Personally I've started the LoTR books several times, but always got bored stiff by half-way through the first one and gave up. I much prefer the movies to Tolkein's perpetual rambling asides from the plot.
OTOH the Hobbit was a pretty cool book as a teenager, but I must admit I only read it so I could figure out how to finish the computer game version:).
"no journey is too slow if you're having a good time"
Unless you're one of the people who are actually going somewhere and have a deadline to meet, rather than just spending a day travelling on the trains in some weird trainspotter ritual.
The idea that the railways were "privatised" in any real sense is a myth. They're just run by government cronies, rather than directly by the government, so the government no longer take the blame for their poor decisions even while they still get to set the policies.
"Trains are one of the safest methods of travel, it's just that train crashes are occasional news, whilst no news station wants to be doing a daily update of car accidents."
The difference is that whether or not I get killed in a rail accident is purely a matter of luck, whereas I mostly control whether or not I get killed on the roads: sure, there's some measure of luck there, but by driving at a safe speed at a safe distance and looking ahead for potential problems you eliminate most of the risks. On a railway you'd better just get praying that the driver isn't drunk and the signals don't break down, because there's nothing more you can do about it as an individual.
"Personally I think half the problem is in the British attitude. We want everything to be on time, snappy, and we want the trains to get there as quickly as possible."
Yes, God forbid that we should want the service that we've paid for, especially after the railway raised the fare into London from here by 50% last year. We should be grateful that we get the crap service that we do, and apologise when someone complains about having to stand for an hour on the platform in the wind and rain because the previous three trains have been cancelled and they can't even tell us whether there will _ever_ be a train running that night. And our friends should totally understand when we can't get into London to meet them for dinner because the trains have all been cancelled due to the weather being too hot.
Etc, etc, etc.
"If we shut the whole thing down"
We'd all be a lot better off, and all that money wasted running trains could be spent on building proper roads instead. But that will never happen while the transport unions are a significant force in politics.
"If they are delayed it is almost never more than 10 minutes and if it is greater than 10 minutes it's usually due to something weird like lightning hitting the tracks or some other thing."
Which is fine if you have nothing better to do with your time. Some of us actually travel in order to get somewhere, and not to "enjoy" sitting on a train full of drunken football hooligans, beggars and people coughing and sneezing all over us.
I live on a direct rail line in and out of London, yet if I want to go to London for the evening at a specific time I have to allow at least an hour for delays, cancellations and that idiot who's always at the front of the queue wanting a ticket from Aberystwyth to Edinburgh via Dover with a student's railcard on the special five day trip travelling with a ferret discount scheme and, while they're here, can they check train times from Bristol to Prague?
Seriously, I've travelled on trains in about a dozen countries, and I've never had to put up with the same kind of crap that we get in the UK. The sooner the railways are actually, really privatised rather than being farmed out to government cronies to run, the better we'll all be: not because services will improve, but because the private owners will rip up the tracks and sell off the land.
"Get on whatever train you want come back on whatever train you want at any time"
Uh, I can only wonder where exactly you're living if you can "come back on whatever train you want at any time". My last train from London is about 11:30 in the evening. That's pathetic for a main line service from the largest city in the country.
"Taking long distance freight off the roads and putting it back onto rail where it belongs would be a major vote winner I reckon."
Not to the people who actually ship that freight and don't want to be at the mercy of the rail unions again. If even the Post Office have found that it's cheaper to ship letters by road than by rail, there's no hope of people choosing to send their frieght by train again.
As for trucks on the road, the problem is not the trucks, the problem is that for decades now the government has refused to build proper roads that can handle modern traffic. Of the 40-ish billion pounds a year they collect from motoring taxes, only about 20% actually gets spent on the roads: it's no wonder they're crap too.
"I suspect that the pool will be expanded at some point to include movie publishers, software publishers, etc."
Now explain why the _publisher_ should be getting any money, if I'm legally downloading a copy of a song from a P2P service. Any money that is paid should be going to the people who made the song, not to some middleman who's become totally irrelevant.
And what if you're downloading a song that I recorded with some mates in my garage? How am I going to collect my money from this "compulsory license"?
"This seems like an equitable way to solve the problema and make it go away. Very Canadian."
