- President: elected to lead society and make executive decisions, i.e. intentionally put in a position to wield semi-arbitrary power and also directly representative of the highest office of government, so to show respect is to recognise this arrangement
- Judge: in this case, you must show respect precisely because you are submitting to the rule of law and placing yourself in the Court's hands
In contrast, a police officer is there to "serve and protect" you, but does not wield any arbitrary authority or represent any high office - they, personally, are not in any sense in charge of you or a leader of society. They only interact with you when there are question of safety or crime.
You pay their salaries. They are subordinate to the executive branch of government, which is subordinate to the legislature, which is subordinate to YOU and every other citizen.
They should be calling you sir. You should be dealing with them in a polite but not deferential manner. Otherwise you are recognising that they hold some form of authority 'at large' over you, rather than merely an authority which is activated by a combination of the valid application of democratically passed laws and your conduct.
Er... there's one person who goes to court more than a "few times" who is in an excellent position to detect rehearsed testimony: the judge. Defence counsel should also be wise to the possibility of rehearsed evidence.
I don't know about American courts, but in Australia you would also be entitled to test the credit of the witness, which IIRC might include leading evidence of identical testimony given by the same witness in other cases.
This all out anti-advertising stance is just fucking ignorant.
OP presumably has access to the internet. If he/she decides he/she needs a particular product, Google and other search/shopping services are readily available and will grant access to comprehensive independent information, reviews, technical specifications, pricing, etc etc etc.
If something radically innovative comes onto the market, you can rest assured that the media will report about it widely as 'news'.
So what is the purpose of commercial advertising, if not to affect your buying decision in ways which are not purely objective and rational? Answer, there is none.
There are a huge number of different methods, and some are manipulative certainly, others are simply informative.
Really? Show me an advertisement where a business points out the downsides as well as the upsides to their product. Because that would be "informative". Otherwise, it is "manipulative", because it implies that the product only has upsides.
Copyright law as we know it today was instituted to create incentive to submit works to an official library for archival purposes, so that your work would not be lost, and that you do not have the right to profit
(a) You're American I assume, modern copyright has varying origins not all of them from the USA
(b) I'd love to see a source for this assertion anyway
The same reason you can use ideas that you've heard elsewhere and repeat them verbatim or modify them based on other ideas that you've heard/read or thought up. All without paying someone for the use of an idea that they "came up with". How on earth can we have conversations if people that come up with ideas aren't paid a licensing fee each time they're used?
Actually, if you repeat them verbatim you may be infringing copyright. If you use only the concepts and ideas, you will not be. So by all means, go ahead and use the ideas you got from listening to a Pink Floyd album.
I suggest you read up on the idea/expression dichotomy.
Doh! Copyright ALREADY starts from the date of registration. And if you aren't registering your copyrights, then you don't care about the commercial value to begin with.
Ah, the sweet, undeniable evidence that you don't know anything about copyright, which was already fairly apparent from your rantings in other comments...
Yes, but we won't all be in a position to mass produce, distribute and market the work in question, and to make a profit because people want the original work but will still purchase a specific article embodying a copy of the work in order to experience it.
Copyright is about securing a living for creative "folks", and thereby giving them an incentive to create. It's exactly what it was originally designed for - there was a view that many authors of great books had suffered material hardship because their dedication to writing had prevented them from making a living, and that they should be given some way to make a living so that writing books was less of a burden.
Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Print- ed, Reprinted, and Published Books, and other Writings, without the Con- sent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Fami- lies: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write use- ful Books;
Ok. This is an argument I have used myself in debates (I go for the "infinite Ferraris for free" variant).
So if we accept that creators will make new chairs even if they don't have a monopoly on a particular kind of chair they make, I have a question for you: why do you need to take a copy of the chair from the guy who would prefer that you not copy his chair? Why can't you just copy your chair from one of these people who will apparently happily churn out chair designs for you to use as you see fit?
And, in fact, where are all of these chair makers? In music terms, other than Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, where are the "chair makers" who are happy to create high quality IP and have it distributed for no fee?
