the interests of the thousands of employees that make their paychecks, dividends, and campaign contributions possible.
Glad your friend survived. I'll admit I don't know what his survivability would've looked like with a car with proper side impact safety - it's entirely possible he would not have made it. I was thinking more of freeway speed pileups. A 30mph T-Bone certainly isn't a love tap.
I guess I look at my vehicle purchases a little different. If I'm a contractor hauling stuff all the time, I'll get the truck. If I'm just pulling a commute and running around with friends I'll stick with my car, and rent a moving truck that one day every few years I need it.
If a truck's fun for you, or what you want, go for it. I tend to be more...what am I using it for oriented rather than style or safety oriented...but that's me. It's reflected in the clothes that I wear and the things that I purchase.
I do think the roads would be much safer if most soccer moms/dads had stuck with their mini-vans rather than upgrading to SUVs...though the mini-van is WAY less styleish. Never mind the guy who has a SUV for a commute to a white collar job and never even gets it dusty...but again, that's his choice.
A fun vehicle for me is a cruiser style motorcycle, a Shadow, for instance - and the survivability of one of those in an accident with anything is pretty low compared to even the smallest of compact cars.
Re:(1) exercise (2) diet complicated (3) gm etc ok
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The Rise of Nanofoods
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Diet and exercise. Sleep habits and genetics. All of this plays into health and your individual body weight. It doesn't really matter if you get your hour of moderate exercise in a day, 6 days a week if you eat 3000+ calories of mostly corn syrup. You're not going to lose weight. Diet isn't that incredibly complicated, not if you boil it down to "don't eat more than your level of activity can reasonably burn off." For most of us in white collar jobs that's probably 2000 or less calories, not our average 3000 or more. If we want to lose weight, then it's probably considerably less. Yes, exercise helps, but it won't cure an obesity problem when we simply eat too much. (Of course, eating less without exercise would simply mean we're lean, unfit people rather than being fat unfit people, but the lean bit would eliminate a lot of health issues - like the rise in diabetes and heart disease.)
*Shrug*. First, it's not our job to feed the starving people in - choose your impoverished 3rd world nation here. We have the corn and wheat to do it, for now. Heck, we find subsidized ways of turning said substances into fuel so it doesn't simply rot. We *DO* contribute tons of food stuffs, probably more than just about anybody specifically for these purposes. (Been a while since I've looked at these numbers.)
Even if it were our job, in many cases we'd have to basically invade the country to make sure the food made it to the impoverished masses, and we do such a *good* job of managing conquered countries after we defeat its military. Even if we did that and didn't make things worse, that wouldn't necessarily solve the *root* problem of too many people for the land and their tech base to support. In some cases food and medical aide causes a temporary increase in the population without adding anything to their ability to grow their own foods and makes things worse. Does that mean I think we should do *nothing*? No, but I do think that outside of disaster relief, we should spend more time really studying the problem rather than simply exporting food, and more effort building infrastructure in those countries than simply making them dependent on food shipments from foreign powers with no real vested interest in keeping those food shipments coming.
Second, we have a *HUGE* obesity problem here, and most of us who eat preprepared foods probably aren't going to go back to eating foods "the way mother nature intended them to be eaten" no matter how much you bitch and whine at people. Hell, tell a person you're going to make their set 400% more efficient on standby, but it'll take less than a minute extra to power up when they get home and you get riots. So if we can find a way to make that lard burger taste like a lard burger with 1/3 less lard - and no nasty surprise side effects - bonus. I'm dubious about our ability to accomplish that, but if we can, I see no reason not to. *More testing would be good before mass release of said foods.* The way we've decided to work, with a 40 hour work week - minimum - for *both* halves of a family, assuming you're not in a single parent home, doesn't help. We spend more time on work, on average, then even the Japanese.
Third - America's obesity problem is slowly becoming the rest of the first world's obesity problem. Cube farms, to me, are at least as detrimental to the health of a country as bad food. Combine the two, along with leisure activities that are also sedentary, and you run into some real problems.
Fourth - if we lazy American's aren't doing the job of feeding the masses, despite exporting more food - even our Franken Foods - than just about anybody, why not have them step in to make up the difference? Heck, maybe they'd have a fresh idea or two. Or, get *your* community jazzed about - *pick your favorite charity here.*
That's not to say that we don't use our current economic and military might in ways that are incredibly sort sighted and very much corporate profits now, let the next generation worry about the consequences way, but if we're doing such a shoddy job of aide, please, encourage others to pick up the slack, or do so yourself.