No, it's crony capitalism, stealing money from the majority of the population to give to a special interest group in the business world. You can be damn sure that almost all that money will go to big corporations, and little to individuals who make movies or music.
I can just move to Canada, pull out my old guitar, announce to the world that I am 'A Musician', and wait for the tax money to roll in. Brilliant!
What, you mean this money won't go to the musicians, it will go to the bloated music distribution industry instead?
More seriously, this is the whole problem with any kind of 'download tax'. Who's going to decide who's a musician who qualifies for money and who's not? If I'm putting up MP3s of my songs on my web site, do I qualify? Or will there have to be some government Department of Music to determine who's a Legally-Qualified Musician? Otherwise it's simply government-supported theft for the IP Barons.
I believe that even the shuttle is able to cope with a hole in the hull close to an inch across long enough to do an emergency re-entry (of course if it's in the wrong part of the hull it's Columbia time again). So an ISS crew shouldn't have too big a problem with small meteorites, even if they had to seal off one module... the idea that all your air will leak out in seconds through a small hole is pure Hollywood.
"But the fact is they are filtering based on what is legal, which they have every right to do."
So you're saying that their software is able to determine what's a legal download and what's not? Wow! That's an absolutely amazing step in software engineering, why didn't the original poster point that out? Lawyers are going to be obsolete overnight!
"It really doesn't matter what the students think."
That really sums up modern universities in one sentence: they're basically just welfare programs for authoritarian lefties, why would they care about what the students think?
How many ISPs ban P2P users, or force them to go to commie-style 'reeducation' sessions?
Again, you're confusing students with employees: students are the university's customers, even though the university managers may believe they can treat those customers like crap with no repercussions (and, to an extent, they're right, since they have a nice little racket going where the customers need the university to give them a piece of paper to get a well-paid job). No-one would be complaining if the universities banned university employees from using the Internet, since they're paid to do a job, they're not paying customers.
And, as others have pointed out, they were given no alternative to that policy: the students are, after all, the customers who pay the bills, and that kind of behaviour would not be acceptable in pretty much any other field of commerce.
Universities are lucky that businesses are still stupid enough to hire people based on pieces of paper rather than ability and experience: there's really little reason to support them otherwise given the nonsense they're pulling these days.
Nope. That's $600 million _every three years_ for a shuttle maintenance mission, and when the next shuttle goes boom there'll be no more such missions. Even now NASA isn't eager to launch a shuttle for one final mission to bring it back, so keeping it up there is a non-started.
"Now I don't know about you but I think the police have got more important things to do than checking to see if Kylie's latest warblings are on little Johnny Smith's MP3 player."
Ten years ago people would have said that the police had more important things to do than harass people for driving at 65mph in a 60mph limit on a straight road in good weather. Then the government introduced speed cameras and promised to give the police the profits from speeding tickets: now minor crimes like burglary are ignored in favor of serious crimes like driving a little above the speed limit.
Equally, if the government let the police keep the profits from fines for illegal copying, the police would be breaking down teenagers' doors all day long. The UK has become an utterly corrupt police state since Bliar and his mates were elected, and will only get worse.
"If Microsoft is truly producing an inferior product then in time it will get replaced by something better."
Not when those same governments deliberately prevent real competition in the Windows market. The governments created Microsoft's monopoly on Windows sales, and they can take it away any time they choose.
"YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY WINDOWS. MICROSOFT CAN INCLUDE ANY FEATURES IT DAMN WELL SEES FIT IN ITS OWN PRODUCT."
Of course if I want to buy Windows, I can't legally buy it from anyone but Microsoft, solely due to their government-mandated monopoly. Companies like Microsoft who rely on the armed might of the state to bring in their profits can hardly complain when that state decides to use its armed might against them... when you sleep with an 800 pound gorilla, you have to expect to get squashed.
"Interesting that you brought up Standard Oil, since it's an example of company that took a monopoly away from someone else."
Standard Oil was never a true monopoly (AFAIR it had 'only' about 80% of the market at the peak, so anyone who really wanted to buy essentially the same product from a competitor could do so), as you said, it spent vast amounts of money buying out competitors to try to maintain that position, and the price of oil dropped by a factor of ten or so during the supposed 'monopoly' period. Compared to Microsoft's government-granted monopoly on Windows, Standard Oil were amateurs.
