People have had pens and paper for a really long time, and that's all you need in order to copy books...
This is correct, but once again an important factor is missed here. For one with out literacy or artistic talent it is very difficult to copy type face or even hand written words. Even if you did have the skills to copy writen word, it would take you approximately as long as it took the original artist to write the book in the first. Other artistics works that were copyable before photography or other form of photoreplication, such as paintings on canvas, also required a great deal of skill and time.
The big jumps (e.g. the jump from nothing to the first sound recordings) were [a big deal in the copyright world], but they were just as important for publishers and artists as anyone else.
This is exactly why copyright law had to be inacted. The tools that were benefitial to publishers and artists would be of no benefit at all if there was no legal right to control of the copying of a work. The best part about this is that the people that use modern copy techniques own that all to the original copyright holders. If there was no legal rights of copy protection then the copy technologies would not have received funding for coporations hoping to use it the technology to their own benefit.
The vast, vast majority of [artist] have to make money in other ways, ranging from taking commissions (which involves performing a service, rather than exploiting copyrights)
This is were you are correct but missing some important information. Most paid artists, not hobbyists, who would actually be affected by copyright infringement, which is probably far more than you realize, do receive income through commisions; commisions which are paid by people purchasing the work in the hopes of exploiting copyrights, as you put it. To publisher would buy the rights to a story, or song, or video game if their were no copyright law.
Mixing archaic arts like painting, sculpture and non-recorded perfroming arts, with modern arts like audio and video recording or video games only muddies up the issue and makes people think they are all applicable to the same rules. The rules should protect all artists but we don't have copyright law and DMCA because of painters.
Ignoring the childish personal attack I will address your comment in as clear a way as possible.
Copyright is a thing of the present, not of the past; it is a couple hundred years old. There has been art forever.
Copyright, wether it be by institutional law or other form of enforcement (limitation of knowledge, or force for example) has been around as long as the ability to copy or forge artistic works has been easily accesible to the everyday citizen. When forgeries cost as much and took as much skill as the original there was less need for copyright, since may forgers actually took claim and pride in there ability to copy the works of the masters of their art. Today there is no skill involved in making mass produced copies of print, photographic, recorded or digital art and the cost in resources, including time, is considerably less than that required to create the work. Without copyright protection we would be without most of the art that we have today. Artists would not find themselves free enough , do to the obligation to make a living elsewise, to produce the amount of art, wether you like it or not, that we have available to us.
Art through the years has change from a single solitary task, to works that require many people hundreds of thousands of man hours to create. When a painter, one of the older reproducible art forms, were to spend even a hundred hours on a painting, they could find someone willing to pay over a thousand dollars for the original and there for provide a living wage. Music records take easily a dozen people hundreds of man hours to produce, and with the complaints about the high cost of CDs today I doubt anyone would be willing to pay 10 thousand dollars or more to have the original. If we look at movies or video games, those numbers become astronomic. Now that these newer artforms are pure digital in also adds another difference between the art of today, and the historical art you speak of. Digital art loses no quality in replication, where as a painting, for example, can not be easily replicated with the same qualities except by someone who is also a painter of the same skill as the original.
Many Things have changed throughout history and you should not look at something like art in isolation and instead look at it in a grander scope, such as including the technology of replication.
But if you can copy (are capable of copying it), then it is allowed unless it harms someone else.
I agree with you completely on the face value of that statement. To bad copyright infringment does harm people by taking away their ability to survive in a capitalist society.
Once artistic work does not supply the resource to keep a person living (read that very carefully because it is worded that way specifically), then mass promotion, regardless of production, of art will be a thing of the past. Sure there will always be artist, such as people who create artistic works in there free time, but they will only be available to a small audiance due to the amount of resources needed to make people aware of the artistic work.
There is a solution if you would truely like art, or for that matter all creations, to be freely available to all people, but it would require a much larger change than copyright infringement or the abolishment of copyright law.
Copying a song does not deprive anybody of the item
I feel sorry for humanity every time I read a line like this. It always comes from someone that doesn't really have any understanding of how artists feed, cloth and house themselves. Just because technology has made replication of audio and video easy and cheap should be no excuse for depriving other human beings of a living. If those who support the copying of copyrighted materials have their way then art it self will soon be a thing of the past. To me this really sucks, because I enjoy music and other digital media art (such as video games). My only hope is that some day a cheap molecular replicator (yes a thing out of sci-fi at this time) is produced so that automobile, hardware and other physical media manufacturers start to be attacked the same way that the artist of today are being attacked.
I guess I don't prescribe to the idea that just because you can copy something that you should copy it, and lucky neither do the law makers of this country which is why we have copyrights.
Right, but if I go to Staples and buy a retail copy of WinXP, I can take that and install it on a machine from any vendor.
This argument doesn't make any sense at all. If you buy a retail copy of WinXP you can't go out and install it on a machine from any vendor. I know I can't install windows XP on the machine I am typing this on right now, nor can it be installed on many other computers out there. It's also possible that if I was able to get it to install it wouldn't support all of the components I use. Windows and Linux are actually an exception in the history of OSes. The original OSes where not only tied to a specific vendor, but also to a specific machine, and there was no way to remove or replace it. Even windows to this day is tied to specific hardware. It runs on x86 architecture only, and it will not run on all machines with an x86 cpu, all though you are lead to beleive that.