For better or worse we've become a white collar work force with *LONG* hours. Even if we start changing our culture so we're more active - both in the workforce and recreational - those changes take time, and many won't make the change. If we manage to get foods to those who won't make the change that are just as filling, taste just about as good, but contain 50% less calories, corn syrup, and salt, then why not? I do agree that it should be clearly labeled for those who want to avoid it, and it'd be nice to see the foods tested for more than they generally are, but "fast food" is already known to be about as processed and bad for you as it gets. If we can make it *less bad*, then that would go a ways to making millions more healthy. The trick, of course, is making it less bad rather than worse.
And a transition from a blue collar, at least semi-active lifestyle to cube farms, T.V., and video games. The cube farms really don't help with choice of food.
If a big rig hits you, and it's more than just a love tap, it doesn't really matter what you're riding in.
Further, while I've seen some crazy stuff from big rigs, mostly it's the idiot cars around the big rigs that are the danger. If you respect them and give them room, you're not likely to get hit by them. If you squeeze into that spot that a car might have trouble stopping for, but it's a semi you've just cut off...
Or an even better maneuver. That tipple trailer hauling rock trying to make a right turn? Yeah, just slide into that "space" to the right of him for your turn...go for it.
What you're getting with the Pandora is a hand-held, arm powered laptop - umpc if you prefer - with OpenGLES 2.xaccelerated graphics. Play your videos and music with it. Mix music, browse the web, do your normal desktop stuff with it, emulate arcade games, NES games, or, potentially, N64 games. Tinker with it to your heart's content. Put Android OS on it. Develop your own games for it. Or play some of the games the development community's been working on, or ported.
It's not for everybody, but it's one of the first open consoles to have accelerated 3D which makes it exciting for a bunch of us home brew guys. It also has wifi and bluetooth. The wifi is a nice touch as I anticipate decent network play on some of the games.
It'll never rival the PSP or DS for sales, which eliminates the larger software houses as developers, but there are independent developers who've expressed interest in it.
What'll be interesting to see is how much interest it has two months(tm) after the first batchers have their Pandoras in their hands and some of the projects targeted for it get released. Even if round 2 doesn't have many orders, I believe the current batch of developers will give the hand-held their enthusiastic support. If it DOES have decent sales, the potential to interest at least a few published independent game developers increases dramatically.
I don't believe the problem is with markup - and yes, you can do that with HTML. (It's not pretty, and to do it quickly would require a program designed to do it, but css and z-index...no problem.) 'Course, this is all a software problem, not a format of the document problem. (HTML is meant to be flow-able to many different sized screens, making markup a tad more difficult, but you could easily convert to PDF or make your "marked up" copy use absolute positioning.)
The problem is with the "tablet" style computer that's just not quite there yet. Even "good" pens have atrocious accuracy compared to a pen or pencil on paper. They're expensive. If they're not using the SLOW e-ink, they need to be charged frequently. They don't support multiple pen widths very well...
One problem that haunts computers is the many format issue, and what document tracking pedagogy to you submit it to. When people are on different systems, things can quickly become a pain. Having something like an XML document that gets parsed to whatever end-use format it needs to be can take care of some of that.
The screen technology is coming along. We have black & white e-ink, and they're working on color. I believe refresh rates can be improved.
To me, the biggest problem is the "feel" of the stylus on the screen, whatever it happens to be. Fix that, let economies of scale work for a few years, and we'll have a working usable 8.5x11color e-ink - or reflective TFT, or whatever - tablet with wireless and most the horsepower of a modern laptop in a form factor of a kindle DX. Then the only problem is software - which is usually where the real stumbling blocks are.
I don't believe we'll ever totally get away from the notebook - you can rip sheets from it and give it to people who don't have your wonderful tablet, but you can get awfully close.
Depends. Eventually, I can see everything being robotized. (And they already have public self cleaning toilets that don't use the standard toilet brush.) A good interim / cheap step is a humanoid robot, and once everything is robotized you'll probably have one humanoid anyway to do maintenance on stuff, with a butler's pantry to do maintenance on itself. A lot of devices - like the bathroom cleaning bot - would simply be plugged in. The car-bot would run off of whatever energy is already being produced for the car. Some things would need to be autonomous, but probably not that many. For a lot of things, you'd have to have a semi-expensive device anyway, so robotizing it wouldn't be THAT much more expensive.
*SHRUG* We're a ways away from it anyway. We can't even get a "smart" home to work right. But I look forward to the commute-bot 3000, the chores-bot 2200, which, with the separate personality plugin could also be your personal secretary bot 2300. Yeah, there'll be plugins for those other bedroom needs eventually as well, and they'll have the same social stigma, for a while at least, as the blowup dolls do now. Least if it can do all the other stuff it should be self cleaning.
