Depends on where you live. In Australia, you have a number of VERY STRONG rights to modify software you own. Part 4, Division 4A of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth)...
Specifically, I'd argue that s47e (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s47e.html) allows you to patch the program to make it work.
Valve could try and argue they EULA you're right to do that away but, sensibly, in Australia under s47H of the CPA any agreement which attempts to overrule your rights under Part 4/Division 4A "has no effect"... ie they can't use a contract of adhesion to force you to deny your legislated rights. (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ca1968133/s47h.html)
If I was using HL2 and patched it and then they blocked me out, I'd launching a test case:) (After asking politely for donations).
On top of that, lawyers are not techies. Letting a group of lawyers define the law on anything technical is a *bad* thing.
What makes you think technies are going to a good job defining the law? They're not lawyers, afterall.
Letting any one interest group define the law is a problem. Its not lawyers per se that are the problem with intellectual problem - its the corporatisation of the law combined with the contemproary political economy.
There are many lawyers who are opposed to the expansion of copyright - they just usually don't work for any of the big corporate law firms.
"Just" images/frames? They're BIG frames with lots of colour-space... which all draw on other frames.
If they're workign with 4K uncompressed film scans, which is becoming the requirement for DI work*, then you're talking data rates in excess of 540 megs per sec or 32 gigs per minute... thats around 1.2 TB for the finished product.
However, visual effects compositing joins together a number of effects elements. I've seen shots with over 90 different elements being combined into a single shot.
So you could have a one minute shot with, say, 10 elements all at 4:4:4 4k uncompressed RGB 10bit Log (people are pushing to 12 bit... and i've heard of 96bit files for some model work)... and that alone would push the storage required to 3.2 TB for the one shot.... a feature at that kind of data rate would be 384 TBs
*2K may be the standard, but its pretty grainy. 4K hides most these problems... 6K is great.
There I committed three sins: I was ugly (a tooth issue not diagnosed correctly until later), uncoordinated and couldn't play sports well (just nearsighted enough to ruin my depth perception, also undiagnosed for many years), and I knew stuff (could already read and do simple arithmetic in kindergarten). Hattrick.
I dunno if I call my primary self ugly, but I certainly wasn't spiffy. We were quite poor, so I wore shitty tracksuits to highschool, and my hair was always in a mess. I wore glasses, plates (to widen my jaw), had teeth crowding, and I sucked at sport (broke my fingers in touch foot ball, hit my own mouth with my tennis racket). I played Chess at lunch time and read Dr Who novels.
In high school, I got bad acne, sucked even more at sport, wrote poetry etc. etc.
But I was and still am an extrovert. These three sins may have done damage to my self esteem but they didn't make me stop being an extrovert. Not liking yourself and projecting that onto other people doesn't make everyone an introvert. It depends on the individual.
As I get older, the more I see and believe that personalities are genetic -- environments may bring out certain traits, emphasise some, repress others... but they are merely working on pre-determined colours. Lucky for me, most modern psychology agrees with this general notion (that nature and nuture work together to shape who we are):)
My point is, I never had a chance.
You may never had a chance to 'become' an extrovert, but that has less to do with those three sins in a general sense, than who you are in a specific sense (and the impact of those 'three sins' onto YOU)
Social skills are a two way street. Make sure that the people around him are interacting with him, too.
This I certainly agree with.:)
All I'mm trying to do is separate they idea that extroversion and introversion are somehow inseperable from having social skills. You can learn social skills, you just mightn't like to use them that much:)
I'm so fucking tired of jackasses who think they can make a conclusive judgement about another person's intellect, reasons for holding an opinion, personality and motives based on a couple of lines of text in a remark on a website.
The one thing that a law degree has taught me is to never trust anyone who tries to tell you what the law is unless they have a law degree (and even thats not always teh case) -- chances are they are lying or full of shit.
And you sir, are full of shit.
Theft can mean whatever the hell the legislature wants it to mean (unless its repugnant to the constitution). The law is DYNAMIC and is CREATED by Government and Courts. This is like the bedrock of jurisprudence.