The easiest way to defeat the copyright system would be to exclusively use and enjoy non-copyright works. So why doesn't this happen? After all, by your reasoning the equivalent quality and quantity stuff will be produced either way.
Another issue: since when is having "zero marginal cost" associated with more users a reason to conclude that someone should have no ability to exploit that thing for financial gain? Hypothetical: a man opens a zoo. It can cater to 10,000 people per day without costing him any more in overheads. Only about 2,000 people come through each day at the moment. Does this mean that he should be required to let another 8,000 people into his zoo for free each day? After all, there is zero marginal cost for each additional patron. Why shouldn't those 8,000 people see the animals? They're just sitting there whether the people go through or not, after all.
You could use the same analogy with a half-empty movie theatre, a half-empty concert, a half empty aeroplane...
Ohhh! So now YOU are deciding when "they" have made enough money. Gee, what a hypocrite.
No, I am suggesting an amount of time which would give someone a reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work however they see fit. Unlike you, I am not basing my suggestion on whether they have made "enough" money, I am basing it on the practicalities of exploiting creative work.
And do they not provide a valuable service - that of putting the words in a tangible form and then distributing it to you so that you can read it while sitting on the toilet? Are you saying that they do not deserve to profit from such work?
Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book. You must love the phone book - it's totally free and has a huge number of excellently printed words in it.
I don't know. Why do you work to acquire money (assuming you do)? After all, it's just an artificial creation of society, with no intrinsic value. Therefore, I assume you have no objection if society caps your wealth at a level which will make you reasonably comfortable, and takes the rest? Come on, fair's fair, those pieces of paper had no value until the government declared that they did.
I also noticed you had some possession there. You maybe have a few too many, so the government might just take a few if that's ok. After all, property rights are also a creation of society, aren't they? So you can't really complain. Without society, you'd be getting clubbed by a neighbouring tribesman who would take all of your stuff, not just some of it. Really, you should be grateful....and so on...
Wouldn't society be better served by this than having them suck gin by the pool for the rest of their life?
just sayin...
Since when do bands, or anyone else, have to work for "society"? If they have made something amazing enough that they never have to work again, good for them.
You might argue that they work for society because society created the legal rights they have in their work in the first place. But on the other hand, if there were no copyright at all, maybe they would never have gotten as far as Dark Side of the Moon...
Sure. Why not? Everyone will be able to use it for free so I'm not sure why your using the boogey man of large corporations. Take a band like Green Day. Would it kill them to stop receiving royalties on music they made 15 years ago? They'd still be pulling in cash on the stuff they've done recently.
Why not? Why?
What I like is the implication that you somehow have a right to their work. Why do you get to decide that they have made "enough" money from something?
The "boogey man" of large corporations was mentioned in my earlier post because they are precisely the ones who would benefit in tangible financial terms. For instance, people are likely to still buy physical books and other media, so even if they only cost a few bucks the companies with the means to manufacture and distribute those things will still make money.
I don't agree with endless or ridiculously long copyright, but I think that people who high handedly assert that it should be very short are not thinking it through. Something like 30 years from the date of creation or the lifetime of the creator, whichever is longer, seems reasonable to me.
I think it is necessary to distinguish between patents and copyright.
Patent = limited duration government-backed monopoly in exchange for eventually putting the details of how to do/make the thing in question into the public domain.
Copyright = protection of creative expression from exploitation by third parties in recognition of the efforts of the creator.
Patents are naturally fairly short, because otherwise there is likely to be little value in the idea in question by the time the monopoly is lifted. Patents are useful because the specific ideas they protect give us new and better ways to do things.
Copyright, on the other hand, is not directly premised on the notion of an exchange of a particular idea for value (you get a monopoly, then we all get to use your idea). Instead, it is designed to make the act of creation financially rewarding in and of itself by providing a mechanism by which the creator can exploit the work. This has the general effect of making creative work an appealing thing for people to do, which means that overall more creative work will (theoretically) be done.
