I'd have to have a look at the company's books and have a detailed knowledge of the industry to know what the profit margin really is. The entertainment industry has a reputation of low-balling their numbers by inflating reported expenses so they can pay their artists even less.
My 50% estimate is just a guess based on what other people on Slashdot have said.
It's still small potatoes to what they can raise. Don't forget that they have a monopoly on music and have a profit margin on the order of 50%. They can afford to throw billions into legal fees and still turn a profit.
I take it very seriously (heck, in my opinion, 99%+ of advertising is fake, though some is worse than others). Too bad my representatives don't take the same view.
What strawman? Is communist a dirty word to you or something.
And yes, ardent believers in free markets must reject copyrights on ideological grounds, but since there are very few of these people around in the world, I doubt it effects the numbers much. On the other hand, socialists and communists make up a very large share of the world population.
I live in NYC, and yes, the inner city people and people of certain colors (black and hispanic mainly) are far more likely to spend time behind bars than people in small white towns. Even in NYC, middle class whites are unlikely to land in the slammer, but it only takes a few neighborhoods with 50%+ rates to skew the figures.
"While some people do reject the entire notion of copyright, I think that more people merely reject the present implementation."
Any belief system that believes in 'from all according to ability' must totally reject copyright to avoid being a total hypocrite. For a person or entity to copyright something, they are saying that they are going to produce fewer copies than they are capable of.
Since 'from all according to ability' is a core tenant of communism, this means there aught to be a lot of people against any sort of copyright just based on communist ideology.
Couldn't you still load the program into gdb and get the register values that way? Or is there something in the modern versions of MS Windows that prevents using a debugger?
PS: The last Windows OS that I used regularly was MS Windows ME, so I'm surely out of date with what is going on in that area of computer software.
No, I believe that you do indeed have a better than 1 in 100 chance of spending some jail time for a crime you didn't do. About 0.7% of the population is in jail at any one time and over 10% of the population has been sent to prison at least once in their lives. If only 10% of people convicted were innocent, then you get your 1 in a 100.
Your odds vary greatly based on where you are, how rich you are, your gender, your race, your political connections, and other factors, with poor black males in inner cities far above 1 in 100 and white rich females having a much lower than 1 in 100 chance of a false conviction in a lifetime.
The problem is that we have an awfully car-friendly city government. Why can cars have radios, speedometers, and other distracting electronic gadgets and people walking (which takes less brain power) are not allowed to do so? Don't forget that pedestrians have far, far less capacity to cause harm than a car. It's simple physics: 50kg human * 1.5 m/s = 56 J of energy. 1000kg car * 20 m/s = 200,000 J of energy. Taking that into account, pedestrians should be the ones treated leniently. After all, when is that last time that a pedestrian killed someone by walking into them?
I don't care so much about my privacy but about the hypocrisy of it all. If shady government contractors and three letter agencies had as much privacy as common citizens, they'd be a lot easier to control.
PS: Why the no soliciting (or even the no trespassing) signs? Trespassing is by default illegal, and it's hard to solicit without trespassing.
I'm not sure if this an Ethernet issue, but my router and cable modem are substantial (probably >10 W) sources of heat. Considering that they're on 24/7, I sure would like to cut that down.
We also have a major bias towards catastrophic risks that we have no control over mundane risks that we think we have control of.
Take the risk of getting wiped out by an asteroid vs. the risk of getting framed and sent to prison. The former is far less likely (less than 1 in a million), but it also gets people a lot more scared. Your odds of being framed and sent to prison are greater than 1 in a 100 over a lifetime (at least in the USA, the odds are far lower in countries with lower incarceration rates), but it doesn't evoke the same kind of fear.
"It also may actually encourage piracy. Because people would rather have DRM free "pirate" copies, effectivly the pirate version can become more valuable than the "legit" version. If DRM is too much of a problem it effectivly ends up driving a black economy of paid for DRM free copies."
