That's quite insightful. Costs do limit the margins on recorded music production and distribution. This is why the RIAA is fighting tooth and nail against P2P. The entirety of the value they add to the music industry is through the distribution of music. A legal, "free" distribution model would mean there'd be vastly less money in it for them.
In the bygone days, bands made money through performances. Sheet music was very popular because that was the only real way to get a "recording" of a song. Then LPs etc came into the picture, and the sheet music industry became marginalized. People's desire for an actual recording of the original performance was higher than for a transcription of the song. As the costs for production of these recordings (and their playback mechanisms) dropped, the demand rose, and the RIAA was born.
So while it is fair to say that the DVD industry is a secondary market for movies (theatre being the primary), in a way the CD industry arose from a secondary market for the artists as well. It's just that this secondary market became far more lucrative than the primary performance market and the power shifted away from the artist into the hands of the recording executive.
CDs are for the recording industry to make money from, not the artists. It's the RIAA's primary income stream, but not always the performers.
Since the recording industry's power arose purely from the demand for its product, shouldn't the sector should try to shift with the changing demands of the public, rather than manipulate government to legislate itself a demand that is no longer there ? If they can no longer compete on price, whether it be because their costs are too high or because they're money-grubbing monopolists - it doesn't matter. The market shifts to a different product and they lose.
Wow - A real Chemist and a Real Chef, but not a logician.
Surely you don't think because Chemistry is a science that any regular Joe could pick up a copy of "Chemistry for Dummies" and be running a lab in a week ?
Why should it be any different for the "science" of cooking?
As for your "chemically and scientifically should have worked fine" dishes - did you cook them in a lab ? Did you measure the liquids in a pipette? Did you eliminate the influences of the environment ? did you time the process to the second? Unless you've done all those things (and many more), you were relying on your experience as a Chef, not a chemist, to get that food to work.
Anyone else see an image in their head of the absent-minded music lover sitting with their head-phones on and tapping away to the music.. and buying the same song four hundred times?
Strangely, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Perhaps our experiences differ, or perhaps your brand of ethics is different from mine. In either case, I certainly don't advocate adding to the population problem through mandatory reproduction, and surely any eugenics program based on economic position is shortsighted to say the least. Perhaps those people are earning that salary because they've taken the opportunity to forgoe children at a young age to get an education. There is no reason to suspect that economic standing is caused by heightened intellect or other survival characteristics (although there might be a correlation).
Finally, there are plenty of people who believe things would be better if the humans of the world stopped acting like a rampant virus and used their brains to manage their consumption of the worlds resources. Unrestrained reproduction isn't the solution.
Re:I had read of this before...
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
Actually there are reported incidents of oil fields replenishing. Let me see if I can dig one up..
'On September 26, 1995, the New York Times ran an article headlined "Geochemist Says Oil Fields May Be Refilled Naturally." Penned by Malcolm W. Browne, the piece appeared on page C1.
Could it be that many of the world's oil fields are refilling themselves at nearly the same rate they are being drained by an energy hungry world? A geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts... Dr. Jean K. Whelan... infers that oil is moving in quite rapid spurts from great depths to reservoirs closer to the surface. Skeptics of Dr. Whelan's hypothesis... say her explanation remains to be proved... Discovered in 1972, an oil reservoir some 6,000 feet beneath Eugene Island 330 [not actually an island, but a patch of sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico] is one of the world's most productive oil sources... Eugene Island 330 is remarkable for another reason: it's estimated reserves have declined much less than experts had predicted on the basis of its production rate. "It could be," Dr. Whelan said, "that at some sites, particularly where there is a lot of faulting in the rock, a reservoir from which oil is being pumped might be a steady-state system -- one that is replenished by deeper reserves as fast as oil is pumped out"... The discovery that oil seepage is continuous and extensive from many ocean vents lying above fault zones has convinced many scientists that oil is making its way up through the faults from much deeper deposits... A recent report from the Department of Energy Task Force on Strategic Energy Research and Development concluded from the Woods Hole project that "there new data and interpretations strongly suggest that the oil and gas in the Eugene Island field could be treated as a steady-state rather than a fixed resource." The report added, "Preliminary analysis also suggest that similar phenomena may be taking place in other producing areas, including the deep-water Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan North Slope"... There is much evidence that deep reserves of hydrocarbon fuels remain to be tapped.'