You could, of course, choose not to patent a great idea you have, but instead keep its details secret and make your money by producing items or services using the idea. If you can manage to do this in a way which cannot be reverse engineered, or by being so far ahead of the curve that others cannot effectively compete with you, then you can make money from your idea indefinitely without patenting it in any way.
In addition, an idea expressed in a copyright work would not itself be protected - it is the expression only, not the idea, which is protected. So if I write a copyright book which explains how to do or make a particular thing in a better way, there is absolutely nothing to stop you using my book to do or make the thing in question, so long as you avoid reproducing my words verbatim.
If one album can only guarantee income for 5 years, then they would be encouraged to, i don't know, make another one! Or perhaps get out and find a real job. Either would be better for society as a whole.
As I have posted above in reply to someone else, you are assuming that work has value which is at its highest immediately upon its creation and then declines steadily from there.
But what about, say, an author. He writes a novel today which is published in limited circulation and does moderately well. In 2015 he publishes another novel, which through a combination of quality, good timing and strong support from his publisher turns into a big hit and gets rave reviews. Suddenly some of the reviewers start reading his first novel, and realise that it's actually even better than the second one.
So, on your theory, his publisher is now entitled to make millions selling physical copies of his first novel (for people will surely still buy physical books, no matter how great the Kindle or whatever becomes) while the author gets nothing for his "imaginary" property.
Oh, and yes, some works of art are sufficiently great that I have no problem whatsoever with the artist living for the rest of their lives from the proceeds. Dark Side of the Moon racked up over 1500 weeks in the Billboard charts, and as far as I am concerned Pink Floyd deserve every penny they make from it. But on your random 5 year system they would have lost 23 years worth of royalties because society somehow deserves to have their unique creative work for free. Lazy Pink Floyd, go and record another masterpiece, dammit!
Why should you indefinitely? 5 years should be enough to capitalize and come up with something new to sell.
What if, like many creative people, you struggle in obscurity for years before gaining a reputation?
When you get your big break and your work finally has some real dollar value, should large corporates be entitled to move in and use your work for free?
Re:Speaking as a valve fanboy and steam early adop
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The Age of Steam
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For the amount of money that I payed for TF2 and the hours I've spent playing it, I feel like I have already gotten the better end of the deal.
I will never understand why someone would ever think that it's ok for a random company to both install unneccessary software on your computer and then require that you phone home and report to them every time you use a piece of software developed by another company. It's not that some of the features of Steam aren't useful - it's that many of them are absolutely not needed.
Example, once you install a game via Steam, and even once you activate it, why the hell does it have to phone home when you play it? Not needed for any legitimate purpose other than Valve spying on you. If you want to install a patch, fine, but that should be up to you, not enforced to a point where you are not even allowed to play a game without first patching it.
Yes, Steam isn't installing Secu-rom on your PC - but it is installing an invasive, internet-enabled piece of monitoring and access-control software over which you have no control whatsoever. Give me secu-rom any day.
Steam is an excellent advertisement for piracy, in my opinion.
Same experience here - I was using VLC religiously, but having tried Media Player Classic Homecinema and ffdshow I will not be going back any time soon. It's faster, a better range of videos are playable, it uses fewer resources and seems to do much better with media being played from slowish sources (e.g. over wifi, where VLC would screw up massively or do weird things with buffers).
My XP box that I'm using now at work (2 core 2.33 GHz Xeon) boot Windows REALLY fast. It is under 30 seconds to get to the "Ctrl-Alt-Del to login" screen. It's great.
Then you log in.
Then you wait 5 minutes or so for it to finish loading everything and settle down enough to be usable (the desktop comes up nearly instantly but can't be used). If you open Outlook (as I have to), you're waiting another 5 minutes for that too.
Honestly, what the hell are you running on it?
I run three XP machines, one desktop at home, one laptop and one work desktop. They are running a Phenom II, Centrino dual core and Core 2 Duo respectively. My home desktop and laptop both run minimal (read: no) crudware, just an antivirus program on each and some touchpad software on the laptop. My work PC runs approximately 10 random work-related pieces of software on boot (IAAL, we have a tonne of document management type software on our PCs).