And in one of his books of Robots short stories, there are similar robots that get awfully close to breaking the 3 laws and doing stuff because "it's for the meatbags' own good." The ones that had elevated themselves into either gods, or at the least guardian angels for you and I. There was another story where the 3rd law - to protect the robot's own self - was made much more powerful, and the other two laws less powerful, so that the robots found themselves having troubles following "weak" orders when it threatened their own existence. You combine this with Asimov's 0th law of robotics - the idea of humanity being more important than an individual, and you get something that could actually come close to the action movie that was the Will Smith version of I Robot.
The thing I didn't like about that movie, and the newest Sherlock Holmes movie, is they ignore the original author's feel for the original work. They take stories that are a lot more cerebral than the respective genres often produce and make them into just another summer action flick. Both movies are fine if you can get past the title, or if they were called anything other than what they were called, but using the title kind ruins it for me. Neither Asimov's Robots, nor Sherlock Holmes are accurate representations of the authors' original works, even allowing for the cutting that has to be done to get a novel to a reasonable feature film length. Sorry, point of the post drifting...stopping now.
If, as an author, I was guaranteed that I could not choose my publisher, and for a limited time how my works were published, I wouldn't become an author. I would discourage anybody else from writing as well. Copyright has a place in society, and does not hurt the economy. The people making speculative works have a right to be paid for them if the risk of writing those works - risk in time, effort, and money - finds a market for them.
The crazy copyright terms we have today, sure, they're messed up. I think life of the author or 25 years, whichever is longer seems about right. (If a parent dies, his works can support his kids for a bit.) Works for hire, make them 25 years like patents. If somebody said no, that's too random, make it a straight 25-50 years instead, that would be okay too.
Many people only purchase things from legitimate sources, but what happens when every source becomes legitimate? Also, if every source is legitimate, how can I easily tell which sources are actually paying the authors, assuming I want them to receive money for their work? When I can purchase a book from the author's publisher legally, or go with an equally legal pulp book producer who gives nothing back to the author? What about making legitimate downloads, for money or not, legal from day one? None of this will benefit anybody in the least. Sure, for a short while we'll have a boon of stuff that's already published. Eventually; however, your free gravy train of content will dry up. Maybe musicians will continue to work bars and do shows, but authors don't have those venues. Movies don't either. (And why would a theater pay Hollywood for a film if they can display it for free?)
Our current system is not perfect. It wasn't perfect when the founders put it into place way back when and limited to 14 years. It was an acknowledgement that, even at the time, the overhead of allowing a limited monopoly so that authors could get paid for their works was an acceptable compromise to have those works produced in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure many of those details are up there on the site. I know that Blender actually has some built in stuff for video editing, so a lot of the editing may have been done in Blender. Check the site for more details, they tend to be pretty open about what they're using.
& they offer at least Quicken and CSV. 'Course, I can't promise said bank won't go bankrupt, get absorbed into another bank, or change their back end system, in which case your history may be lost.
My suggestion is to not let 6+ months of transactions go unaccounted for. If you've your transactions for all but the last month or 3, then most banks will let you pull the rest of the transactions.
That way, if they get bought, change their back end, or whatever, you have all, or 99% of your data.
If you have your transactions saved locally and downloaded about once a month, then it shouldn't matter that you can only get 3-6 months of transaction data.
My 2c.
Star Wars set the bar for Sci-Fi movies, action, and special effects movies for 20 years at least, in story, acting, and special effects. It can be argued if that was the bar we should've measured things against, as opposed to more cerebral efforts - ala 2001, but it was the bar. To some, it still is, and that's not just your nerdy geeky set either.
The story of the first three was good. Nothing bookwormisghly great, but certainly not bad, and better than just about any sci-fi movie of its time. Some of the literary greats could use a little bit of...I don't know, movement. Maybe actually talk to that guy you're pining over for chapters... There's only so many pages of court backbiting or noble gossip I'm willing to put up with, even from the "greats". Star Wars wasn't a great when compared to literary movies, but it certainly still is when compared to Sci-Fi or Fantasy.
The dialog was certainly campy, and I don't know if anyone other than Harrison Ford could've pulled off some of the lines as well as he did, but he did do it, and audiences loved it. Not just the geeky 15 year old set. Simply put, it was a fun movie!
If that wasn't enough, it was the movie that pulled us into the era of modern special effects. For its day it was revolutionary. Many will bemoan that transition, and certainly Hollywood has done less with more effects - see the prequels - because of these movies, but that doesn't mean Star Wars wasn't the movie that raised the visual bar for certain classes of movies. Heck, a lot of the modern CGI looks flat and stale compared to the models from the original 3.