And also 'The Eugene Island story was revisited by the media three-and-a-half years later, by the Wall Street Journal (Christopher Cooper "Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning," Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1999). (http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm )
Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330. Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while. it behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day. Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10 years ago. All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be.... Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts... says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just migrating" deep underground.... About 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, the underwater landscape surro
Oil might not be a "fossil fuel" at all
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
The notion that oil is a 'fossil fuel' was first proposed by Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in 1757. Lomonosov's rudimentary hypothesis, based on the limited base of scientific knowledge that existed at the time, and on his own simple observations, was that "Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil."
Two and a half centuries later, Lomonosov's theory remains as it was in 1757 -- an unproved, and almost entirely speculative, hypothesis. Returning once again to the Wall Street Journal, we find that, "Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that led to its creation." A paragraph in the Encyclopedia Britannica concerning the origins of oil ends thusly: "In spite of the great amount of scientific research... there remain many unresolved questions regarding its origins."
In 1951, however, a group of Soviet scientists led by Nikolai Kudryavtsev claimed that this theory of oil production was fiction. They suggested that hydrocarbons, the principal molecular constituents of oil, are generated deep within the earth from inorganic materials. Few people outside Russia listened. But one who did was J. F. Kenney, an American who today works for the Russian Academy of Sciences and is also chief executive of Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas. He says it is nonsense to believe that oil derives from "squashed fish and putrefied cabbages." This is a brave claim to make when the overwhelming majority of petroleum geologists subscribe to the biological theory of origin. But Dr Kenney has evidence to support his argument. In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he claims to establish that it is energetically impossible for alkanes, one of the main types of hydrocarbon molecule in crude oil, to evolve from biological precursors at the depths where reservoirs have typically been found and plundered. He has developed a mathematical model incorporating quantum mechanics, statistics and thermodynamics which predicts the behaviour of a hydrocarbon system. The complex mixture of straight-chain and branched alkane molecules found in crude oil could, according to his calculations, have come into existence only at extremely high temperatures and pressures?far higher than those found in the earth's crust, where the orthodox theory claims they are formed. To back up this idea, he has shown that a cocktail of alkanes (methane, hexane, octane and so on) similar to that in natural oil is produced when a mixture of calcium carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500 C and crushed with the weight of 50,000 atmospheres. This experiment reproduces the conditions in the earth's upper mantle, 100 km below the surface, and so suggests that oil could be produced there from completely inorganic sources.
- ("The Argument Needs Oiling," The Economist, August 15, 2002).
Not only is it possible for oil to be produced in this way, but it is likely that this is how all oil is actually produced. The energy capacity of oil is too high for it to have been produced under low pressure near the surface from low-energy content biological matter. Methane is produced in this manner, to be sure, but oil is too energy-rich to come from this process.
Are you talking about Lucas Sergeant, played by John Lithgow ?
I don't remember him being very central to the show, but I've not seen it in a dozen years. I got the impression from your earlier posts you were suggesting the main character was based on George Lucas - which it obviously wasn't.
Oh, that was different. I was thinking of the scene where he confesses to Amidala that he "killed them, every last one of them." yada yada. And when, a few minutes earlier the camera swoops in on his scowling face as he cocks that lightsaber over his head and is just about to start whacking left and right with it - that was overdone.
But when he gets to be subtle and silent, Mr Anakin can be very good. He's just too young to make a good job of such a mealymouthed script. When they make him speak such utter drivel, that's when I have to stop myself from gagging.
Of course we will, because even then, we're still hoping. I've learned my lesson. Ep I sucked. Hard. I went into Ep II with really low expectations and I wasn't disappointed. It sucked. But since I'd been slapped in the face once, I was prepared for it. It was a barely average movie that is still surfing along on the reverie of the original trilogy. I expect nothing more of Ep III. Perhaps it might even be better than average and for me, I will be ecstatic - since that would exceed my expectations by a thousandfold.