Boot times for these are:
1. Home desktop - power on to login: under 15 seconds; login to usable desktop: 1 second.
2. Laptop - power on to login: under 20 seconds; login to usable desktop: 2 seconds.
3. Work desktop - power on to login: under 15 seconds; login to usable desktop: 3-4 seconds.
All of these machines are running XP SP2. So, on average, I have three relatively modern machines which boot to the login screen in under 20 seconds, and at most take 4 seconds to give me a usable desktop. I have seen a brand spanking new Powermac which doesn't even come close to those times.
Thus, I am rather dubious as to why your machine is taking "5 minutes or so" to "finish loading everything and settle down". May I suggest the following causes:
1. Massive quantity of completely unneccessary crap running on startup. From the phrase "My Mac is almost never off" I am guessing you may be an Apple person - my housemate was an Apple afficionado and I found him running XP with literally two dozen random programs automatically firing up at startup, blithely unaware of the fact that this is an incredibly bad idea. This may well be Microsoft's poor OS design (third party software shouldn't be able to do that except in exceptional cases IMHO) but unlike OSX everything you install is going to try to run itself at startup but virtually none of it is necessary or desirable. Kill it all by deleting it from the startup folder in the Start Menu and by running "msconfig" (start->run->type msconfig->enter) and getting rid of it.
2. Crappy piece of hardware doing something it shouldn't at startup. Do you have a shoddy wireless card? A crappy printer or scanner? Something else which is molesting your interrupts on startup? This can slow things down immensely. If so, find it and destroy it.
3. Insufficient RAM. XP should be fairly happy with even 512 megs, but once you are running a few programs on startup it can creep up over the 1GB mark - so 2GB or even 4GB of RAM will make a massive difference to some systems (4GB being slightly over what XP can actually use, but close enough to the max to be worthwhile).
4. Unoptimised XP install. Have you killed System Restore? Have you set a static pagefile size? There are a couple of dozen little things which can and should be set in XP which dramatically improve the performance of the OS.
There is no way in hell XP should take more than 10 seconds or so to get to a usable desktop. If it does, you are doing something wrong.
Every time there is a discussion about boot times, someone very much like yourself comes out with the old chestnut of "are you so important and impatient that you can't wait 30 seconds for a PC to boot". I assume you guys have a secret clubhouse somewhere where you meet to discuss your strategy for defending the indefensible, but anyway...
Could this logic not be applied to any situation? E.g. you double click on an icon to start a program and your computer needlessly pauses for 15-30 seconds - but don't get mad, after all your life isn't so full that you can't wait less than a minute, right?
I honestly don't know what the crap PCs are doing in that 30-40 seconds. If it's scanning for hardware changes, well, newsflash, most people don't change their hardware every time they boot. I do know this: I currently have a clean XPSP2 installation on a system based on an AMD Phenom II 940, and it boots to desktop in under 15 seconds. Yet my last PC (Athlon XP 3000+) somehow took 40 seconds to boot to desktop. There is something totally arbitrary and unneccessary happening on most Windows machines which makes them boot much more slowly than they need to.
I've got some very bad news for you, despite your smugness about our wonderful system of government (I am Australian).
There is no law that needs to be passed. The law has been on the books since this Howard years. This is merely the passage of new regulations by the Minister, which is not something which must be agreed to by parliament.
So, ironically, you ARE finding out "18 months after it was implemented".
This is the problem with bad lawmaking - it's effects are not always apparent until much later, by which time god-knows-who might be in control of the executive arm of government.
IAAAAIPL (I am also an Australian IP lawyer... yes, there are millions of us).
Although I agree that in general our IP laws need an overhaul, I strongly feel that the most 'ridiculous' parts are NOT the UK/common law derived ones, but rather the statutory ones imposed virtually unilaterally by our American friends. So I am slightly surprised that a lecturer in Australian IP law is so quick to condemn our system as flawed by implcit comparison to the US when the biggest problems within it are caused by TRIPS and the US-Australia FTA (that latter of which, IIRC, imposed some DMCA-style obligations on Australia in exchange for the honour of trading with the USA - whatever that's worth now).