Getting to the moon is hardly difficult with modern technology: their spacecraft is basically an updated Soyuz, and the Commies flew an unmanned Soyuz around the moon in the 60s in preparation for their lunar landing plans. If I remember correctly, that's why Apollo 8 flew round the moon and Apollo 9 tested the LEM in Earth orbit: NASA wanted to make sure they beat the Commies with the first manned flight.
For an organisation with a decent amount of time, money and engineering resources, flying to the moon and back really isn't "rocket science" anymore... well, only in the literal sense anyway:).
No, but they _are_ trespassing on private property. If a bunch of kids broke into my house and used my PC to download a ripped copy of 'Britney Does Dallas Part 17', I'd be just as pissed... but they still wouldn't have stolen anything.
"It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make an album."
That'll be news to all my musician friends who've released albums.
"I've seen a blue screen of death on them a number of times, so maybe MS aren't so fanciful an option"
Rumor has it that a certain bank (or, at least, the people who did the IT work) really came to regret making a very public deal with Microsoft to run their ATMs on Windows. Of course I can't tell you which bank that might be.
"Remember dongles (some companies STILL use them)?! Remember the dongle remover programs that tricked the program into thinking there was a dongle there when there wasn't?"
Dongles don't exist to stop Joe Sixpack pirating expensive software, they exist to stop corporate users pirating expensive software. Smart companies know that Joe 6P isn't going to hand over $2000 for their software that they use at home for non-profit work, but they do know that corporations will pay if it's worth buying.
However, without a dongle, Joe Co-Worker may come to you and ask to borrow your CD and install the software on their machine, and it will run. With a dongle, Joe will have two choices: either steal your dongle or download a crack from the web. Most employees who'd happily borrow a CD and install an extra copy of software that the corporation hadn't paid for will not go so far as to steal a dongle or even take the obviously illegal step of downloading a crack so they can run the software without paying for another dongle.
So provided it prevents corporate users from running extra copies of the software, it probably prevents 90% of losses from software piracy.
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Personally I've started the LoTR books several times, but always got bored stiff by half-way through the first one and gave up. I much prefer the movies to Tolkein's perpetual rambling asides from the plot.
:).
OTOH the Hobbit was a pretty cool book as a teenager, but I must admit I only read it so I could figure out how to finish the computer game version
"no journey is too slow if you're having a good time" Unless you're one of the people who are actually going somewhere and have a deadline to meet, rather than just spending a day travelling on the trains in some weird trainspotter ritual.
The idea that the railways were "privatised" in any real sense is a myth. They're just run by government cronies, rather than directly by the government, so the government no longer take the blame for their poor decisions even while they still get to set the policies.
"Trains are one of the safest methods of travel, it's just that train crashes are occasional news, whilst no news station wants to be doing a daily update of car accidents."
The difference is that whether or not I get killed in a rail accident is purely a matter of luck, whereas I mostly control whether or not I get killed on the roads: sure, there's some measure of luck there, but by driving at a safe speed at a safe distance and looking ahead for potential problems you eliminate most of the risks. On a railway you'd better just get praying that the driver isn't drunk and the signals don't break down, because there's nothing more you can do about it as an individual.
"Personally I think half the problem is in the British attitude. We want everything to be on time, snappy, and we want the trains to get there as quickly as possible."
Yes, God forbid that we should want the service that we've paid for, especially after the railway raised the fare into London from here by 50% last year. We should be grateful that we get the crap service that we do, and apologise when someone complains about having to stand for an hour on the platform in the wind and rain because the previous three trains have been cancelled and they can't even tell us whether there will _ever_ be a train running that night. And our friends should totally understand when we can't get into London to meet them for dinner because the trains have all been cancelled due to the weather being too hot.
Etc, etc, etc.
"If we shut the whole thing down"
We'd all be a lot better off, and all that money wasted running trains could be spent on building proper roads instead. But that will never happen while the transport unions are a significant force in politics.
"If they are delayed it is almost never more than 10 minutes and if it is greater than 10 minutes it's usually due to something weird like lightning hitting the tracks or some other thing."
Which is fine if you have nothing better to do with your time. Some of us actually travel in order to get somewhere, and not to "enjoy" sitting on a train full of drunken football hooligans, beggars and people coughing and sneezing all over us.