Depending on your jurisdiction, theft is the act of taking someone elses property without their permission. Copyright is a form of property rights (albeit postively created). Music has copyright in it. Downloading music is a breach of the exclusive property rights vested in intellectual property via the Government.
What is so difficult to understand about this concept?
I'm so fucking tired of jackasses arguing that piracy isn't theft when they have no legal, jurisprudential or philosophical basis for their argument. There are some good arguments about why intellectual property shouldn't be recognised as property but those arguments don't deny that it currently IS recognised as property (and is as real as any other kind of contemporary transistory property like stocks, or money, or wahtever).
that may be true. but in the end the real world performance of a system comes to down to one thing:
code.
bad code runs slow.
good code runs fast.
SPEC numbers mean shit when After Effects runs significantly faster on a PC cause Adobe can't be bothered to optimise their mac code.
(I'm still waiting for apple to buy out adobe and make adobe's apps good again!)
It's not a G5, it's a PPC970, completely different beasts. Not to mention neither Motorola or IBM have 2GHz chips in their roadmap until 2005. Bzzzt One point impossible
Bzzt. Wrong.
G3 and G4 are both Apple marketing terms, not CPU specifications from IBM or Moto.
IBM was expecting low yields of the 2ghz chip but it was always on the roadmap for this year... or have you not been paying attention?
I'm writing this on a Powerbook G4, not a Powerbook 7450 (PPC 7450 is Motos term for the cpu running this beastie).
1GHz bus? gimme a break. Intel hasn't yet reached this. Two points impossible
Bzzt. Wrong. One word for you:
Hypertransport.org
The FSB runs at half the clockspeed of the CPU. A dual 2ghz 970 would have FSB of 1ghz.
The rest of Apples site would say "3 USB Ports" not "Three". Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible
The current G4s ship with USB 2.0 chipsets. Firewire and USB2 are NOT in competition. THey have different applications. If you don't belive me, then I ask you to point to a USB2 uncompressed SDI interface? Oh. YOu can't? Shit.
Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible
My dual 1.4ghz G4 has a FW800 port and two FW400s. FW800 is a different physical interface than FW400. I'm sure the chipset is also slightlly more expensive.
Bad grammar, but optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry but this sounds like wishful thinking. One more point impossible.
Marketing has always made a habit of playing with grammar.
Macs are not just graphics machine. In fact, the dual 1.4ghz mentioned above is primarily an audio workstation. It has digital audio out already on board.
Optical in/out is a surprise, but not unlikely - it has its advantages.
This is accurate. Like it or not. Apple is back in town where it belongs - on the top.
Signatures are not necessary for a binding contract. I don't sign anything when I buy my groceries at a store, but its still a binding contract because something have been exchanged.
Your sign would be considered unconscionable and would not be enforced.
But its not wrong in principle.
Its how ticketed parking works: 'by entering this carpark, you agree to these terms and conditions'.
in consideration of using a vendor's software you agree to their licensing agreement.
that's a contract. consideration. exchange.
(i had a discussion with my IT Law lecturer over EULAs. I used to think as you do. I know realise I was wrong. They are contracts. Whether they're contracts made in good faith or whether they're unconscionable contracts is a different question.)
As an Australian I can proudly say that almost NONE of us drink Fosters. It tastes like Budweiser which means it tastes like piss.
XXXX is mostly for the Queenslanders. I know no Sydneysiders, Melbournites or Adeladians who drink XXXX.
Toohey's New and VB are probably the most widely drunk beer in Australia. I personally prefer Hahn Premium Larger, which actually contains some german hops, but so be it.
Many companies, institutions and organisations - BSA - claim to have legal power they do NOT actually have. They then use this psudeo authority to coerce persons who are unwilling to fight them into pursuing a certain course. Sometimes its caused by pure ignorance, sometimes its willful ignorance, and sometimes its just callous deceit.
It happened to me when my faculty members at my Uni tried to claim that they (as in the faculty) owned copyright and any consequent profit in my media honours thesis. Fools didn't realise I was also a law student at the time too (still am, sadly). I spent time researching the situation, spoke to some media lawyers, and even found the University's OWN policy documents on the matter... and provided them with written proof that they were inarguably wrong. Somehow the staff didn't believe me. Or didn't want to belive me. My response was then "bill me". They never have and never will. Sadly, a year later they asked for money from a fellow student... who paid for it cause she was UNWILLING to fight them. "Oh, because they said its so it must be so".