Sure, held against today's movies Star Wars isn't the visual bonanza it was back when. Its pace was about perfect given the genre. It's story is still better than most of the action, sci-fi, or fantasy movies we're getting today. Or romances. Or..well, let's face it. There just aren't that many great movies out there. Dozens of okay movies, but revolutionary or groundbreaking in one fashion or another? That doesn't often happen, and just shrugging that off in a movie? It might not be the movie for you, but it certainly influenced cinematography for a couple generations of "summer blockbuster" movie makers. Not many movies can claim to hold an audiences attention beyond the release of the next film one is looking forward to seeing. The original trilogy held the attention span of several generations of movie goers.
Man, now I gotta MOVE. I'll have to arrange to pay rent for that leaky attic space. :-b Won't have to worry 'bout fumigation, the place just reeks of moth balls, but I'll have to find a way to convince mom it's better that she move her boxes down the basement than having me do it...
This whole thing making me exhausted just thinking about it. Thanks!
Umm.... B&N, Borders, and their ilk ran out most of the medium and small mom & pops devoted to popular fiction before Amazon came along and made things worse, even when the mom & pops sold used books so you could get new fiction for less than even Amazon offers it. Maybe they're making a comeback, but certainly B&N and Borders ran a whole slew of them out of town before this happened.
Where mom & pops seem to thrive is around the niches, if they do a good job of filling those niches.
There are exceptions to this rule, and there are some larger bookstores - like Powell's in Portland - that put B&N to shame. 4 stories of books, a map to the store, real sections devoted to specialties, rare books, beats, an actual history section, etc., a large bit of their warehouse moved to a building next door, a whole separate building devoted to tech books, and, yes, a coffee shop. Sorry you don't like them, but they're great for folk who'd like to pickup a book, and sit down and read it.
I believe Powell's is paying as much or more for all of their employees than B&N, but the employees often know and care about their sections, and tend to be very dedicated to the store.
I'm somewhere between a freeloader and a regular purchaser for them.
I used to purchase a TON of books from them. I like popular sci-fi and fantasy.
I have always been there, a LOT, doing my on line classes in their coffee shop rather than doing them at home. I buy 1 or 2 coffees for several hours of free internet access.
I bought a Kindle DX, so a lot of the sci-fi / fantasy paperback purchases they were getting from me have dried up. Also, a lot of the classics - and I liked their classics series - are free to me now.
I have a membership card. I still buy books there, just not nearly as many, and with school and a full time job I don't have as much idle time as I did - plus I have a fairly substantial library of books I've already purchased.
HOPEFULLY whoever purchases them keeps them up and running. I'd like to see it where I can buy e-books from them that work on the Kindle...but I doubt that will happen. I'd buy them, even if they were a little more expensive, to keep the bits of the store going that I enjoy. (I like the physical book, but books take up space, and I'm seriously looking at cutting down the number of phsyical items I actually own.)
This isn't a problem with just B&N, of course. Every time we go to a retail outlet, peruse what they have, then buy it online we cause said retail outlet grief. I guess the same could be said if we bypass them all together, but the online retailers benefit from us being able to review things at an actual store without purchasing them from that store.
The flip side of that, unfortunately, is if the price is too high at the retail store...there's only so much of a premium most are willing to pay to support it.
Yeah, well, the electronic book is here, but the college version of it.... *shudder*. You might spend less for that book - but only have access to it while the class is running...or in my case up to 1 or 2 days before the last day you can schedule your final that counts for 70% of your grade. (Yes, I've been studying, but there's always some last minute niggling thing I want to go over.)
If it were public domain - and CA is trying to do just this - and unencumbered by DRM, or even an e-pub, mobi, or PDF where you can keep the book, that might work, but it seems the mighty scholastic publishers are looking for ways to make you rent books for short periods rather than buy them. The funny thing about that is if they'd just let me have the silly thing I'd only access their site once to get the book, rather than every time I wanted to read it during the course of the class.
If you want to record a particular lecture so it can be re-broadcast, better to have somebody who knows how to do the recording to it then force a professor who doesn't want to try to learn it. Every piece of recording equipment I've ever come across is different, and uses different interfaces, and there are tons of different front end programs to make an end product of the recording. Further, unless you're trained, lighting, placing the mic, etc., etc. aren't things the teacher is going to know how to do, nor should we be wasting their time forcing them to learn. Finally, in a lot of schools, even some universities, many computers the profs have aren't setup to be media editing machines, so they're going to be slow and unwieldy.
Recording a lecture by somebody who knows how and has the equipment - cool.
Trying to record the lecture by somebody who doesn't know how, who should be teaching the class, who doesn't have the time to edit it, etc.? Why bother? You're actually detracting from the class and frustrating both your professor and your students.
The founders believed in the principle that once an idea is shared, even if it's simply one person relating a story to another, the second person has a copy of the idea in his head, and that both people now "own" the idea. That person can then share the idea with others, and that ideas, whether they be musical, artistic, pure science, or engineering should be shared - and in fact could not be owned. That society and one's ideas are built on the foundations of the ideas that came before them.