You have also failed to mention that you cannot actually copyright a single fact - it is the compilation of facts into a particular form which is capable of attracting copyright. So if the timetable contained one piece of information, "Train X leaves at 10:00pm" then (assuming you didn't use the identical choice of words) that fact per se is not subject to copyright. But when you compile 10,000 of these into a table and publish that, it is subject to copyright.
Although this differs from the US system, one argument in favour of it is that there should be protection for the skill and labour exerted in the production of a compilation of facts, notwithstanding that there is no "creative" expression. This reflects the non-US origins of Australian copyright law.
Slashdot Mirror
Both of your examples highlight my point, though:
- President: elected to lead society and make executive decisions, i.e. intentionally put in a position to wield semi-arbitrary power and also directly representative of the highest office of government, so to show respect is to recognise this arrangement
- Judge: in this case, you must show respect precisely because you are submitting to the rule of law and placing yourself in the Court's hands
In contrast, a police officer is there to "serve and protect" you, but does not wield any arbitrary authority or represent any high office - they, personally, are not in any sense in charge of you or a leader of society. They only interact with you when there are question of safety or crime.
I find this mentality totally mystifying too.
You pay their salaries. They are subordinate to the executive branch of government, which is subordinate to the legislature, which is subordinate to YOU and every other citizen.
They should be calling you sir. You should be dealing with them in a polite but not deferential manner. Otherwise you are recognising that they hold some form of authority 'at large' over you, rather than merely an authority which is activated by a combination of the valid application of democratically passed laws and your conduct.
Er... there's one person who goes to court more than a "few times" who is in an excellent position to detect rehearsed testimony: the judge. Defence counsel should also be wise to the possibility of rehearsed evidence.
I don't know about American courts, but in Australia you would also be entitled to test the credit of the witness, which IIRC might include leading evidence of identical testimony given by the same witness in other cases.
OP presumably has access to the internet. If he/she decides he/she needs a particular product, Google and other search/shopping services are readily available and will grant access to comprehensive independent information, reviews, technical specifications, pricing, etc etc etc.
If something radically innovative comes onto the market, you can rest assured that the media will report about it widely as 'news'.
So what is the purpose of commercial advertising, if not to affect your buying decision in ways which are not purely objective and rational? Answer, there is none.
Really? Show me an advertisement where a business points out the downsides as well as the upsides to their product. Because that would be "informative". Otherwise, it is "manipulative", because it implies that the product only has upsides.
(a) You're American I assume, modern copyright has varying origins not all of them from the USA
(b) I'd love to see a source for this assertion anyway
Actually, if you repeat them verbatim you may be infringing copyright. If you use only the concepts and ideas, you will not be. So by all means, go ahead and use the ideas you got from listening to a Pink Floyd album.
I suggest you read up on the idea/expression dichotomy.
Ah, the sweet, undeniable evidence that you don't know anything about copyright, which was already fairly apparent from your rantings in other comments...
Yes, but we won't all be in a position to mass produce, distribute and market the work in question, and to make a profit because people want the original work but will still purchase a specific article embodying a copy of the work in order to experience it.
Copyright is about securing a living for creative "folks", and thereby giving them an incentive to create. It's exactly what it was originally designed for - there was a view that many authors of great books had suffered material hardship because their dedication to writing had prevented them from making a living, and that they should be given some way to make a living so that writing books was less of a burden.
From the Statute of Anne:
Ok. This is an argument I have used myself in debates (I go for the "infinite Ferraris for free" variant).
So if we accept that creators will make new chairs even if they don't have a monopoly on a particular kind of chair they make, I have a question for you: why do you need to take a copy of the chair from the guy who would prefer that you not copy his chair? Why can't you just copy your chair from one of these people who will apparently happily churn out chair designs for you to use as you see fit?
