Asperger's and autism are more likely due to the fact that it's a geek haven.
A choice quote: "Scientists strongly believe that autism is greatly influenced by genes."
I'm not worried about this toxic dust article. I keep my area cleaned. Independent researchers aren't worried about it. We've had computers since the 1970s. When Stallman grows a third arm, that's when I'll start getting worried.
* Someone in almost every article tries to make a completely off-topic reference to Clippy in order to get upmods.
* Clippy hasn't been in default installs in some four years now. I haven't seen him in almost six years.
* Clippy goes away when you right-click and go to "Hide." He never comes back.
Clippy, along with BSOD, is one of those jokes that will never die on Slashdot, because newbie Linux geeks like to think it's funny and relevant and still happens in this day and age. It's like people are stuck in 1998 and absolutely will not let go, because it's all they've got as they use their OpenOffice apps and that annoying, irritating light bulb pops up every 10 seconds whenever you type a few words...
- that damn preview pane that takes up all kinds of space, and slows things to a crawl when you've had the window open in many directories over a period of time.
It gets switched off in the very dialog box I described. My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings. Are you trolling?
The rest of your list is personal preference that doesn't affect the majority of users. The complaint is a non-issue. Even changing Folder Options is incredibly easy--compared to, say, navigating the huge mess that is the KDE Control Center.
Uh, no it's not. What would you change in Display properties? What would you change in Folder properties? Nice specifics there, pal.
The only one I could agree with you on is the Start menu. Oh, what a hassle. Right-clicking, going to Properties, and changing the radio button from one to the other. The horror!
Technically, all films are all-artificial. It's not like we're really watching people on screen--it's artificially-captured light printed on tiny film strips, sometimes even projected digitally. Voices aren't real human voices but the sound wave output coming from speakers spitting out the mastered input from a microphone that just so happened to have a human stand in front of it and use his or her vocal chords.
I would have been impressed if the movie had been created entirely artificially--i.e., by non-humans. Machines making movies would be fun to watch.
These are the secrets of the Linux desktop. You don't know about these things when you see the pretty desktop art on the back of the Mandrake box. All you get told is when you go to some niche site like Slashdot, and someone mentions something called "pre-linking" and asks you which distro you're using. Hell, Office on Windows doesn't even preload itself into memory (yet another False Meme(tm) spread on Slashdot as if it's proven truth--but it doesn't matter if I point this out, the rabid zealots aren't interested in truth and will continue to spread the lie) and it loads in three seconds for me, compared to OpenOffice which takes 10.
Didn't you know you're supposed to ignore how much mysteriously slower apps take to load under Linux desktop emulators like KDE and GNOME? You're just supposed to go off and spend three hours hacking at text files to get a sound card working and ignore performance issues (and go rattling on about how Windows XP is "riddled with spyware" without ever citing a single example). Didn't you know taskbars and start menus and integrated filesystem/HTML browsers are the norm in KDE, while Microsoft is supposed to be the uncreative one ripping people off?
And people wonder why Linux is still at an embarrassing 1% on Google Zeitgeist. What was that about the Linux desktop taking over OS X usage? What a hilarious article that was when Slashdot posted it. The power of all the volunteers in the world, and we make a clone of UNIX. Then we make a clone of Windows 98 on top of it.
* A vague claim that they aren't better engineered ("completely false") because they aren't cross-platform. Yes, lets stick to absolutists definitions, because surely nothing could be well-engineered yet exist for only one platform. You know, like OS X for instance?
* A vague claim that IE has less code just because it's not as HTML-compliant. Lame and amusing.
* Describing how Microsoft analyzes I/O and optimizes accordingly. Doesn't that mean they're better engineers? I don't see how it's a criticism that Windows optimizes apps correctly to minimize I/O--you just gave them a compliment.
* A vague claim that Microsoft builds in "basis" that other applications "can't benefit from." Of course, nothing is mentioned or specified, just like when people claim Windows XP is "riddled with spyware" without citing a single example other than Windows Media Player grabbing song titles like every single other media player.