I've already noticed this with games. If you download the cracked version, you don't need to feed the CD into the drive for the game to play. For this reason alone I've downloaded quite a few games that I had already bought. Cracked games also have a much better chance of working under WINE.
Where does this RAM go? Using Fedora Core 5 + KDE (a very bloated combo), RAM is the least of my worries, despite only having 256MB of it. The processor power and hard drive transfer rate are the main hardware limits.
And people wonder why so many people are against globalization.
The reason is not any hate of foreign countries or trade, but rather that it's a code word for giving more power and money to the ultra rich and powerful by restricting the freedoms and rights (including property rights) of the working class (which includes the middle class).
Having red-green colorblindness, I can say that your typical high-contrast hues (bright red and normal or dark green) can be extremely hard to tell apart. I've missed stop signs while staring right where the sign should be because of the dark green foliage behind it and I have to get up real close to red-on-black signs to be able to read them (maybe 1/3rd the distance that I need for more legible white-on-black or black-on-white signs).
PS: I prefer to call it red colorblindness, as I have no trouble seeing green and it's the brightest color around.
"Most. perhaps only many, people who copy electronic media would not have purchased the item anyway"
That's probably true, and one can even use economic theory to get a decent grasp on just how large this effect is by using the good old demand curve.
What is demand @ $.01/song (or whatever your time and a bit of bandwidth are worth when bulk downloading) and what is demand @ $2/song (cost of CD + tax + hassle and time spent shopping). So long as the demand @ $.01 is at least double that @ $2/song, then most people would indeed not have paid for that item.
I wouldn't be surprised if demand is 25x greater at $.01 than at $2 - after all, 25 songs at a cent a piece is still 1/8th the cost of a song from the store and I've seen plenty of people with massive 10,000+ song collections. At 25x, only about 4% of song downloads are displacing sales, ignoring any free advertising effect.
The problem with relying solely on GPS is that it'll probably be down quite quickly if we ever got into a war with a major power. Satellite killers aren't that hard to design for any power with access to space.
It'll take more than 0.01% of the 'war on terror' resources and arming civilian ships to stop this sort of piracy.
The sort of person or country that wants highly enriched uranium that badly isn't going to be deterred by a few poorly trained gunners. A PT boat could easily take over even an armed cargo ship, as the crew is extremely tiny and, even armed, the sailors would not be well trained or experienced.
If the aim is decent (if you can at least pick which county it will land in) and the material is quite abundant on the moon, you can just roll it into a ball and hurl it with no parachute. Part will burn up, but most of a dense chunk of metal will survive and smash into some remote desert which you targeted. Considering that it makes a very bright meteor on re-entry, it shouldn't be hard to find.
"The second mistake is that not all units can be expressed in terms of metres, kilograms and seconds. Try electric charge for example which is measured in coulombs."
Actually, the base measure is amperes. A coulomb is 1 ampere * second.
In all there are 7 base units, but I cannot recall them offhand.
Degrees (and other units of measure based on circumferences instead of radii) have their uses. Most common angles (180 deg, 90 deg, 45 deg, 60 deg, 30 deg) can be expressed without having to rely on fractions or pi.
Even arcminutes have their uses. An arcminute of latitude is almost exactly 1 nautical mile (~6,000 feet or 1/3 of a league). I certainly wouldn't want to try navigating using radians instead of the conventional degrees.
Amen to that. What I hate even worse are the laws restricting clothelines and many easy to grow plants from your property. I personally like dandelions, but if I ever dared grow them I would be running afoul of the local law.
"... and Jehovah's Witnesses going door-to-door distrbing the peace..."
Annoying as they are, they pale in comparison to billboards and the likes. Get rid of the big and permanent stuff, and then focus on the more minor and transient nuisances.
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I'd have to have a look at the company's books and have a detailed knowledge of the industry to know what the profit margin really is. The entertainment industry has a reputation of low-balling their numbers by inflating reported expenses so they can pay their artists even less.