You know, when the designers of the Knights of the Old Republic do a more coherent and interesting storyline in their open-ended game than your last two movies, as well as conceive and execute graphical sequences which rival your on-screen renderings, Mr Lucas, you need to take a long hard look at yourself.
According to that logic, Occams Razor is never effective.
Let me restate it:
There is no physical evidence for a place called Atlantis as described by Plato. Plato was a writer who used allegory and fiction to express his philosophical ideas.
Occams Razor suggests that there is no need to multiply entities to explain the evidence.. therefore it is more likely that Plato was making Atlantis up than it is that Atlantis exists as he described it. Conceivability doesn't enter into it.
However, just because Plato isn't a reliable source on Atlantis does not mean Atlantis did not exist. That's just an appeal from ignorance, and is, as stated previously, fallacious.
Correct. But irrelevant. Just because flying pink elephants have never been seen, doesn't mean they don't exist either. Atlantis as descibed by Plato is no more likely.
If you drop Plato, saying he isn't a reliable source, then what do you have left ? You don't even have a name...
Surely, after that, any sunken ruins will do to "prove" there was an Atlantis.
Actually, that's a reasonable application of Occams razor.
1/ Atlantis is mentioned first by Plato, who had a penchant for making stuff up. 2/ It's mentioned afterwards by reference to Plato. No other original sources are shown (barring revelationary sources who claim Aliens or spirits told them). 3/ No physical evidence for Atlantis is known to exist.
When and if actual evidence is found that corroborates Platos story, any rational explanation is that he made it up.
Say that you can trust the open source community to expose any flaws in the voting system... It doesn't matter if you can't trust the government to actually deploy that software when it says that it does.
That's his point.
The only way to ensure that a vote was cast at all, let alone correctly, is to have some sort of physical redundancy. Something that can be counted by a bunch of humans.
No matter how you think it works - copyright is about controlling who can make copies.
The GPL works because it relies on the fact that people who use your source code are making a derivative of the original work. The GPL says that the original author (who, under Copyright law, has the exclusive right to say who can and can't do this), grants you limited permission to make this derivation, provided you satsify the conditions of the GPL.
What I'm saying is : I have the exclusive right to determine how my intellectual property is copied. I don't have the right to tell you what you can do with an existing copy of that information that has already been manifested. I can stop you making a copy of it, but I can't stop you from taking a copy that's already been produced and burning it, stomping on it, or looking at it through a different kind of viewer than I'd originally envisaged.
Of course, that's before DMCA, which effectively says that I can. Many people believe that the ramifications of this Act will be detrimental to free expression. I happen to agree.
Slashdot Mirror
That's quite insightful. Costs do limit the margins on recorded music production and distribution. This is why the RIAA is fighting tooth and nail against P2P. The entirety of the value they add to the music industry is through the distribution of music. A legal, "free" distribution model would mean there'd be vastly less money in it for them.
In the bygone days, bands made money through performances. Sheet music was very popular because that was the only real way to get a "recording" of a song. Then LPs etc came into the picture, and the sheet music industry became marginalized. People's desire for an actual recording of the original performance was higher than for a transcription of the song. As the costs for production of these recordings (and their playback mechanisms) dropped, the demand rose, and the RIAA was born.
So while it is fair to say that the DVD industry is a secondary market for movies (theatre being the primary), in a way the CD industry arose from a secondary market for the artists as well. It's just that this secondary market became far more lucrative than the primary performance market and the power shifted away from the artist into the hands of the recording executive.
CDs are for the recording industry to make money from, not the artists. It's the RIAA's primary income stream, but not always the performers.
Since the recording industry's power arose purely from the demand for its product, shouldn't the sector should try to shift with the changing demands of the public, rather than manipulate government to legislate itself a demand that is no longer there ? If they can no longer compete on price, whether it be because their costs are too high or because they're money-grubbing monopolists - it doesn't matter. The market shifts to a different product and they lose.