Just another collection of vague, unproven claims in your typical Thursday story on Slashdot.
OS X doesn't date back to the mid-eighties. OS X is based on NextStep technology Steve Jobs brought with him when he returned to Apple.
They had been trying to replace the classic MacOS since the mid-eighties, but they weren't working on OS X then. They had been trying to get a new OS off the ground for years and failed every time--until Jobs brought in NextStep. That's when they started on OS X, and the first release was in 1999 as OS X Server.
Yes, OS X is based on a Mach kernel with BSD subsystems grafted in. It's basically the UNIX GUI that server-oriented Linux is always trying to be but will never achieve even 10% of.
XP was faster than Windows 98 for me. 2000 was horribly slow--I remember trying to run games, and Black and White would run at 15fps.
I know you think your anecdotal little experience magically encompasses all experiences with Windows XP, but that's like me recounting my horrible experiences with Gnome and KDE always crashing (and they still do--I never fail to find a way to break either of those hacky desktop emulators) and pretending that it's the same situation for every single person who ever uses them.
There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.
What fucking hoops?
Right-click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings button.
Choose either "Best Performance" or "Best Appearance." Or check each option individually. What a non-issue.
If this was KDE, someone would have already answered with this, but because it's Windows, everyone just nods with the rest of the flock, "Baa, baa, yes, there are hoops to jump through, baa."
Speaking of KDE, talk about fucking hoops. You've got a completely horrible control center, with three different areas for changing the looks of things like window styles, widget styles, and so on. Why the hell isn't that all integrated into one configuration dialog? Oh, I forgot, ease-of-use is a criticism we only reserve for non-issues on the Windows platform like checking a radio button to get rid of a blue theme.
"New KDE, with a few more sidebar buttons, a few more tiny apps beginning with K, and few changed gradients in our default theme!"
Obviously there are more changes under the hood that occur. You're being kind of unfair here, I think, to pretend you've seen a full changelog for WMP10, especially since it hasn't been released yet except in beta form.
I was making a point about the complete double-standard around here, where it's okay to violate RIAA and artist copyright holder rights, and Slashdot even makes cheeky jokes about P2P piracy, but if a company dares violate the copyright of the GPL, it's suddenly a big headline article and everyone gets up in arms.
It's a double standard--apparently copyrights are only a big deal when it comes to the GPL and not when it comes to violating someone else's rights on Kazaa, which is some sort of imagined "gray area" on Slashdot.
This was no doubt awarded to avoid crap like Eolas. Microsoft can just sit on the patent, and just in case some little company comes along trying to fleece them of money like Eolas did, they can say, "Sorry, can't do it, we already own it."
I guarantee this won't actually be enforced against competitors. It's an interesting patent, but I'm not worried about it. But it is an illustration of how silly the system is that anybody can be awarded a patent for anything, to the point where companies take out cheesy patents like this one just to keep even cheesier companies like Eolas off their backs.
...what's the point when there aren't any decent hard drive based recording applications out there? The ones that do exist aren't even past beta and achieve the feature set of something like Cakewalk 2.0 from the early 90s. Not to mention DXi and VST support.
Congratulations on a new P2P app, particularly one that is open source. Any method of enforcing that copyrighted works aren't being pirated across the network?
No? Oh.
Well sorry then, I'm not going to bother supporting it. 95% of P2P traffic is illegal piracy, and there is no legal or ethical justification. Just my position to not support it--agree or disagree if you'd like.
I believe medicine care is a humane and fair way of bettering the quality of the life you have. Forgive me for thinking engineering ourselves not to age isn't.
So does the RIAA. They 'give' artists up to a buck a cd sold.
Complete bullshit. They make these things called "contracts." Artists willingly sign them.
They take 9 at least for themselves.
They take that much in order to pay:
The studio The artists having a place to stay New equipment for the artists to use during recording The producers The mixers The level of hardware used in the studio The mastering studio they send the music to The art department The marketing department The pressing plant The distributors Coverage of expenses on all the thousands of other acts they fund that don't return on their investment And much, much more
Yet there's rarely bitching about that.