It happened with a friend on Austudy. Basically there was a fuck up and the government claimed he owned them money. When he talked to them about it and said they were wrong, the person was like 'no, you owe us the money, you can't fight us, that's the law'. He fought them and won.
People in positions of power, or at least with appearance of power, will claim to have the law behind them to give them greater authority... and because citizens tend to view law as some great big evil other... when, in fact, the greatest thing about the common law tradition is that its the citizens' law. Chances are, they don't have ANY legal authority behind and just use the treat to silence disent.
Frankly, I think legal studies should be a compulsory study at high schools. It'll never happen, because then citizens will actually know their legal rights.Can't have that happen.
I'm involved with an Australia, grassroots, electronica label (www.dumphuck.com). We don't make money from the label, we all have full time jobs, and more often than not we LOSE money. Same with the musicians themselves.
Most of our records have been compilations to raise money for Amnesty, we press around 500 CDs per run. All tracks are donated. The distributor and the retailer takes a cut. We, as a label, make nothing. Nonetheless, the CDs retail at around $20AU - and we sell them at $10 a pop.
Fact is, we don't expect to sell all 500 copies. I think our first compilation - released in 1999 - is close to selling out. So our costing for the CD has to take into account our reasonable expectations of the volume we can sell so we can meet our production costs. We needed to sell 100 CDs to cut even. We did. Rejoice!
Since then, the compilation series (Beat and Squelch) has sold reasonably well and has always broken even and kinda turned a profit for Amensty.
Selling a CD in the Australian market is very different from the American market, mind you. Our population is small and diverse.
Now, we ended up releasing an album for one of our artists (Sonik Professa). It was a decent album. Again, $20. We didn't shift many units at all. I think it was like 80 or so. It got the point where WE (as a label) had to pay the distributor money to buy back the unsold CDs from the retailers who didn't want it anymore. It was around $2 a CD to 'deshelve it'. Thats a $1000 to buy back unsold stock on top of our pressing expenses. So we ended up being $1500 in the black on our hobby. Its worth mentioning we split the pressing costs with the msuo...
Another album is released by a guy called Deepchild. Its a killer album. The guy has profile internationally (he was reviewed very favourably in Wire) and has been getting killer reviews. He's on rotation in the big youth radio over here (Triple J). He sells like 64 CDs. Total. Again, he's lost around $1500 or so.
This does NOT include the cost of mastering (which we get done cheap by 301 Studios here cause they luv us) or the cost of the musicians gear... or any of our time.
The problem is marketing. We don't have the money to do it. Therefore we lose money cause people aren't aware of our product. Yeah, we can try and sell CDs at shows, but with shows of around 100 people, only around 5 people buy the CD!
Keep that in mind when you whine about the price of CDs, even from independent labels. Most of us don't make money. Most of us lose money. If all the musicians worldwide who didn't make any money stopped making music, the world would be a much quieter place (and would be full of so much crap)
Yes, musicians love what they do, but why shouldn't they then be paid what they deserve?
This whole movies and music and books should be free philosophy is fucking nonsense. Why don't you try working for free for a change rather than expecting us to do it out of the goodness of our hearts?
You kind of forget that part of a requirement of being a Professor (or just a basic academic) is being *published* x number of times a year. Journal articles are like 1 point. Books like 10. Basically Professors need to publish to keep their jobs. Why would they then want to put all their notes on the web? Moreover, if you spent two years writing a textbook (on unpaid leave quite possibly) why wouldn't you WANT to get paid? Oh e-book I hear you cry. Frankly, the idea of reading a 500 page textbook on my computer screen is highly unappealing. I want highlighted notes! Scribbes everywhere!