Adapt or Die.
Wow - A real Chemist and a Real Chef, but not a logician.
Surely you don't think because Chemistry is a science that any regular Joe could pick up a copy of "Chemistry for Dummies" and be running a lab in a week ?
Why should it be any different for the "science" of cooking?
As for your "chemically and scientifically should have worked fine" dishes - did you cook them in a lab ? Did you measure the liquids in a pipette? Did you eliminate the influences of the environment ? did you time the process to the second?
Unless you've done all those things (and many more), you were relying on your experience as a Chef, not a chemist, to get that food to work.
And perhaps the influence of Siouxie and the Banshees cannot be heard in any of it ?
Guess what - it's called a TAXI, and you don't even have to drive it yourself.
Anyone else see an image in their head of the absent-minded music lover sitting with their head-phones on and tapping away to the music ..
and buying the same song four hundred times?
NOOOOO !
Strangely, I've had exactly the opposite experience. Perhaps our experiences differ, or perhaps your brand of ethics is different from mine.
In either case, I certainly don't advocate adding to the population problem through mandatory reproduction, and surely any eugenics program based on economic position is shortsighted to say the least. Perhaps those people are earning that salary because they've taken the opportunity to forgoe children at a young age to get an education. There is no reason to suspect that economic standing is caused by heightened intellect or other survival characteristics (although there might be a correlation).
Finally, there are plenty of people who believe things would be better if the humans of the world stopped acting like a rampant virus and used their brains to manage their consumption of the worlds resources. Unrestrained reproduction isn't the solution.
Actually there are reported incidents of oil fields replenishing.
... Dr. Jean K. Whelan ... infers that oil is moving in quite rapid spurts from great depths to reservoirs closer to the surface. Skeptics of Dr. Whelan's hypothesis ... say her explanation remains to be proved ... ... Eugene Island 330 is remarkable for another reason: it's estimated reserves have declined much less than experts had predicted on the basis of its production rate. ... ... ...
... Jean Whelan, a geochemist and senior researcher from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts ... says, "I believe there is a huge system of oil just migrating" deep underground. ... About 80 miles off the Louisiana coast, the underwater landscape surro
Let me see if I can dig one up..
'On September 26, 1995, the New York Times ran an article headlined "Geochemist Says Oil Fields May Be Refilled Naturally." Penned by Malcolm W. Browne, the piece appeared on page C1.
Could it be that many of the world's oil fields are refilling themselves at nearly the same rate they are being drained by an energy hungry world? A geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts
Discovered in 1972, an oil reservoir some 6,000 feet beneath Eugene Island 330 [not actually an island, but a patch of sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico] is one of the world's most productive oil sources
"It could be," Dr. Whelan said, "that at some sites, particularly where there is a lot of faulting in the rock, a reservoir from which oil is being pumped might be a steady-state system -- one that is replenished by deeper reserves as fast as oil is pumped out"
The discovery that oil seepage is continuous and extensive from many ocean vents lying above fault zones has convinced many scientists that oil is making its way up through the faults from much deeper deposits
A recent report from the Department of Energy Task Force on Strategic Energy Research and Development concluded from the Woods Hole project that "there new data and interpretations strongly suggest that the oil and gas in the Eugene Island field could be treated as a steady-state rather than a fixed resource."
The report added, "Preliminary analysis also suggest that similar phenomena may be taking place in other producing areas, including the deep-water Gulf of Mexico and the Alaskan North Slope"
There is much evidence that deep reserves of hydrocarbon fuels remain to be tapped.'
And also
'The Eugene Island story was revisited by the media three-and-a-half years later, by the Wall Street Journal (Christopher Cooper "Odd Reservoir Off Louisiana Prods Oil Experts to Seek a Deeper Meaning," Wall Street Journal, April 16, 1999).
(http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm )
Something mysterious is going on at Eugene Island 330.
Production at the oil field, deep in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, was supposed to have declined years ago. And for a while. it behaved like any normal field: Following its 1973 discovery, Eugene Island 330's output peaked at about 15,000 barrels a day. By 1989, production had slowed to about 4,000 barrels a day.