Rarely any bitching? I constantly hear Slashdotter non-artists bitching about it all the time. The only people I hear "rarely bitching" about it are the artists themselves, the ones you claim to be protecting by ripping off. Nobody here knows any artists or has met any or asked them, yet everyone claims to be their guardian angels--somehow accomplished by ripping them off and making sure they don't get paid for their work. I'm sure John Carmack will thank you so much for "protecting" him from the evil publishers when you pirate Doom 3 to make sure those evil execs don't get a share.
Hell, let's pirate everything just to make sure these select unnamed execs don't get a share of money. That'll sure show them--and the artists as well.
You people claiming that 'pirates' are stealing from artists are only partially correct. They're mostly stealing from record company executives.
Uh, if you steal an artist's work, you steal from an artist. The artist is not going to get paid their share. There is no "partially correct" about this. Listen to your own insanity. "Technically I'm not stealing from artists because mostly I'm stealing from the share the execs get!" What a weak argument.
Stealing from record company executives is no less illegal or inethical either. You don't have the right to violate people's copyright just because you're in college and have some naive, anti-capitalist slant. If you don't like the business model, introduce a new one or try to change the system or support only systems you like.
I don't personally think it's ok to steal music from anyone, and I think any artist who gives up 90% of their earnings to some record company exec deserves to get screwed
90% of earnings aren't going to some single record company exec. This is one of those false memes that pirates spread so many times that it magically becomes "truth" in Slashdot posts, presented as evidence of a point. Like I said, a lot of the sales of CDs goes to all the people who make those sales possible, not just the artists. Artists sign their contracts willingly to a record label and distributer who will pay a lot of money to make sure the band is known, heard, and that their CD is available everywhere in stores. I get the impression very, very few of you if any even know how the business works.
but really it isn't the downloaders who are exhibiting 'pirate'-like behavior.
You've got to be kidding me. Pirates aren't acting like pirates? It most certainly is the pirates exhibiting pirate-like behavior. Man, what a spin.
Who cares if the music is good or bad or indifferent? If it's distributed by the major labels, a.k.a. head ripoff practitioners, I don't buy it.
So you pirate it instead? Are you implying it's okay if others do as well?
I buy only from independant artists because they get more of my money. If you want to truly support artists, rather than help some exec buy his second hummer, buy independant.
It's funny you rag on nameless execs so much when it's the artists and their gold toilets, huge mansions, classic car collections, and second hummers I see on MTV Cribs all the time. You want to pa
I'd rather grow older and die, thank you. Natural processes and all that.
What's the point of overstaying your welcome? Let the young have the world they are born to inherit from us, let them take our place. It's not fair to them, or to us, to engineer ourselves to stick around forever and take up their resources.
Okay, so the rampant piracy has gone to the point where the companies are going to try to implement copy controls in an attempt to curb it.
How much piracy has to go on before people stop so that the record companies stop these last-ditch efforts? I mean, do you really expect them not to try this? It seems to be the only way, along with legal lawsuits, to get people to stop pirating the fuck out of everything.
I know, I know--many of you have constructed entire ideologies to justify violating copyright holder rights. The artists are completely ignored in this equation; it's all about painting the RIAA as evil for, say, suing individual downloaders (which Slashdot told them to do back during the Napster lawsuit!). I saw one moron around here once describe them as a "Copyright Enforcement Militia." Talk about an out-of-touch, loopy mentality.
Absolutely nothing justifies ripping an artist off.
Ah, the logical fallacy of thinking that because that you don't like today's music, it means nobody else does.
This is Slashdot, where people think The Who is still a relevant band.
Your argument makes no sense anyway. If today's music is so crap, why do so many people pirate it? It's a copout to say, "Well, maybe if they would just produce good music." That's not even the issue. Piracy isn't right just because you aren't a member of the MTV demographic anymore. You're implying piracy will go down if they make good music, which begs the question--why are people pirating music they think is bad?
Oh, that's right, it's an irrelevant issue and you're just scapegoating the music industry in order to justify piracy and ignore artist rights. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify pirating an artist's music.