I'm about 3/4rs through my Law degree and I've got a shelf full of textbooks. About $500 worth. I also have 'unit readers' from certain law subjects. Yeah, each reader only costs $20 but when you have five volumes for a subject its the same as a textbook. Why don't they put them on the web? Well, a couple of law courses did do that. It wasn't too popular. No one likes printing out 20-30 page cases. Oh, just bring your laptop to school and do mark-up? Well. Fine. Then what are you going to do with your notes when you sit an exam? (Law subjects at my uni are predominately open book. Thank god for small mercies). Law textbooks are also the kind of thing you tend to keep for most of your career. You might update to new editions but most lawyers I know still have copies of their uni textbooks - because they want all their notes!
I also have a honours degree in media. We never really had 'textbooks' just set texts. Some subjects had compiled readers - and almost always the same readers were available on the 'online reserve'. Most people preferred to buy the reader. Of course, readers weren't published, just printed compilations of materials (which were made subject to copyright law and for which the University pays a huge amount in royalities for each year).
So until 'personal printing' becomes a legitimate reality, I don't see any reason to NOT have publishers. Its not like CDs where you can press 500 for $300! Try doing a run of 500 books and getting them in stores and sold so you don't make a loss.
Hmm. A friend of mine is a bigshot at Random House. Apparently the reason that its taken so long for Rowling to get out the next Harry Potter book is that the manuscript was trash. Needed a massive rewrite.
Its like George Lucas. I'm sure the SW prequels would be better if George Lucas had someone else to answer too.
But I'm biased. I love the printer page. All I spend my money on is books, dvds and computer-bits. I tend to agree with Giles (of Buffy fame); "books smell of knowledge".
I'd (personally) argue that the grandfather of Cyberpunk was Philip K Dick.
He didn't use many of the cliched setpieces of cyberpunk, but the mood & style & themes of his writing set the foundations for the movement (in opposition to trad sci fi).
Although, I think most CP fans can cite a pre-movement writer who they consider to be protocyberpunk... How far back can *you* go?
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on where you live. In Australia, you have a number of VERY STRONG rights to modify software you own. Part 4, Division 4A of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth)...
t /ca1968133/s47e.html) allows you to patch the program to make it work.
t /ca1968133/s47h.html)
:) (After asking politely for donations).
Specifically, I'd argue that s47e (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_ac
Valve could try and argue they EULA you're right to do that away but, sensibly, in Australia under s47H of the CPA any agreement which attempts to overrule your rights under Part 4/Division 4A "has no effect"... ie they can't use a contract of adhesion to force you to deny your legislated rights. (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_ac
If I was using HL2 and patched it and then they blocked me out, I'd launching a test case
I think 47H is a VERY sensible division.
What makes you think technies are going to a good job defining the law? They're not lawyers, afterall.
Letting any one interest group define the law is a problem. Its not lawyers per se that are the problem with intellectual problem - its the corporatisation of the law combined with the contemproary political economy.
There are many lawyers who are opposed to the expansion of copyright - they just usually don't work for any of the big corporate law firms.
"Just" images/frames? They're BIG frames with lots of colour-space... which all draw on other frames.
If they're workign with 4K uncompressed film scans, which is becoming the requirement for DI work*, then you're talking data rates in excess of 540 megs per sec or 32 gigs per minute... thats around 1.2 TB for the finished product.
However, visual effects compositing joins together a number of effects elements. I've seen shots with over 90 different elements being combined into a single shot.
So you could have a one minute shot with, say, 10 elements all at 4:4:4 4k uncompressed RGB 10bit Log (people are pushing to 12 bit... and i've heard of 96bit files for some model work)... and that alone would push the storage required to 3.2 TB for the one shot.... a feature at that kind of data rate would be 384 TBs
*2K may be the standard, but its pretty grainy. 4K hides most these problems... 6K is great.
I dunno if I call my primary self ugly, but I certainly wasn't spiffy. We were quite poor, so I wore shitty tracksuits to highschool, and my hair was always in a mess. I wore glasses, plates (to widen my jaw), had teeth crowding, and I sucked at sport (broke my fingers in touch foot ball, hit my own mouth with my tennis racket). I played Chess at lunch time and read Dr Who novels.
In high school, I got bad acne, sucked even more at sport, wrote poetry etc. etc.