And, in fact, where are all of these chair makers? In music terms, other than Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, where are the "chair makers" who are happy to create high quality IP and have it distributed for no fee?
The easiest way to defeat the copyright system would be to exclusively use and enjoy non-copyright works. So why doesn't this happen? After all, by your reasoning the equivalent quality and quantity stuff will be produced either way.
Another issue: since when is having "zero marginal cost" associated with more users a reason to conclude that someone should have no ability to exploit that thing for financial gain? Hypothetical: a man opens a zoo. It can cater to 10,000 people per day without costing him any more in overheads. Only about 2,000 people come through each day at the moment. Does this mean that he should be required to let another 8,000 people into his zoo for free each day? After all, there is zero marginal cost for each additional patron. Why shouldn't those 8,000 people see the animals? They're just sitting there whether the people go through or not, after all.
You could use the same analogy with a half-empty movie theatre, a half-empty concert, a half empty aeroplane...
No, I am suggesting an amount of time which would give someone a reasonable opportunity to exploit their own work however they see fit. Unlike you, I am not basing my suggestion on whether they have made "enough" money, I am basing it on the practicalities of exploiting creative work.
Apparently you regard the service of printing and distributing a book to be far more valuable than the service of actually creating the words which go into that book. You must love the phone book - it's totally free and has a huge number of excellently printed words in it.
I don't know. Why do you work to acquire money (assuming you do)? After all, it's just an artificial creation of society, with no intrinsic value. Therefore, I assume you have no objection if society caps your wealth at a level which will make you reasonably comfortable, and takes the rest? Come on, fair's fair, those pieces of paper had no value until the government declared that they did.
I also noticed you had some possession there. You maybe have a few too many, so the government might just take a few if that's ok. After all, property rights are also a creation of society, aren't they? So you can't really complain. Without society, you'd be getting clubbed by a neighbouring tribesman who would take all of your stuff, not just some of it. Really, you should be grateful. ...and so on...
Since when do bands, or anyone else, have to work for "society"? If they have made something amazing enough that they never have to work again, good for them.
You might argue that they work for society because society created the legal rights they have in their work in the first place. But on the other hand, if there were no copyright at all, maybe they would never have gotten as far as Dark Side of the Moon...
This is a remarkably stupid way of thinking about creative work.
Many great artists only had one or two truly great works in them. Some only created one (such as JD Salinger).
Art is not a commodity which can be cranked out like a Model T Ford, and it does not obey the calculus of supply and demand.
Why not? Why?
What I like is the implication that you somehow have a right to their work. Why do you get to decide that they have made "enough" money from something?
The "boogey man" of large corporations was mentioned in my earlier post because they are precisely the ones who would benefit in tangible financial terms. For instance, people are likely to still buy physical books and other media, so even if they only cost a few bucks the companies with the means to manufacture and distribute those things will still make money.
I don't agree with endless or ridiculously long copyright, but I think that people who high handedly assert that it should be very short are not thinking it through. Something like 30 years from the date of creation or the lifetime of the creator, whichever is longer, seems reasonable to me.
I think it is necessary to distinguish between patents and copyright.
Patent = limited duration government-backed monopoly in exchange for eventually putting the details of how to do/make the thing in question into the public domain.
Copyright = protection of creative expression from exploitation by third parties in recognition of the efforts of the creator.
Patents are naturally fairly short, because otherwise there is likely to be little value in the idea in question by the time the monopoly is lifted. Patents are useful because the specific ideas they protect give us new and better ways to do things.
Copyright, on the other hand, is not directly premised on the notion of an exchange of a particular idea for value (you get a monopoly, then we all get to use your idea). Instead, it is designed to make the act of creation financially rewarding in and of itself by providing a mechanism by which the creator can exploit the work. This has the general effect of making creative work an appealing thing for people to do, which means that overall more creative work will (theoretically) be done.