They also recognized that if an author, engineer, or what have you couldn't make money off of his ideas, he was much less likely to bother to create them in the first place, or if he did create them, he'd do it in the guise of trade secrets that would never become part of the public domain, or private showings in the case of copyright. If an idea isn't shared, the public domain doesn't grow, and advances in the sciences can actually regress because an individual or corporation never shared how to create something.
To encourage works to eventually enter the public domain patents and copyrights were created, granting the author a monopoly of the distribution of his works for a limited time to gain a return on his works. In return, when that time expired his ideas would be available, for free, to everybody. The government makes sure of this by keeping a copy of the registered copyright or patent.
I'm perfectly willing to argue the benefits of a much reduced copyright term, and to explicit DMCA exemptions to allow fair use. That playing the radio at a restaurant doesn't equate to a live performance, and that the adds on the radio are sufficient payment for the rights to play the radio at a work premises. The copyright term could be as little as the founder's 14 years. I believe life of the author OR 25 years, whichever is longer, is equitable, but the term of the copyright could certainly be expanded or contracted. I have no problem with copyright being longer than patents as a patent generally will be used in the creation of other things, while the copyright is very specific and only protects a very specific work.
What I'm not willing to grant is that anything that's ever been written or produced is free game for everybody to download, gratis, the moment the work is published. Even if I were willing to grant this, and lawmakers embraced it, I doubt that freeloaders would get what they wanted. Quality works of art, music, video games, and other media, as well as inventions, take a TON of work. Not as a hobby. Not as something to be done for fun outside of your "real" job or just for the love of it, but AS your real job, and more often as the real job of a whole host of people.
I think a ton of people would stop producing media, or do it in such a fashion that the media becomes much more exclusive. Live concerts only, no pressed CDs, for instance. "Yeah, that's the way it should be man!" Never mind the guy saying this might have gigs of downloaded, studio produced CDs. Forget the PC unless the game requires a net connection. We're into console games only, or games where all the content is run off of some centralized servers and you have to pay to get access to said content. A lot of the applied sciences would dry up as corporations become even more cliquish, hording all of their secrets, rather than protecting them for 25 years - or hording them more than they currently do. And, no, I don't think killing off whole industries or types of content so that we can all get everything for free is healthy. It won't be free, and it'll be MUCH more encumbered than what we currently have.
Unfortunately there's not a great way to stop piracy, but there are ways to limit it. Having a convenient way - ala iTunes, Steam, or other popular digital distribution channel - to get ones work is one way, especially if it's more convenient and safer than torrents or rapidshare. Careful pricing is another. NOT ticking off the paying customers with adds against piracy - that the pirat
This is the problem with any DRM. The BEST one can hope for is that there is finally a Betamax, everybody with said Betamax gets screwed - heretical supporters of the evil competitors, and we eventually get "one format" that everybody can use...and hopefully it lasts long enough to matter. (If B&N had signed a similar deal, then all the Kindle folk would be in trouble.)
I own a Kindle and it still irks me that it won't read unencumbered ePUB.
Eventually I hope a tablet computer with some sort of color reflective and high refresh screen replaces the Kindle/nook/what have you and that the e-reader is just an app on it. Until then, I'm waiting to see who ends up with Betamax. (And who ends up controlling the price / availability of books on e-readers, whatever they happen to be.)
Sure there are times and places where speech can be restricted. I won't argue with you there. Heck, if protesters start doing more than simply waving banners around and calling out the protests - say starting fights or throwing things, then yes, I'd expect the police to do something about it - assuming that they aren't the ones instigating things. (Not usually the case, but it *does* happen.)
And I'll grant you that you did say it appears to be used to curtail speech.
I'm simply calling B.S. on the safety thing. We've had dissenting opinions in public gatherings for politicians for hundreds of years without having to coral people into over packed pens miles from where the where the politicians are.
Having to show support for a fearless leader when he makes a public appearance - be he Republican or Democrat - reeks a bit much of totalitarianism to me. We're not there yet, not by a long shot, but little steps like this help nudge us in that direction.
That "safety" excuse gets thrown around a lot to curtail our constitutional rights. Not just today, but in WWII, and throughout our history.
Generally, when we "come to our senses" we look back at the particular incidents with a bit of shock that we could've done such horrendous things. Japanese internment camps, for instance. Or McCarthyism.
GP - I believe you're right, it was a Supreme Court decision.
Parent - thank you for pointing out that this only limited *corporate* caps - which is the center of my argument.
A corporation *is* made up of people - the corporation itself is not a person. Unfortunately, more and more it's getting the rights of a person while maintaining all the protections of a corporation and separations of consequences that a corporation affords its majority shareholders and board.