But I was and still am an extrovert. These three sins may have done damage to my self esteem but they didn't make me stop being an extrovert. Not liking yourself and projecting that onto other people doesn't make everyone an introvert. It depends on the individual.
As I get older, the more I see and believe that personalities are genetic -- environments may bring out certain traits, emphasise some, repress others... but they are merely working on pre-determined colours. Lucky for me, most modern psychology agrees with this general notion (that nature and nuture work together to shape who we are) :)
My point is, I never had a chance.
You may never had a chance to 'become' an extrovert, but that has less to do with those three sins in a general sense, than who you are in a specific sense (and the impact of those 'three sins' onto YOU)
Social skills are a two way street. Make sure that the people around him are interacting with him, too.
This I certainly agree with. :)
All I'mm trying to do is separate they idea that extroversion and introversion are somehow inseperable from having social skills. You can learn social skills, you just mightn't like to use them that much :)
I'm so fucking tired of jackasses who think they can make a conclusive judgement about another person's intellect, reasons for holding an opinion, personality and motives based on a couple of lines of text in a remark on a website.
Quid Pro Quo.
The one thing that a law degree has taught me is to never trust anyone who tries to tell you what the law is unless they have a law degree (and even thats not always teh case) -- chances are they are lying or full of shit.
And you sir, are full of shit.
Theft can mean whatever the hell the legislature wants it to mean (unless its repugnant to the constitution). The law is DYNAMIC and is CREATED by Government and Courts. This is like the bedrock of jurisprudence.
Depending on your jurisdiction, theft is the act of taking someone elses property without their permission. Copyright is a form of property rights (albeit postively created). Music has copyright in it. Downloading music is a breach of the exclusive property rights vested in intellectual property via the Government.
What is so difficult to understand about this concept?
I'm so fucking tired of jackasses arguing that piracy isn't theft when they have no legal, jurisprudential or philosophical basis for their argument. There are some good arguments about why intellectual property shouldn't be recognised as property but those arguments don't deny that it currently IS recognised as property (and is as real as any other kind of contemporary transistory property like stocks, or money, or wahtever).
that may be true. but in the end the real world performance of a system comes to down to one thing: code. bad code runs slow. good code runs fast. SPEC numbers mean shit when After Effects runs significantly faster on a PC cause Adobe can't be bothered to optimise their mac code. (I'm still waiting for apple to buy out adobe and make adobe's apps good again!)
it seemed to read ok to me? or is that there are too many paragraph breaks?
It's not a G5, it's a PPC970, completely different beasts. Not to mention neither Motorola or IBM have 2GHz chips in their roadmap until 2005. Bzzzt One point impossible
Bzzt. Wrong.
G3 and G4 are both Apple marketing terms, not CPU specifications from IBM or Moto.
IBM was expecting low yields of the 2ghz chip but it was always on the roadmap for this year... or have you not been paying attention?
I'm writing this on a Powerbook G4, not a Powerbook 7450 (PPC 7450 is Motos term for the cpu running this beastie).
1GHz bus? gimme a break. Intel hasn't yet reached this. Two points impossible
Bzzt. Wrong. One word for you:
Hypertransport.org
The FSB runs at half the clockspeed of the CPU. A dual 2ghz 970 would have FSB of 1ghz.
The rest of Apples site would say "3 USB Ports" not "Three". Also, Apple have a long standing habit of using Firewire instead of USB 2.0. I take this as one point impossible
The current G4s ship with USB 2.0 chipsets. Firewire and USB2 are NOT in competition. THey have different applications. If you don't belive me, then I ask you to point to a USB2 uncompressed SDI interface? Oh. YOu can't? Shit.
Once again use of the verbal "One" instead of the numeric. Only one FW800 port? Why would Apple stick with FireWire 400 anyway? I mark this impossible
My dual 1.4ghz G4 has a FW800 port and two FW400s. FW800 is a different physical interface than FW400. I'm sure the chipset is also slightlly more expensive.
Bad grammar, but optical audio in a graphics machine? I'm sorry but this sounds like wishful thinking. One more point impossible.
Marketing has always made a habit of playing with grammar.