You could, of course, choose not to patent a great idea you have, but instead keep its details secret and make your money by producing items or services using the idea. If you can manage to do this in a way which cannot be reverse engineered, or by being so far ahead of the curve that others cannot effectively compete with you, then you can make money from your idea indefinitely without patenting it in any way.
In addition, an idea expressed in a copyright work would not itself be protected - it is the expression only, not the idea, which is protected. So if I write a copyright book which explains how to do or make a particular thing in a better way, there is absolutely nothing to stop you using my book to do or make the thing in question, so long as you avoid reproducing my words verbatim.
As I have posted above in reply to someone else, you are assuming that work has value which is at its highest immediately upon its creation and then declines steadily from there.
But what about, say, an author. He writes a novel today which is published in limited circulation and does moderately well. In 2015 he publishes another novel, which through a combination of quality, good timing and strong support from his publisher turns into a big hit and gets rave reviews. Suddenly some of the reviewers start reading his first novel, and realise that it's actually even better than the second one.
So, on your theory, his publisher is now entitled to make millions selling physical copies of his first novel (for people will surely still buy physical books, no matter how great the Kindle or whatever becomes) while the author gets nothing for his "imaginary" property.
Oh, and yes, some works of art are sufficiently great that I have no problem whatsoever with the artist living for the rest of their lives from the proceeds. Dark Side of the Moon racked up over 1500 weeks in the Billboard charts, and as far as I am concerned Pink Floyd deserve every penny they make from it. But on your random 5 year system they would have lost 23 years worth of royalties because society somehow deserves to have their unique creative work for free. Lazy Pink Floyd, go and record another masterpiece, dammit!
What if, like many creative people, you struggle in obscurity for years before gaining a reputation?
When you get your big break and your work finally has some real dollar value, should large corporates be entitled to move in and use your work for free?
I will never understand why someone would ever think that it's ok for a random company to both install unneccessary software on your computer and then require that you phone home and report to them every time you use a piece of software developed by another company. It's not that some of the features of Steam aren't useful - it's that many of them are absolutely not needed.
Example, once you install a game via Steam, and even once you activate it, why the hell does it have to phone home when you play it? Not needed for any legitimate purpose other than Valve spying on you. If you want to install a patch, fine, but that should be up to you, not enforced to a point where you are not even allowed to play a game without first patching it.
Yes, Steam isn't installing Secu-rom on your PC - but it is installing an invasive, internet-enabled piece of monitoring and access-control software over which you have no control whatsoever. Give me secu-rom any day.
Steam is an excellent advertisement for piracy, in my opinion.
Same experience here - I was using VLC religiously, but having tried Media Player Classic Homecinema and ffdshow I will not be going back any time soon. It's faster, a better range of videos are playable, it uses fewer resources and seems to do much better with media being played from slowish sources (e.g. over wifi, where VLC would screw up massively or do weird things with buffers).
Honestly, what the hell are you running on it?
I run three XP machines, one desktop at home, one laptop and one work desktop. They are running a Phenom II, Centrino dual core and Core 2 Duo respectively. My home desktop and laptop both run minimal (read: no) crudware, just an antivirus program on each and some touchpad software on the laptop. My work PC runs approximately 10 random work-related pieces of software on boot (IAAL, we have a tonne of document management type software on our PCs).
Boot times for these are:
1. Home desktop - power on to login: under 15 seconds; login to usable desktop: 1 second.
2. Laptop - power on to login: under 20 seconds; login to usable desktop: 2 seconds.
3. Work desktop - power on to login: under 15 seconds; login to usable desktop: 3-4 seconds.
All of these machines are running XP SP2. So, on average, I have three relatively modern machines which boot to the login screen in under 20 seconds, and at most take 4 seconds to give me a usable desktop. I have seen a brand spanking new Powermac which doesn't even come close to those times.