Then suddenly -- some say almost inexplicably -- Eugene Island's fortunes reversed. The field, operated by PennzEnergy Co., is now producing 13,000 barrels a day, and probable reserves have rocketed to more than 400 million barrels from 60 million. Stranger still, scientists studying the field say the crude coming out of the pipe is of a geological age quite different from the oil that gushed 10 years ago.
All of which has led some scientists to a radical theory: Eugene Island is rapidly refilling itself, perhaps from some continuous source miles below the Earth's surface. That, they say, raises the tantalizing possibility that oil may not be the limited resource it is assumed to be.
The notion that oil is a 'fossil fuel' was first proposed by Russian scholar Mikhailo Lomonosov in 1757. Lomonosov's rudimentary hypothesis, based on the limited base of scientific knowledge that existed at the time, and on his own simple observations, was that "Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil."
... there remain many unresolved questions regarding its origins."
Two and a half centuries later, Lomonosov's theory remains as it was in 1757 -- an unproved, and almost entirely speculative, hypothesis. Returning once again to the Wall Street Journal, we find that, "Although the world has been drilling for oil for generations, little is known about the nature of the resource or the underground activities that led to its creation." A paragraph in the Encyclopedia Britannica concerning the origins of oil ends thusly: "In spite of the great amount of scientific research
In 1951, however, a group of Soviet scientists led by Nikolai Kudryavtsev claimed that this theory of oil production was fiction. They suggested that hydrocarbons, the principal molecular constituents of oil, are generated deep within the earth from inorganic materials. Few people outside Russia listened. But one who did was J. F. Kenney, an American who today works for the Russian Academy of Sciences and is also chief executive of Gas Resources Corporation in Houston, Texas. He says it is nonsense to believe that oil derives from "squashed fish and putrefied cabbages." This is a brave claim to make when the overwhelming majority of petroleum geologists subscribe to the biological theory of origin. But Dr Kenney has evidence to support his argument.
In this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he claims to establish that it is energetically impossible for alkanes, one of the main types of hydrocarbon molecule in crude oil, to evolve from biological precursors at the depths where reservoirs have typically been found and plundered. He has developed a mathematical model incorporating quantum mechanics, statistics and thermodynamics which predicts the behaviour of a hydrocarbon system. The complex mixture of straight-chain and branched alkane molecules found in crude oil could, according to his calculations, have come into existence only at extremely high temperatures and pressures?far higher than those found in the earth's crust, where the orthodox theory claims they are formed.
To back up this idea, he has shown that a cocktail of alkanes (methane, hexane, octane and so on) similar to that in natural oil is produced when a mixture of calcium carbonate, water and iron oxide is heated to 1,500 C and crushed with the weight of 50,000 atmospheres. This experiment reproduces the conditions in the earth's upper mantle, 100 km below the surface, and so suggests that oil could be produced there from completely inorganic sources.
- ("The Argument Needs Oiling," The Economist, August 15, 2002).
Not only is it possible for oil to be produced in this way, but it is likely that this is how all oil is actually produced. The energy capacity of oil is too high for it to have been produced under low pressure near the surface from low-energy content biological matter. Methane is produced in this manner, to be sure, but oil is too energy-rich to come from this process.
So you can relax : no die-off today.
Are you talking about Lucas Sergeant, played by John Lithgow ?
I don't remember him being very central to the show, but I've not seen it in a dozen years. I got the impression from your earlier posts you were suggesting the main character was based on George Lucas - which it obviously wasn't.
Oh, that was different.
I was thinking of the scene where he confesses to Amidala that he "killed them, every last one of them." yada yada.
And when, a few minutes earlier the camera swoops in on his scowling face as he cocks that lightsaber over his head and is just about to start whacking left and right with it - that was overdone.
But when he gets to be subtle and silent, Mr Anakin can be very good. He's just too young to make a good job of such a mealymouthed script. When they make him speak such utter drivel, that's when I have to stop myself from gagging.
Of course we will, because even then, we're still hoping.