Macs are not just graphics machine. In fact, the dual 1.4ghz mentioned above is primarily an audio workstation. It has digital audio out already on board.
Optical in/out is a surprise, but not unlikely - it has its advantages.
This is accurate. Like it or not. Apple is back in town where it belongs - on the top.
Signatures are not necessary for a binding contract. I don't sign anything when I buy my groceries at a store, but its still a binding contract because something have been exchanged. Your sign would be considered unconscionable and would not be enforced. But its not wrong in principle. Its how ticketed parking works: 'by entering this carpark, you agree to these terms and conditions'.
how are they *not* valid contracts?
in consideration of using a vendor's software you agree to their licensing agreement.
that's a contract. consideration. exchange.
(i had a discussion with my IT Law lecturer over EULAs. I used to think as you do. I know realise I was wrong. They are contracts. Whether they're contracts made in good faith or whether they're unconscionable contracts is a different question.)
XXXX is mostly for the Queenslanders. I know no Sydneysiders, Melbournites or Adeladians who drink XXXX.
Toohey's New and VB are probably the most widely drunk beer in Australia. I personally prefer Hahn Premium Larger, which actually contains some german hops, but so be it.
If you're using a more strict definition of 'citizen' then yes, it was designed to protect citizens.
Otherwise it was designed to protect aristocrats and to control the masses.
It has, of course, evolved beyond this. Quite to the disdain of the landed gentry. Mostly because of cricket.
It happened to me when my faculty members at my Uni tried to claim that they (as in the faculty) owned copyright and any consequent profit in my media honours thesis. Fools didn't realise I was also a law student at the time too (still am, sadly). I spent time researching the situation, spoke to some media lawyers, and even found the University's OWN policy documents on the matter... and provided them with written proof that they were inarguably wrong. Somehow the staff didn't believe me. Or didn't want to belive me. My response was then "bill me". They never have and never will. Sadly, a year later they asked for money from a fellow student... who paid for it cause she was UNWILLING to fight them. "Oh, because they said its so it must be so".
It happened with a friend on Austudy. Basically there was a fuck up and the government claimed he owned them money. When he talked to them about it and said they were wrong, the person was like 'no, you owe us the money, you can't fight us, that's the law'. He fought them and won.
People in positions of power, or at least with appearance of power, will claim to have the law behind them to give them greater authority... and because citizens tend to view law as some great big evil other... when, in fact, the greatest thing about the common law tradition is that its the citizens' law. Chances are, they don't have ANY legal authority behind and just use the treat to silence disent.
Frankly, I think legal studies should be a compulsory study at high schools. It'll never happen, because then citizens will actually know their legal rights.Can't have that happen.
I'm involved with an Australia, grassroots, electronica label (www.dumphuck.com). We don't make money from the label, we all have full time jobs, and more often than not we LOSE money. Same with the musicians themselves.
Most of our records have been compilations to raise money for Amnesty, we press around 500 CDs per run. All tracks are donated. The distributor and the retailer takes a cut. We, as a label, make nothing. Nonetheless, the CDs retail at around $20AU - and we sell them at $10 a pop.
Fact is, we don't expect to sell all 500 copies. I think our first compilation - released in 1999 - is close to selling out. So our costing for the CD has to take into account our reasonable expectations of the volume we can sell so we can meet our production costs. We needed to sell 100 CDs to cut even. We did. Rejoice!
Since then, the compilation series (Beat and Squelch) has sold reasonably well and has always broken even and kinda turned a profit for Amensty.
Selling a CD in the Australian market is very different from the American market, mind you. Our population is small and diverse.
Now, we ended up releasing an album for one of our artists (Sonik Professa). It was a decent album. Again, $20. We didn't shift many units at all. I think it was like 80 or so. It got the point where WE (as a label) had to pay the distributor money to buy back the unsold CDs from the retailers who didn't want it anymore. It was around $2 a CD to 'deshelve it'. Thats a $1000 to buy back unsold stock on top of our pressing expenses. So we ended up being $1500 in the black on our hobby. Its worth mentioning we split the pressing costs with the msuo...