In fact, to some extent, corporations are lobbying to become not just individuals, but investigators - without the constraints that the police have to put up with, or even the constraints about breaking and entering of computer equipment that individual must abide by, or consequences for actions of said investigations should they cause damage to the equipment they're investigating. (See Hollywood's campaigns to broaden their rights to snoop on what individuals are doing with their computers, while trying to diminish wire tapping laws, and remove any claims of damages individuals might make in regards to said investigations should the company bork your computer in the course of its "investigation", even if nothing is found on the computer.)
A small fraction of 1% of the "people" of a corporation get to decide the "voice" of said corporation. The voice of the corporation is not even its employees, in most cases, but its majority stock holders.
So here you have this massive multi-national pouring in so many millions of dollars, favors, or whatever into some campaign warchest, and the only people with a voice are the large % stock holders who elect the board, the board itself, and the very senior executives. There is *NO* representation for the minority stock holders or the corporation's employees - and the employees are what enable said corporation to have those millions to poor into campaign contributions.
There are always people who will have a "bigger" voice than others, whether it be because of money, contacts, or what have you, but a corporation is not an individual. Giving the majority stockholders the added boost to their already influential voices of all the output of all the employees and stock holders under them isn't right. It tips the balance way too far in their direction, and they didn't *need* the help making their voices heard.
That's my opinion, even if the Supreme Court disagrees by a narrow 5-4 vote.
There's no maybe about it. It *IS* restricting free speech, and it's *NOT* a safety issue.
Making sure that the protests are nowhere near the event they're protesting so that said protesters don't show up on T.V. It's not even crowd control as there are tons of people there *SUPPORTING* the event.
Should you hold up a placard protesting something - when everybody else in the crowd has been vetted as a supporter, you get hauled off to the free speech zone, or simply arrested.
Cops being inserted into crowds to act as instigators of riots to claim that the crowd is rowdy and arrest everybody when in fact the crowd had been pacific before said undercover throws something or incites something that could be riot like.
It is different if you're on private grounds and the organizers want you to be affiliated in one way or the other, but these things often happen on public ground where it *should be* expected to have both supporting and dissenting voices in the crowd.
For instance... the law that was recently passed repealing a corporation's cap on campaign contributions because it would inhibit free speech... Never mind that the only people "speaking" are the top executives and the board, and that they probably *DO NOT* represent the interests of the thousands of employees that make their paychecks, dividends, and campaign contributions possible.
Glad your friend survived. I'll admit I don't know what his survivability would've looked like with a car with proper side impact safety - it's entirely possible he would not have made it. I was thinking more of freeway speed pileups. A 30mph T-Bone certainly isn't a love tap.
I guess I look at my vehicle purchases a little different. If I'm a contractor hauling stuff all the time, I'll get the truck. If I'm just pulling a commute and running around with friends I'll stick with my car, and rent a moving truck that one day every few years I need it.
If a truck's fun for you, or what you want, go for it. I tend to be more...what am I using it for oriented rather than style or safety oriented...but that's me. It's reflected in the clothes that I wear and the things that I purchase.
I do think the roads would be much safer if most soccer moms/dads had stuck with their mini-vans rather than upgrading to SUVs...though the mini-van is WAY less styleish. Never mind the guy who has a SUV for a commute to a white collar job and never even gets it dusty...but again, that's his choice.
A fun vehicle for me is a cruiser style motorcycle, a Shadow, for instance - and the survivability of one of those in an accident with anything is pretty low compared to even the smallest of compact cars.
Diet and exercise. Sleep habits and genetics. All of this plays into health and your individual body weight. It doesn't really matter if you get your hour of moderate exercise in a day, 6 days a week if you eat 3000+ calories of mostly corn syrup. You're not going to lose weight. Diet isn't that incredibly complicated, not if you boil it down to "don't eat more than your level of activity can reasonably burn off." For most of us in white collar jobs that's probably 2000 or less calories, not our average 3000 or more. If we want to lose weight, then it's probably considerably less. Yes, exercise helps, but it won't cure an obesity problem when we simply eat too much. (Of course, eating less without exercise would simply mean we're lean, unfit people rather than being fat unfit people, but the lean bit would eliminate a lot of health issues - like the rise in diabetes and heart disease.)
*Shrug*. First, it's not our job to feed the starving people in - choose your impoverished 3rd world nation here. We have the corn and wheat to do it, for now. Heck, we find subsidized ways of turning said substances into fuel so it doesn't simply rot. We *DO* contribute tons of food stuffs, probably more than just about anybody specifically for these purposes. (Been a while since I've looked at these numbers.)