My 50% estimate is just a guess based on what other people on Slashdot have said.
It's still small potatoes to what they can raise. Don't forget that they have a monopoly on music and have a profit margin on the order of 50%. They can afford to throw billions into legal fees and still turn a profit.
I take it very seriously (heck, in my opinion, 99%+ of advertising is fake, though some is worse than others). Too bad my representatives don't take the same view.
What strawman? Is communist a dirty word to you or something.
And yes, ardent believers in free markets must reject copyrights on ideological grounds, but since there are very few of these people around in the world, I doubt it effects the numbers much. On the other hand, socialists and communists make up a very large share of the world population.
I live in NYC, and yes, the inner city people and people of certain colors (black and hispanic mainly) are far more likely to spend time behind bars than people in small white towns. Even in NYC, middle class whites are unlikely to land in the slammer, but it only takes a few neighborhoods with 50%+ rates to skew the figures.
"While some people do reject the entire notion of copyright, I think that more people merely reject the present implementation."
Any belief system that believes in 'from all according to ability' must totally reject copyright to avoid being a total hypocrite. For a person or entity to copyright something, they are saying that they are going to produce fewer copies than they are capable of.
Since 'from all according to ability' is a core tenant of communism, this means there aught to be a lot of people against any sort of copyright just based on communist ideology.
Couldn't you still load the program into gdb and get the register values that way? Or is there something in the modern versions of MS Windows that prevents using a debugger?
PS: The last Windows OS that I used regularly was MS Windows ME, so I'm surely out of date with what is going on in that area of computer software.
No, I believe that you do indeed have a better than 1 in 100 chance of spending some jail time for a crime you didn't do. About 0.7% of the population is in jail at any one time and over 10% of the population has been sent to prison at least once in their lives. If only 10% of people convicted were innocent, then you get your 1 in a 100.
Your odds vary greatly based on where you are, how rich you are, your gender, your race, your political connections, and other factors, with poor black males in inner cities far above 1 in 100 and white rich females having a much lower than 1 in 100 chance of a false conviction in a lifetime.
The problem is that we have an awfully car-friendly city government. Why can cars have radios, speedometers, and other distracting electronic gadgets and people walking (which takes less brain power) are not allowed to do so? Don't forget that pedestrians have far, far less capacity to cause harm than a car. It's simple physics: 50kg human * 1.5 m/s = 56 J of energy. 1000kg car * 20 m/s = 200,000 J of energy. Taking that into account, pedestrians should be the ones treated leniently. After all, when is that last time that a pedestrian killed someone by walking into them?
I don't care so much about my privacy but about the hypocrisy of it all. If shady government contractors and three letter agencies had as much privacy as common citizens, they'd be a lot easier to control.
PS: Why the no soliciting (or even the no trespassing) signs? Trespassing is by default illegal, and it's hard to solicit without trespassing.
I'm not sure if this an Ethernet issue, but my router and cable modem are substantial (probably >10 W) sources of heat. Considering that they're on 24/7, I sure would like to cut that down.
We also have a major bias towards catastrophic risks that we have no control over mundane risks that we think we have control of.
Take the risk of getting wiped out by an asteroid vs. the risk of getting framed and sent to prison. The former is far less likely (less than 1 in a million), but it also gets people a lot more scared. Your odds of being framed and sent to prison are greater than 1 in a 100 over a lifetime (at least in the USA, the odds are far lower in countries with lower incarceration rates), but it doesn't evoke the same kind of fear.
"It also may actually encourage piracy. Because people would rather have DRM free "pirate" copies, effectivly the pirate version can become more valuable than the "legit" version. If DRM is too much of a problem it effectivly ends up driving a black economy of paid for DRM free copies."
I've already noticed this with games. If you download the cracked version, you don't need to feed the CD into the drive for the game to play. For this reason alone I've downloaded quite a few games that I had already bought. Cracked games also have a much better chance of working under WINE.