Another album is released by a guy called Deepchild. Its a killer album. The guy has profile internationally (he was reviewed very favourably in Wire) and has been getting killer reviews. He's on rotation in the big youth radio over here (Triple J). He sells like 64 CDs. Total. Again, he's lost around $1500 or so.
This does NOT include the cost of mastering (which we get done cheap by 301 Studios here cause they luv us) or the cost of the musicians gear... or any of our time.
The problem is marketing. We don't have the money to do it. Therefore we lose money cause people aren't aware of our product. Yeah, we can try and sell CDs at shows, but with shows of around 100 people, only around 5 people buy the CD!
Keep that in mind when you whine about the price of CDs, even from independent labels. Most of us don't make money. Most of us lose money. If all the musicians worldwide who didn't make any money stopped making music, the world would be a much quieter place (and would be full of so much crap)
Yes, musicians love what they do, but why shouldn't they then be paid what they deserve?
This whole movies and music and books should be free philosophy is fucking nonsense. Why don't you try working for free for a change rather than expecting us to do it out of the goodness of our hearts?
Yeah, and Paul Davies wrote a paper on how the speed of light has slowed over time. This may or may not break relativity.
There is a remote possibility that we mightn't be able to travel faster than light but that we might be able to increase its speed.
Anyway. Said paper is at:
http://aca.mq.edu.au/lightspeed.html
You kind of forget that part of a requirement of being a Professor (or just a basic academic) is being *published* x number of times a year. Journal articles are like 1 point. Books like 10. Basically Professors need to publish to keep their jobs. Why would they then want to put all their notes on the web? Moreover, if you spent two years writing a textbook (on unpaid leave quite possibly) why wouldn't you WANT to get paid? Oh e-book I hear you cry. Frankly, the idea of reading a 500 page textbook on my computer screen is highly unappealing. I want highlighted notes! Scribbes everywhere! I'm about 3/4rs through my Law degree and I've got a shelf full of textbooks. About $500 worth. I also have 'unit readers' from certain law subjects. Yeah, each reader only costs $20 but when you have five volumes for a subject its the same as a textbook. Why don't they put them on the web? Well, a couple of law courses did do that. It wasn't too popular. No one likes printing out 20-30 page cases. Oh, just bring your laptop to school and do mark-up? Well. Fine. Then what are you going to do with your notes when you sit an exam? (Law subjects at my uni are predominately open book. Thank god for small mercies). Law textbooks are also the kind of thing you tend to keep for most of your career. You might update to new editions but most lawyers I know still have copies of their uni textbooks - because they want all their notes! I also have a honours degree in media. We never really had 'textbooks' just set texts. Some subjects had compiled readers - and almost always the same readers were available on the 'online reserve'. Most people preferred to buy the reader. Of course, readers weren't published, just printed compilations of materials (which were made subject to copyright law and for which the University pays a huge amount in royalities for each year). So until 'personal printing' becomes a legitimate reality, I don't see any reason to NOT have publishers. Its not like CDs where you can press 500 for $300! Try doing a run of 500 books and getting them in stores and sold so you don't make a loss. Hmm. A friend of mine is a bigshot at Random House. Apparently the reason that its taken so long for Rowling to get out the next Harry Potter book is that the manuscript was trash. Needed a massive rewrite. Its like George Lucas. I'm sure the SW prequels would be better if George Lucas had someone else to answer too. But I'm biased. I love the printer page. All I spend my money on is books, dvds and computer-bits. I tend to agree with Giles (of Buffy fame); "books smell of knowledge".
Assuming she's running OS X.
Create a superuser account for yerself on her machine.
Whenever she's doing illegal things... SSH into her machine and kill the process.
again.
and again.
and again.
she'll presume the program is so buggy she'll never use it again.
the RIAA and you win.
yah! technology.
I'd (personally) argue that the grandfather of Cyberpunk was Philip K Dick.
He didn't use many of the cliched setpieces of cyberpunk, but the mood & style & themes of his writing set the foundations for the movement (in opposition to trad sci fi).
Although, I think most CP fans can cite a pre-movement writer who they consider to be protocyberpunk... How far back can *you* go?