And it is a fact that CD sales continued to climb, despite illegal price fixing on the part of the record labels, until the demise of Napster.
Correlation is not causation.
File-sharing is even more widespread than it ever was during the Napster days, and more people have broadband. Just because Napster went away and then CD sales went down doesn't mean anything. In fact, it could be argued that causing Napster to go away made pirates create even more P2P apps, and so even more people were pirating artists' work than ever before.
Oh, I forgot, we're scapegoating the RIAA here and ignoring the artists in this equation. You know, those nameless people who actually rented the studio and spent a couple of months recording the music.
Do you realize that for all the moaning and complaining the labels do, they are still making profits that would make any small business jealous? Never ever forget, that this stopped being about money a long time ago. Money is a secondary issue now. What these companies are really after now is control.
Yeah--control over their own copyrighted materials. How dare they. The nerve!
The most interesting bit is that in the grand scheme of things, speaking from an economic theory standpoint, it doesn't matter if consumers share music with 1 or 10 or 100 people. Most consumers will share less than 2% of their CDs with less than 5 people, and a portion of that sharing will generate new sales. So it all becomes a wash in the end.
Ah, made-up Slashdot statistic! Let's just pull numbers out of our asses and not cite a source.
The time, money, and energy the labels are spending trying to shut down music sharing is a utter waste, and won't even pay for itself in the end.
So many people are pirating the fuck out of everything, what's the big deal if the companies dare make attempts to prevent the violation of their rights that's going on? Or do copyright holder rights only matter when it's a situation of the GPL being violated? That seems to be the only time people around here care about being ethical.
But Stallman doesn't live in a 68 billion dollar robo-house, so his ideas aren't interesting to the general public.
That's not why. His ideas aren't interesting because they are often considered radical and unchanging, not to mention conflicting with capitalism in many cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Asperger's and autism are more likely due to the fact that it's a geek haven.
A choice quote: "Scientists strongly believe that autism is greatly influenced by genes."
I'm not worried about this toxic dust article. I keep my area cleaned. Independent researchers aren't worried about it. We've had computers since the 1970s. When Stallman grows a third arm, that's when I'll start getting worried.
* Someone in almost every article tries to make a completely off-topic reference to Clippy in order to get upmods.
* Clippy hasn't been in default installs in some four years now. I haven't seen him in almost six years.
* Clippy goes away when you right-click and go to "Hide." He never comes back.
Clippy, along with BSOD, is one of those jokes that will never die on Slashdot, because newbie Linux geeks like to think it's funny and relevant and still happens in this day and age. It's like people are stuck in 1998 and absolutely will not let go, because it's all they've got as they use their OpenOffice apps and that annoying, irritating light bulb pops up every 10 seconds whenever you type a few words...
- that damn preview pane that takes up all kinds of space, and slows things to a crawl when you've had the window open in many directories over a period of time.
It gets switched off in the very dialog box I described. My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings. Are you trolling?
The rest of your list is personal preference that doesn't affect the majority of users. The complaint is a non-issue. Even changing Folder Options is incredibly easy--compared to, say, navigating the huge mess that is the KDE Control Center.
Uh, no it's not. What would you change in Display properties? What would you change in Folder properties? Nice specifics there, pal.
The only one I could agree with you on is the Start menu. Oh, what a hassle. Right-clicking, going to Properties, and changing the radio button from one to the other. The horror!
Technically, all films are all-artificial. It's not like we're really watching people on screen--it's artificially-captured light printed on tiny film strips, sometimes even projected digitally. Voices aren't real human voices but the sound wave output coming from speakers spitting out the mastered input from a microphone that just so happened to have a human stand in front of it and use his or her vocal chords.
I would have been impressed if the movie had been created entirely artificially--i.e., by non-humans. Machines making movies would be fun to watch.