Thus, I am rather dubious as to why your machine is taking "5 minutes or so" to "finish loading everything and settle down". May I suggest the following causes:
1. Massive quantity of completely unneccessary crap running on startup. From the phrase "My Mac is almost never off" I am guessing you may be an Apple person - my housemate was an Apple afficionado and I found him running XP with literally two dozen random programs automatically firing up at startup, blithely unaware of the fact that this is an incredibly bad idea. This may well be Microsoft's poor OS design (third party software shouldn't be able to do that except in exceptional cases IMHO) but unlike OSX everything you install is going to try to run itself at startup but virtually none of it is necessary or desirable. Kill it all by deleting it from the startup folder in the Start Menu and by running "msconfig" (start->run->type msconfig->enter) and getting rid of it.
2. Crappy piece of hardware doing something it shouldn't at startup. Do you have a shoddy wireless card? A crappy printer or scanner? Something else which is molesting your interrupts on startup? This can slow things down immensely. If so, find it and destroy it.
3. Insufficient RAM. XP should be fairly happy with even 512 megs, but once you are running a few programs on startup it can creep up over the 1GB mark - so 2GB or even 4GB of RAM will make a massive difference to some systems (4GB being slightly over what XP can actually use, but close enough to the max to be worthwhile).
4. Unoptimised XP install. Have you killed System Restore? Have you set a static pagefile size? There are a couple of dozen little things which can and should be set in XP which dramatically improve the performance of the OS.
There is no way in hell XP should take more than 10 seconds or so to get to a usable desktop. If it does, you are doing something wrong.
My powers of deduction tell me you are either a taxi driver or an airline pilot.
Every time there is a discussion about boot times, someone very much like yourself comes out with the old chestnut of "are you so important and impatient that you can't wait 30 seconds for a PC to boot". I assume you guys have a secret clubhouse somewhere where you meet to discuss your strategy for defending the indefensible, but anyway...
Could this logic not be applied to any situation? E.g. you double click on an icon to start a program and your computer needlessly pauses for 15-30 seconds - but don't get mad, after all your life isn't so full that you can't wait less than a minute, right?
I honestly don't know what the crap PCs are doing in that 30-40 seconds. If it's scanning for hardware changes, well, newsflash, most people don't change their hardware every time they boot. I do know this: I currently have a clean XPSP2 installation on a system based on an AMD Phenom II 940, and it boots to desktop in under 15 seconds. Yet my last PC (Athlon XP 3000+) somehow took 40 seconds to boot to desktop. There is something totally arbitrary and unneccessary happening on most Windows machines which makes them boot much more slowly than they need to.
No, Australia is a constitutional monarchy while the USA is a republic.
They are both democracies in the ordinary sense of the word.
I've got some very bad news for you, despite your smugness about our wonderful system of government (I am Australian).
There is no law that needs to be passed. The law has been on the books since this Howard years. This is merely the passage of new regulations by the Minister, which is not something which must be agreed to by parliament.
So, ironically, you ARE finding out "18 months after it was implemented".
This is the problem with bad lawmaking - it's effects are not always apparent until much later, by which time god-knows-who might be in control of the executive arm of government.
IAAAAIPL (I am also an Australian IP lawyer... yes, there are millions of us).
Although I agree that in general our IP laws need an overhaul, I strongly feel that the most 'ridiculous' parts are NOT the UK/common law derived ones, but rather the statutory ones imposed virtually unilaterally by our American friends. So I am slightly surprised that a lecturer in Australian IP law is so quick to condemn our system as flawed by implcit comparison to the US when the biggest problems within it are caused by TRIPS and the US-Australia FTA (that latter of which, IIRC, imposed some DMCA-style obligations on Australia in exchange for the honour of trading with the USA - whatever that's worth now).
You have also failed to mention that you cannot actually copyright a single fact - it is the compilation of facts into a particular form which is capable of attracting copyright. So if the timetable contained one piece of information, "Train X leaves at 10:00pm" then (assuming you didn't use the identical choice of words) that fact per se is not subject to copyright. But when you compile 10,000 of these into a table and publish that, it is subject to copyright.
Although this differs from the US system, one argument in favour of it is that there should be protection for the skill and labour exerted in the production of a compilation of facts, notwithstanding that there is no "creative" expression. This reflects the non-US origins of Australian copyright law.