I live on a direct rail line in and out of London, yet if I want to go to London for the evening at a specific time I have to allow at least an hour for delays, cancellations and that idiot who's always at the front of the queue wanting a ticket from Aberystwyth to Edinburgh via Dover with a student's railcard on the special five day trip travelling with a ferret discount scheme and, while they're here, can they check train times from Bristol to Prague?
Seriously, I've travelled on trains in about a dozen countries, and I've never had to put up with the same kind of crap that we get in the UK. The sooner the railways are actually, really privatised rather than being farmed out to government cronies to run, the better we'll all be: not because services will improve, but because the private owners will rip up the tracks and sell off the land.
"Get on whatever train you want come back on whatever train you want at any time"
Uh, I can only wonder where exactly you're living if you can "come back on whatever train you want at any time". My last train from London is about 11:30 in the evening. That's pathetic for a main line service from the largest city in the country.
"Taking long distance freight off the roads and putting it back onto rail where it belongs would be a major vote winner I reckon." Not to the people who actually ship that freight and don't want to be at the mercy of the rail unions again. If even the Post Office have found that it's cheaper to ship letters by road than by rail, there's no hope of people choosing to send their frieght by train again. As for trucks on the road, the problem is not the trucks, the problem is that for decades now the government has refused to build proper roads that can handle modern traffic. Of the 40-ish billion pounds a year they collect from motoring taxes, only about 20% actually gets spent on the roads: it's no wonder they're crap too.
"I suspect that the pool will be expanded at some point to include movie publishers, software publishers, etc."
Now explain why the _publisher_ should be getting any money, if I'm legally downloading a copy of a song from a P2P service. Any money that is paid should be going to the people who made the song, not to some middleman who's become totally irrelevant.
And what if you're downloading a song that I recorded with some mates in my garage? How am I going to collect my money from this "compulsory license"?
"This seems like an equitable way to solve the problema and make it go away. Very Canadian."
No, it's crony capitalism, stealing money from the majority of the population to give to a special interest group in the business world. You can be damn sure that almost all that money will go to big corporations, and little to individuals who make movies or music.
I can just move to Canada, pull out my old guitar, announce to the world that I am 'A Musician', and wait for the tax money to roll in. Brilliant!
What, you mean this money won't go to the musicians, it will go to the bloated music distribution industry instead?
More seriously, this is the whole problem with any kind of 'download tax'. Who's going to decide who's a musician who qualifies for money and who's not? If I'm putting up MP3s of my songs on my web site, do I qualify? Or will there have to be some government Department of Music to determine who's a Legally-Qualified Musician? Otherwise it's simply government-supported theft for the IP Barons.
I believe that even the shuttle is able to cope with a hole in the hull close to an inch across long enough to do an emergency re-entry (of course if it's in the wrong part of the hull it's Columbia time again). So an ISS crew shouldn't have too big a problem with small meteorites, even if they had to seal off one module... the idea that all your air will leak out in seconds through a small hole is pure Hollywood.
"But the fact is they are filtering based on what is legal, which they have every right to do."
So you're saying that their software is able to determine what's a legal download and what's not? Wow! That's an absolutely amazing step in software engineering, why didn't the original poster point that out? Lawyers are going to be obsolete overnight!
"It really doesn't matter what the students think."
That really sums up modern universities in one sentence: they're basically just welfare programs for authoritarian lefties, why would they care about what the students think?
How many ISPs ban P2P users, or force them to go to commie-style 'reeducation' sessions?
Again, you're confusing students with employees: students are the university's customers, even though the university managers may believe they can treat those customers like crap with no repercussions (and, to an extent, they're right, since they have a nice little racket going where the customers need the university to give them a piece of paper to get a well-paid job). No-one would be complaining if the universities banned university employees from using the Internet, since they're paid to do a job, they're not paying customers.
And, as others have pointed out, they were given no alternative to that policy: the students are, after all, the customers who pay the bills, and that kind of behaviour would not be acceptable in pretty much any other field of commerce.
Universities are lucky that businesses are still stupid enough to hire people based on pieces of paper rather than ability and experience: there's really little reason to support them otherwise given the nonsense they're pulling these days.
And presumably those students will be refunded the amount they've paid for Internet access in their fees, if they're not provided with that access?
No, didn't think so.