These are the secrets of the Linux desktop. You don't know about these things when you see the pretty desktop art on the back of the Mandrake box. All you get told is when you go to some niche site like Slashdot, and someone mentions something called "pre-linking" and asks you which distro you're using. Hell, Office on Windows doesn't even preload itself into memory (yet another False Meme(tm) spread on Slashdot as if it's proven truth--but it doesn't matter if I point this out, the rabid zealots aren't interested in truth and will continue to spread the lie) and it loads in three seconds for me, compared to OpenOffice which takes 10.
Didn't you know you're supposed to ignore how much mysteriously slower apps take to load under Linux desktop emulators like KDE and GNOME? You're just supposed to go off and spend three hours hacking at text files to get a sound card working and ignore performance issues (and go rattling on about how Windows XP is "riddled with spyware" without ever citing a single example). Didn't you know taskbars and start menus and integrated filesystem/HTML browsers are the norm in KDE, while Microsoft is supposed to be the uncreative one ripping people off?
And people wonder why Linux is still at an embarrassing 1% on Google Zeitgeist. What was that about the Linux desktop taking over OS X usage? What a hilarious article that was when Slashdot posted it. The power of all the volunteers in the world, and we make a clone of UNIX. Then we make a clone of Windows 98 on top of it.
* A vague claim that they aren't better engineered ("completely false") because they aren't cross-platform. Yes, lets stick to absolutists definitions, because surely nothing could be well-engineered yet exist for only one platform. You know, like OS X for instance?
* A vague claim that IE has less code just because it's not as HTML-compliant. Lame and amusing.
* Describing how Microsoft analyzes I/O and optimizes accordingly. Doesn't that mean they're better engineers? I don't see how it's a criticism that Windows optimizes apps correctly to minimize I/O--you just gave them a compliment.
* A vague claim that Microsoft builds in "basis" that other applications "can't benefit from." Of course, nothing is mentioned or specified, just like when people claim Windows XP is "riddled with spyware" without citing a single example other than Windows Media Player grabbing song titles like every single other media player.
Just another collection of vague, unproven claims in your typical Thursday story on Slashdot.
OS X doesn't date back to the mid-eighties. OS X is based on NextStep technology Steve Jobs brought with him when he returned to Apple.
They had been trying to replace the classic MacOS since the mid-eighties, but they weren't working on OS X then. They had been trying to get a new OS off the ground for years and failed every time--until Jobs brought in NextStep. That's when they started on OS X, and the first release was in 1999 as OS X Server.
Yes, OS X is based on a Mach kernel with BSD subsystems grafted in. It's basically the UNIX GUI that server-oriented Linux is always trying to be but will never achieve even 10% of.
XP was faster than Windows 98 for me. 2000 was horribly slow--I remember trying to run games, and Black and White would run at 15fps.
I know you think your anecdotal little experience magically encompasses all experiences with Windows XP, but that's like me recounting my horrible experiences with Gnome and KDE always crashing (and they still do--I never fail to find a way to break either of those hacky desktop emulators) and pretending that it's the same situation for every single person who ever uses them.
There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.
What fucking hoops?
Right-click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings button.
Choose either "Best Performance" or "Best Appearance." Or check each option individually. What a non-issue.
If this was KDE, someone would have already answered with this, but because it's Windows, everyone just nods with the rest of the flock, "Baa, baa, yes, there are hoops to jump through, baa."
Speaking of KDE, talk about fucking hoops. You've got a completely horrible control center, with three different areas for changing the looks of things like window styles, widget styles, and so on. Why the hell isn't that all integrated into one configuration dialog? Oh, I forgot, ease-of-use is a criticism we only reserve for non-issues on the Windows platform like checking a radio button to get rid of a blue theme.
It's common practice for OSS apps just as much.
"New KDE, with a few more sidebar buttons, a few more tiny apps beginning with K, and few changed gradients in our default theme!"
Obviously there are more changes under the hood that occur. You're being kind of unfair here, I think, to pretend you've seen a full changelog for WMP10, especially since it hasn't been released yet except in beta form.
I was making a point about the complete double-standard around here, where it's okay to violate RIAA and artist copyright holder rights, and Slashdot even makes cheeky jokes about P2P piracy, but if a company dares violate the copyright of the GPL, it's suddenly a big headline article and everyone gets up in arms.