Even if it were our job, in many cases we'd have to basically invade the country to make sure the food made it to the impoverished masses, and we do such a *good* job of managing conquered countries after we defeat its military. Even if we did that and didn't make things worse, that wouldn't necessarily solve the *root* problem of too many people for the land and their tech base to support. In some cases food and medical aide causes a temporary increase in the population without adding anything to their ability to grow their own foods and makes things worse. Does that mean I think we should do *nothing*? No, but I do think that outside of disaster relief, we should spend more time really studying the problem rather than simply exporting food, and more effort building infrastructure in those countries than simply making them dependent on food shipments from foreign powers with no real vested interest in keeping those food shipments coming.
Second, we have a *HUGE* obesity problem here, and most of us who eat preprepared foods probably aren't going to go back to eating foods "the way mother nature intended them to be eaten" no matter how much you bitch and whine at people. Hell, tell a person you're going to make their set 400% more efficient on standby, but it'll take less than a minute extra to power up when they get home and you get riots. So if we can find a way to make that lard burger taste like a lard burger with 1/3 less lard - and no nasty surprise side effects - bonus. I'm dubious about our ability to accomplish that, but if we can, I see no reason not to. *More testing would be good before mass release of said foods.* The way we've decided to work, with a 40 hour work week - minimum - for *both* halves of a family, assuming you're not in a single parent home, doesn't help. We spend more time on work, on average, then even the Japanese.
Third - America's obesity problem is slowly becoming the rest of the first world's obesity problem. Cube farms, to me, are at least as detrimental to the health of a country as bad food. Combine the two, along with leisure activities that are also sedentary, and you run into some real problems.
Fourth - if we lazy American's aren't doing the job of feeding the masses, despite exporting more food - even our Franken Foods - than just about anybody, why not have them step in to make up the difference? Heck, maybe they'd have a fresh idea or two. Or, get *your* community jazzed about - *pick your favorite charity here.*
That's not to say that we don't use our current economic and military might in ways that are incredibly sort sighted and very much corporate profits now, let the next generation worry about the consequences way, but if we're doing such a shoddy job of aide, please, encourage others to pick up the slack, or do so yourself.
For better or worse we've become a white collar work force with *LONG* hours. Even if we start changing our culture so we're more active - both in the workforce and recreational - those changes take time, and many won't make the change. If we manage to get foods to those who won't make the change that are just as filling, taste just about as good, but contain 50% less calories, corn syrup, and salt, then why not? I do agree that it should be clearly labeled for those who want to avoid it, and it'd be nice to see the foods tested for more than they generally are, but "fast food" is already known to be about as processed and bad for you as it gets. If we can make it *less bad*, then that would go a ways to making millions more healthy. The trick, of course, is making it less bad rather than worse.
Do a google search for lab results showing rats getting fatter off of the same number of calories from corn syrup than the others who had sugar.
And a transition from a blue collar, at least semi-active lifestyle to cube farms, T.V., and video games. The cube farms really don't help with choice of food.
If a big rig hits you, and it's more than just a love tap, it doesn't really matter what you're riding in.
Further, while I've seen some crazy stuff from big rigs, mostly it's the idiot cars around the big rigs that are the danger. If you respect them and give them room, you're not likely to get hit by them. If you squeeze into that spot that a car might have trouble stopping for, but it's a semi you've just cut off...
Or an even better maneuver. That tipple trailer hauling rock trying to make a right turn? Yeah, just slide into that "space" to the right of him for your turn...go for it.
What you're getting with the Pandora is a hand-held, arm powered laptop - umpc if you prefer - with OpenGLES 2.xaccelerated graphics. Play your videos and music with it. Mix music, browse the web, do your normal desktop stuff with it, emulate arcade games, NES games, or, potentially, N64 games. Tinker with it to your heart's content. Put Android OS on it. Develop your own games for it. Or play some of the games the development community's been working on, or ported.
It's not for everybody, but it's one of the first open consoles to have accelerated 3D which makes it exciting for a bunch of us home brew guys. It also has wifi and bluetooth. The wifi is a nice touch as I anticipate decent network play on some of the games.
It'll never rival the PSP or DS for sales, which eliminates the larger software houses as developers, but there are independent developers who've expressed interest in it.
What'll be interesting to see is how much interest it has two months(tm) after the first batchers have their Pandoras in their hands and some of the projects targeted for it get released. Even if round 2 doesn't have many orders, I believe the current batch of developers will give the hand-held their enthusiastic support. If it DOES have decent sales, the potential to interest at least a few published independent game developers increases dramatically.
I don't believe the problem is with markup - and yes, you can do that with HTML. (It's not pretty, and to do it quickly would require a program designed to do it, but css and z-index...no problem.) 'Course, this is all a software problem, not a format of the document problem. (HTML is meant to be flow-able to many different sized screens, making markup a tad more difficult, but you could easily convert to PDF or make your "marked up" copy use absolute positioning.)