"15+ more years of Hubble --> $600 Million USD"
Nope. That's $600 million _every three years_ for a shuttle maintenance mission, and when the next shuttle goes boom there'll be no more such missions. Even now NASA isn't eager to launch a shuttle for one final mission to bring it back, so keeping it up there is a non-started.
"Now I don't know about you but I think the police have got more important things to do than checking to see if Kylie's latest warblings are on little Johnny Smith's MP3 player."
Ten years ago people would have said that the police had more important things to do than harass people for driving at 65mph in a 60mph limit on a straight road in good weather. Then the government introduced speed cameras and promised to give the police the profits from speeding tickets: now minor crimes like burglary are ignored in favor of serious crimes like driving a little above the speed limit.
Equally, if the government let the police keep the profits from fines for illegal copying, the police would be breaking down teenagers' doors all day long. The UK has become an utterly corrupt police state since Bliar and his mates were elected, and will only get worse.
"If Microsoft is truly producing an inferior product then in time it will get replaced by something better."
Not when those same governments deliberately prevent real competition in the Windows market. The governments created Microsoft's monopoly on Windows sales, and they can take it away any time they choose.
"YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY WINDOWS. MICROSOFT CAN INCLUDE ANY FEATURES IT DAMN WELL SEES FIT IN ITS OWN PRODUCT."
Of course if I want to buy Windows, I can't legally buy it from anyone but Microsoft, solely due to their government-mandated monopoly. Companies like Microsoft who rely on the armed might of the state to bring in their profits can hardly complain when that state decides to use its armed might against them... when you sleep with an 800 pound gorilla, you have to expect to get squashed.
"Interesting that you brought up Standard Oil, since it's an example of company that took a monopoly away from someone else."
Standard Oil was never a true monopoly (AFAIR it had 'only' about 80% of the market at the peak, so anyone who really wanted to buy essentially the same product from a competitor could do so), as you said, it spent vast amounts of money buying out competitors to try to maintain that position, and the price of oil dropped by a factor of ten or so during the supposed 'monopoly' period. Compared to Microsoft's government-granted monopoly on Windows, Standard Oil were amateurs.
Getting to the moon is hardly difficult with modern technology: their spacecraft is basically an updated Soyuz, and the Commies flew an unmanned Soyuz around the moon in the 60s in preparation for their lunar landing plans. If I remember correctly, that's why Apollo 8 flew round the moon and Apollo 9 tested the LEM in Earth orbit: NASA wanted to make sure they beat the Commies with the first manned flight.
:).
For an organisation with a decent amount of time, money and engineering resources, flying to the moon and back really isn't "rocket science" anymore... well, only in the literal sense anyway
Don't worry, the Congresscreatures will simply pass a new law making Copyright last the lifetime of the universe. Problem solved.
"No they are not stealing anything. Right?"
No, but they _are_ trespassing on private property. If a bunch of kids broke into my house and used my PC to download a ripped copy of 'Britney Does Dallas Part 17', I'd be just as pissed... but they still wouldn't have stolen anything.
"It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make an album."
That'll be news to all my musician friends who've released albums.
"I've seen a blue screen of death on them a number of times, so maybe MS aren't so fanciful an option"
Rumor has it that a certain bank (or, at least, the people who did the IT work) really came to regret making a very public deal with Microsoft to run their ATMs on Windows. Of course I can't tell you which bank that might be.
"Remember dongles (some companies STILL use them)?! Remember the dongle remover programs that tricked the program into thinking there was a dongle there when there wasn't?"
Dongles don't exist to stop Joe Sixpack pirating expensive software, they exist to stop corporate users pirating expensive software. Smart companies know that Joe 6P isn't going to hand over $2000 for their software that they use at home for non-profit work, but they do know that corporations will pay if it's worth buying.
However, without a dongle, Joe Co-Worker may come to you and ask to borrow your CD and install the software on their machine, and it will run. With a dongle, Joe will have two choices: either steal your dongle or download a crack from the web. Most employees who'd happily borrow a CD and install an extra copy of software that the corporation hadn't paid for will not go so far as to steal a dongle or even take the obviously illegal step of downloading a crack so they can run the software without paying for another dongle.
So provided it prevents corporate users from running extra copies of the software, it probably prevents 90% of losses from software piracy.