It's a double standard--apparently copyrights are only a big deal when it comes to the GPL and not when it comes to violating someone else's rights on Kazaa, which is some sort of imagined "gray area" on Slashdot.
A Slashdot story purposely misleading in order to generate knee-jerk page hits? Say it ain't so...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/28/198242
This was no doubt awarded to avoid crap like Eolas. Microsoft can just sit on the patent, and just in case some little company comes along trying to fleece them of money like Eolas did, they can say, "Sorry, can't do it, we already own it."
I guarantee this won't actually be enforced against competitors. It's an interesting patent, but I'm not worried about it. But it is an illustration of how silly the system is that anybody can be awarded a patent for anything, to the point where companies take out cheesy patents like this one just to keep even cheesier companies like Eolas off their backs.
...what's the point when there aren't any decent hard drive based recording applications out there? The ones that do exist aren't even past beta and achieve the feature set of something like Cakewalk 2.0 from the early 90s. Not to mention DXi and VST support.
Congratulations on a new P2P app, particularly one that is open source. Any method of enforcing that copyrighted works aren't being pirated across the network?
No? Oh.
Well sorry then, I'm not going to bother supporting it. 95% of P2P traffic is illegal piracy, and there is no legal or ethical justification. Just my position to not support it--agree or disagree if you'd like.
You're absolutely right! They don't have online music services like Napster or iTunes! Nobody sells anything legally online!
How could I have been so ignorant...apparently piracy is a "new method of distribution" for the artists...
I believe medicine care is a humane and fair way of bettering the quality of the life you have. Forgive me for thinking engineering ourselves not to age isn't.
So does the RIAA. They 'give' artists up to a buck a cd sold.
Complete bullshit. They make these things called "contracts." Artists willingly sign them.
They take 9 at least for themselves.
They take that much in order to pay:
The studio
The artists having a place to stay
New equipment for the artists to use during recording
The producers
The mixers
The level of hardware used in the studio
The mastering studio they send the music to
The art department
The marketing department
The pressing plant
The distributors
Coverage of expenses on all the thousands of other acts they fund that don't return on their investment
And much, much more
Yet there's rarely bitching about that.
Rarely any bitching? I constantly hear Slashdotter non-artists bitching about it all the time. The only people I hear "rarely bitching" about it are the artists themselves, the ones you claim to be protecting by ripping off. Nobody here knows any artists or has met any or asked them, yet everyone claims to be their guardian angels--somehow accomplished by ripping them off and making sure they don't get paid for their work. I'm sure John Carmack will thank you so much for "protecting" him from the evil publishers when you pirate Doom 3 to make sure those evil execs don't get a share.
Hell, let's pirate everything just to make sure these select unnamed execs don't get a share of money. That'll sure show them--and the artists as well.
You people claiming that 'pirates' are stealing from artists are only partially correct. They're mostly stealing from record company executives.
Uh, if you steal an artist's work, you steal from an artist. The artist is not going to get paid their share. There is no "partially correct" about this. Listen to your own insanity. "Technically I'm not stealing from artists because mostly I'm stealing from the share the execs get!" What a weak argument.
Stealing from record company executives is no less illegal or inethical either. You don't have the right to violate people's copyright just because you're in college and have some naive, anti-capitalist slant. If you don't like the business model, introduce a new one or try to change the system or support only systems you like.
I don't personally think it's ok to steal music from anyone, and I think any artist who gives up 90% of their earnings to some record company exec deserves to get screwed
90% of earnings aren't going to some single record company exec. This is one of those false memes that pirates spread so many times that it magically becomes "truth" in Slashdot posts, presented as evidence of a point. Like I said, a lot of the sales of CDs goes to all the people who make those sales possible, not just the artists. Artists sign their contracts willingly to a record label and distributer who will pay a lot of money to make sure the band is known, heard, and that their CD is available everywhere in stores. I get the impression very, very few of you if any even know how the business works.
but really it isn't the downloaders who are exhibiting 'pirate'-like behavior.