The problem is with the "tablet" style computer that's just not quite there yet. Even "good" pens have atrocious accuracy compared to a pen or pencil on paper. They're expensive. If they're not using the SLOW e-ink, they need to be charged frequently. They don't support multiple pen widths very well...
One problem that haunts computers is the many format issue, and what document tracking pedagogy to you submit it to. When people are on different systems, things can quickly become a pain. Having something like an XML document that gets parsed to whatever end-use format it needs to be can take care of some of that.
The screen technology is coming along. We have black & white e-ink, and they're working on color. I believe refresh rates can be improved.
To me, the biggest problem is the "feel" of the stylus on the screen, whatever it happens to be. Fix that, let economies of scale work for a few years, and we'll have a working usable 8.5x11color e-ink - or reflective TFT, or whatever - tablet with wireless and most the horsepower of a modern laptop in a form factor of a kindle DX. Then the only problem is software - which is usually where the real stumbling blocks are.
I don't believe we'll ever totally get away from the notebook - you can rip sheets from it and give it to people who don't have your wonderful tablet, but you can get awfully close.
Depends. Eventually, I can see everything being robotized. (And they already have public self cleaning toilets that don't use the standard toilet brush.) A good interim / cheap step is a humanoid robot, and once everything is robotized you'll probably have one humanoid anyway to do maintenance on stuff, with a butler's pantry to do maintenance on itself. A lot of devices - like the bathroom cleaning bot - would simply be plugged in. The car-bot would run off of whatever energy is already being produced for the car. Some things would need to be autonomous, but probably not that many. For a lot of things, you'd have to have a semi-expensive device anyway, so robotizing it wouldn't be THAT much more expensive. *SHRUG* We're a ways away from it anyway. We can't even get a "smart" home to work right. But I look forward to the commute-bot 3000, the chores-bot 2200, which, with the separate personality plugin could also be your personal secretary bot 2300. Yeah, there'll be plugins for those other bedroom needs eventually as well, and they'll have the same social stigma, for a while at least, as the blowup dolls do now. Least if it can do all the other stuff it should be self cleaning.
And in one of his books of Robots short stories, there are similar robots that get awfully close to breaking the 3 laws and doing stuff because "it's for the meatbags' own good." The ones that had elevated themselves into either gods, or at the least guardian angels for you and I. There was another story where the 3rd law - to protect the robot's own self - was made much more powerful, and the other two laws less powerful, so that the robots found themselves having troubles following "weak" orders when it threatened their own existence. You combine this with Asimov's 0th law of robotics - the idea of humanity being more important than an individual, and you get something that could actually come close to the action movie that was the Will Smith version of I Robot.
The thing I didn't like about that movie, and the newest Sherlock Holmes movie, is they ignore the original author's feel for the original work. They take stories that are a lot more cerebral than the respective genres often produce and make them into just another summer action flick. Both movies are fine if you can get past the title, or if they were called anything other than what they were called, but using the title kind ruins it for me. Neither Asimov's Robots, nor Sherlock Holmes are accurate representations of the authors' original works, even allowing for the cutting that has to be done to get a novel to a reasonable feature film length. Sorry, point of the post drifting...stopping now.
If, as an author, I was guaranteed that I could not choose my publisher, and for a limited time how my works were published, I wouldn't become an author. I would discourage anybody else from writing as well. Copyright has a place in society, and does not hurt the economy. The people making speculative works have a right to be paid for them if the risk of writing those works - risk in time, effort, and money - finds a market for them.
The crazy copyright terms we have today, sure, they're messed up. I think life of the author or 25 years, whichever is longer seems about right. (If a parent dies, his works can support his kids for a bit.) Works for hire, make them 25 years like patents. If somebody said no, that's too random, make it a straight 25-50 years instead, that would be okay too.
Many people only purchase things from legitimate sources, but what happens when every source becomes legitimate? Also, if every source is legitimate, how can I easily tell which sources are actually paying the authors, assuming I want them to receive money for their work? When I can purchase a book from the author's publisher legally, or go with an equally legal pulp book producer who gives nothing back to the author? What about making legitimate downloads, for money or not, legal from day one? None of this will benefit anybody in the least. Sure, for a short while we'll have a boon of stuff that's already published. Eventually; however, your free gravy train of content will dry up. Maybe musicians will continue to work bars and do shows, but authors don't have those venues. Movies don't either. (And why would a theater pay Hollywood for a film if they can display it for free?)
Our current system is not perfect. It wasn't perfect when the founders put it into place way back when and limited to 14 years. It was an acknowledgement that, even at the time, the overhead of allowing a limited monopoly so that authors could get paid for their works was an acceptable compromise to have those works produced in the first place.