Where does this RAM go? Using Fedora Core 5 + KDE (a very bloated combo), RAM is the least of my worries, despite only having 256MB of it. The processor power and hard drive transfer rate are the main hardware limits.
And people wonder why so many people are against globalization.
The reason is not any hate of foreign countries or trade, but rather that it's a code word for giving more power and money to the ultra rich and powerful by restricting the freedoms and rights (including property rights) of the working class (which includes the middle class).
Having red-green colorblindness, I can say that your typical high-contrast hues (bright red and normal or dark green) can be extremely hard to tell apart. I've missed stop signs while staring right where the sign should be because of the dark green foliage behind it and I have to get up real close to red-on-black signs to be able to read them (maybe 1/3rd the distance that I need for more legible white-on-black or black-on-white signs).
PS: I prefer to call it red colorblindness, as I have no trouble seeing green and it's the brightest color around.
"Most. perhaps only many, people who copy electronic media would not have purchased the item anyway"
That's probably true, and one can even use economic theory to get a decent grasp on just how large this effect is by using the good old demand curve.
What is demand @ $.01/song (or whatever your time and a bit of bandwidth are worth when bulk downloading) and what is demand @ $2/song (cost of CD + tax + hassle and time spent shopping). So long as the demand @ $.01 is at least double that @ $2/song, then most people would indeed not have paid for that item.
I wouldn't be surprised if demand is 25x greater at $.01 than at $2 - after all, 25 songs at a cent a piece is still 1/8th the cost of a song from the store and I've seen plenty of people with massive 10,000+ song collections. At 25x, only about 4% of song downloads are displacing sales, ignoring any free advertising effect.
The problem with relying solely on GPS is that it'll probably be down quite quickly if we ever got into a war with a major power. Satellite killers aren't that hard to design for any power with access to space.
It'll take more than 0.01% of the 'war on terror' resources and arming civilian ships to stop this sort of piracy.
The sort of person or country that wants highly enriched uranium that badly isn't going to be deterred by a few poorly trained gunners. A PT boat could easily take over even an armed cargo ship, as the crew is extremely tiny and, even armed, the sailors would not be well trained or experienced.
If the aim is decent (if you can at least pick which county it will land in) and the material is quite abundant on the moon, you can just roll it into a ball and hurl it with no parachute. Part will burn up, but most of a dense chunk of metal will survive and smash into some remote desert which you targeted. Considering that it makes a very bright meteor on re-entry, it shouldn't be hard to find.
"The second mistake is that not all units can be expressed in terms of metres, kilograms and seconds. Try electric charge for example which is measured in coulombs."
Actually, the base measure is amperes. A coulomb is 1 ampere * second.
In all there are 7 base units, but I cannot recall them offhand.
Degrees (and other units of measure based on circumferences instead of radii) have their uses. Most common angles (180 deg, 90 deg, 45 deg, 60 deg, 30 deg) can be expressed without having to rely on fractions or pi.
Even arcminutes have their uses. An arcminute of latitude is almost exactly 1 nautical mile (~6,000 feet or 1/3 of a league). I certainly wouldn't want to try navigating using radians instead of the conventional degrees.
Amen to that. What I hate even worse are the laws restricting clothelines and many easy to grow plants from your property. I personally like dandelions, but if I ever dared grow them I would be running afoul of the local law.
"... and Jehovah's Witnesses going door-to-door distrbing the peace ..."
Annoying as they are, they pale in comparison to billboards and the likes. Get rid of the big and permanent stuff, and then focus on the more minor and transient nuisances.
"Aren't you being a little too harsh on a person who spent more than 1/3rd of his life's savings in philanthropy"
Yeah, and stealing from the poor and middle class (via Microsoft) is a great way to get that money in the first place.
It also ignores the fact that he's wastes more resources on frivolous personal expenses than most people will ever see in a lifetime.