You've got to be kidding me. Pirates aren't acting like pirates? It most certainly is the pirates exhibiting pirate-like behavior. Man, what a spin.
Who cares if the music is good or bad or indifferent? If it's distributed by the major labels, a.k.a. head ripoff practitioners, I don't buy it.
So you pirate it instead? Are you implying it's okay if others do as well?
I buy only from independant artists because they get more of my money. If you want to truly support artists, rather than help some exec buy his second hummer, buy independant.
It's funny you rag on nameless execs so much when it's the artists and their gold toilets, huge mansions, classic car collections, and second hummers I see on MTV Cribs all the time. You want to pa
I'd rather grow older and die, thank you. Natural processes and all that.
What's the point of overstaying your welcome? Let the young have the world they are born to inherit from us, let them take our place. It's not fair to them, or to us, to engineer ourselves to stick around forever and take up their resources.
Okay, so the rampant piracy has gone to the point where the companies are going to try to implement copy controls in an attempt to curb it.
How much piracy has to go on before people stop so that the record companies stop these last-ditch efforts? I mean, do you really expect them not to try this? It seems to be the only way, along with legal lawsuits, to get people to stop pirating the fuck out of everything.
I know, I know--many of you have constructed entire ideologies to justify violating copyright holder rights. The artists are completely ignored in this equation; it's all about painting the RIAA as evil for, say, suing individual downloaders (which Slashdot told them to do back during the Napster lawsuit!). I saw one moron around here once describe them as a "Copyright Enforcement Militia." Talk about an out-of-touch, loopy mentality.
Absolutely nothing justifies ripping an artist off.
Ah, the logical fallacy of thinking that because that you don't like today's music, it means nobody else does.
This is Slashdot, where people think The Who is still a relevant band.
Your argument makes no sense anyway. If today's music is so crap, why do so many people pirate it? It's a copout to say, "Well, maybe if they would just produce good music." That's not even the issue. Piracy isn't right just because you aren't a member of the MTV demographic anymore. You're implying piracy will go down if they make good music, which begs the question--why are people pirating music they think is bad?
Oh, that's right, it's an irrelevant issue and you're just scapegoating the music industry in order to justify piracy and ignore artist rights. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify pirating an artist's music.
And it is a fact that CD sales continued to climb, despite illegal price fixing on the part of the record labels, until the demise of Napster.
Correlation is not causation.
File-sharing is even more widespread than it ever was during the Napster days, and more people have broadband. Just because Napster went away and then CD sales went down doesn't mean anything. In fact, it could be argued that causing Napster to go away made pirates create even more P2P apps, and so even more people were pirating artists' work than ever before.
Oh, I forgot, we're scapegoating the RIAA here and ignoring the artists in this equation. You know, those nameless people who actually rented the studio and spent a couple of months recording the music.
Do you realize that for all the moaning and complaining the labels do, they are still making profits that would make any small business jealous? Never ever forget, that this stopped being about money a long time ago. Money is a secondary issue now. What these companies are really after now is control.
Yeah--control over their own copyrighted materials. How dare they. The nerve!
The most interesting bit is that in the grand scheme of things, speaking from an economic theory standpoint, it doesn't matter if consumers share music with 1 or 10 or 100 people. Most consumers will share less than 2% of their CDs with less than 5 people, and a portion of that sharing will generate new sales. So it all becomes a wash in the end.
Ah, made-up Slashdot statistic! Let's just pull numbers out of our asses and not cite a source.
The time, money, and energy the labels are spending trying to shut down music sharing is a utter waste, and won't even pay for itself in the end.
So many people are pirating the fuck out of everything, what's the big deal if the companies dare make attempts to prevent the violation of their rights that's going on? Or do copyright holder rights only matter when it's a situation of the GPL being violated? That seems to be the only time people around here care about being ethical.
But Stallman doesn't live in a 68 billion dollar robo-house, so his ideas aren't interesting to the general public.
That's not why. His ideas aren't interesting because they are often considered radical and unchanging, not to mention conflicting with capitalism in many cases.