I've learned my lesson. Ep I sucked.
Hard.
I went into Ep II with really low expectations and I wasn't disappointed. It sucked.
But since I'd been slapped in the face once, I was prepared for it. It was a barely average movie that is still surfing along on the reverie of the original trilogy.
I expect nothing more of Ep III.
Perhaps it might even be better than average and for me, I will be ecstatic - since that would exceed my expectations by a thousandfold.
You know, when the designers of the Knights of the Old Republic do a more coherent and interesting storyline in their open-ended game than your last two movies, as well as conceive and execute graphical sequences which rival your on-screen renderings, Mr Lucas, you need to take a long hard look at yourself.
aftermation ? What am I drinking ?
= Aftermath...
True - although his vengeance was not exactly a good act.
And certainly Haydens' portrayal of his emotional aftermation was far from good acting.
Both of which speak of evil to me.
AFAICT All That Jazz is autobiographical. I don't remember any even veiled references to George Lucas.
Check your sources.
.. the same lame stormtropper getup their mother made out of styrofoam and a sharpie.
At least that's better than when it goes "Hiss"
I think your .sig says it all.
Just because something is incredibly cool doesn't mean we can't laugh at it.
Umm.. Ham ?
And who was running this poll anyway ? Did they use e-voting machines to collect it or what ?
Interesting.
This document purports to show a link between Al Qaeda and Hussein, but it's claimed the overtures were due to their mutual hatred of Saudi Arabia...
Isn't Osama bin Ladens family from Saudia Arabia ?
According to that logic, Occams Razor is never effective.
:
Let me restate it
There is no physical evidence for a place called Atlantis as described by Plato.
Plato was a writer who used allegory and fiction to express his philosophical ideas.
Occams Razor suggests that there is no need to multiply entities to explain the evidence.. therefore it is more likely that Plato was making Atlantis up than it is that Atlantis exists as he described it. Conceivability doesn't enter into it.
However, just because Plato isn't a reliable source on Atlantis does not mean Atlantis did not exist. That's just an appeal from ignorance, and is, as stated previously, fallacious.
Correct. But irrelevant. Just because flying pink elephants have never been seen, doesn't mean they don't exist either. Atlantis as descibed by Plato is no more likely.
If you drop Plato, saying he isn't a reliable source, then what do you have left ? You don't even have a name...
Surely, after that, any sunken ruins will do to "prove" there was an Atlantis.
Actually, that's a reasonable application of Occams razor.
1/ Atlantis is mentioned first by Plato, who had a penchant for making stuff up.
2/ It's mentioned afterwards by reference to Plato. No other original sources are shown (barring revelationary sources who claim Aliens or spirits told them).
3/ No physical evidence for Atlantis is known to exist.
When and if actual evidence is found that corroborates Platos story, any rational explanation is that he made it up.
Wishful thinking isn't a valid argument.
You're missing his point.
Say that you can trust the open source community to expose any flaws in the voting system... It doesn't matter if you can't trust the government to actually deploy that software when it says that it does.
That's his point.
The only way to ensure that a vote was cast at all, let alone correctly, is to have some sort of physical redundancy. Something that can be counted by a bunch of humans.
No matter how you think it works - copyright is about controlling who can make copies.
The GPL works because it relies on the fact that people who use your source code are making a derivative of the original work. The GPL says that the original author (who, under Copyright law, has the exclusive right to say who can and can't do this), grants you limited permission to make this derivation, provided you satsify the conditions of the GPL.
What I'm saying is : I have the exclusive right to determine how my intellectual property is copied. I don't have the right to tell you what you can do with an existing copy of that information that has already been manifested.
I can stop you making a copy of it, but I can't stop you from taking a copy that's already been produced and burning it, stomping on it, or looking at it through a different kind of viewer than I'd originally envisaged.
Of course, that's before DMCA, which effectively says that I can. Many people believe that the ramifications of this Act will be detrimental to free expression. I happen to agree.
I'm sorry that you don't see it that way.
Let me state the flip side of my position : being a finite state machine doesn't horrify me either.