Apple is very smart to keep there OS tied to their hardware. This is a big reason behind Apple stability. They can concentrate on supporting a small set of hardware and not worry about a thousand conflicting drivers. It's stupid that this argument never even came up when macs ran on power architecture. Stop thinking of Mac intel machines as the same thing as windows intel machines, they have components that are not the same. An Apple coreduo machine is not a dell coreduo machine evenif the processors are the same.
I knew Windows wouldn't run on the new Intel Macs.
This is out right false, as the guy who sits a couple desks down from me is right now running windows XP on his MacBook Pro.
Do you not know when you go to buy iTunes that they only work on iPods?
That's interesting. I have multiple friends and family members that use iTunes to download music. Some of them use windows computers, some mac, some iPods and some othe MP3 players and not a single one has said they have had any problems using their downloaded songs on any other machines, including regular CD players.
Not liking Apple or DRM is one thing, but lies are another, please stop spreading the fud.
Yeah that's it. I could have just looked at my book shelf had I been home. Of course I probably could have looked it up online too. But hey I knew someone would know what I was talking.
And now it will be FPS/RPG genre, though more FPS than RPG.
I don't know the full details but from what I read its going to be more FPS than anything else. No Matrix (half the game in my opinion), limited magic (Combat only) and no real story (but that is just a random guess).
Having been around and active in Role Playing when the first edition of SR came out I will say you are way off base.
Yes, SR does use concepts of fantasy fiction, which in turn borrowed from folk lore. The SR world has Elves, Trolls and other so called Meta Humans as well as magic, but that is about as close as it comes to D&D. Much of the races are significatly different, such as the trolls don't regenerate naturally and dwarves (which are even real, in a form, today) don't have a natural sense of direction under ground. The Background stroy justifying the SR world is actually one of the better ones I have read, IMHO, and it is enhanced further by the tie in with FASAs fantasy world RPG (who's name is slipping my mind for some reason).
SR is also in the Cyber Punk genre, though more cyber than punk. Being cyber punk, there is then some association with Gibson, whom they do give thanks to in the original hard back edition. Being a fan of Gibson as well as SR I can say there are some significant differences there as well.
In the end shadow run is a combination of two genres, so of that you are not off base, but they happen to have take the best of the two world and melded them very well and create a decent universe around it. The world of shadow run is no Al Amarja but still pretty decent.
Having an add on optical drive would work out really well. It would put Microsoft up there with Sega and the highly succesful SegaCD. Expandablity in consoles has always been a great selling point, which is now doubt why the most exapandable console every made, the Dreamcast, was so succesful and put Sega on top as a console manufacture.
On the other hand, like you said it's a good bet that no game within the next 2 years will use that extra Bluray space for anything other than "HI Def FMV". I mean It has held up that no one has been able to use more the 640k of memory or need more than 1.44 megs of disk space. The chances that a game company will ever use the full space and power of the environment they get to work in is totally laughable.
so you buy a nice little condo for $1.5 million, which is perfectly reasonble given your [$300k a year] salary and the size of your savings [enough money saved up for several years worth of bill].
See that there is the problem, people think 5 time their yearly income is a reasonable amount to pay for a home. And if you have enough money saved up for several years worth of bills I just don't see how you go from there to broken. What could possibly happen, outside of illness which I exempted earlier, that could cause your cost of living to rise so much that your savings is useless? The only think I can think of is still poor financial and personal choices.
Obviously you are a card carrying elitist libertarian asshole...
My associates would laugh at that, but hey one out of 3 ain't bad. If you read through any of my other posts you will see I am the exact opposite of an "elitist libertarian," but since I live in a capitalist society I have learn how to make sure my family is well taken care of. I still don't see how you can go from making $300k a year to living on the street without managing your money poorly. I could pay of my house (which is certainly not a small condo) and still have plenty to spare if I had $300k. This is why I am not libertarian, I don't think most of the public have the where-with-all to handle their own finances. If people weren't allowed to blow their lifes earnings on million dollar condos the whole of society would have a hell of a lot more to share. Next thing you will be telling me is there is justification for multi-million dollar a year earners like some musicians and athletes to end up bankrupt.
When you do have that run of bad luck, and need a hand to get back on your feet, I hope the only people you find are also card carrying elitist libertarian assholes that slap you in the face instead.
I have been down on my luck a few times in my life (mind you this was when I was much younger and made $20-30k at the most), but I stayed on my feet because of the personal decisions I made, like always being there for my friends and family, and not giving up on them when they were having hard times, so they helped me out when I needed it. But I assume that someone who refers to the mother of his children and wife of 8 years as a "psychopathic bitch" probably doesn't do much to help out what little they have in the way of friends and family.
Poor choices in life are no excuse for being a failure. I mean beyond the possibility of illness the thing mentioned in the parent comment are all things you would have control over at one point. If you some how thought it was resonable to purchase a little condo for $1.5 million then you deserve the hardship when the house market crashes (since it would have to crash enough to offset how ever many years of rent you would have otherwise paid.). If you can't figure out how to make a marriage work, or are a poor judge of people then once again I don't feel any sympathy.
There are families in the united states that survive on just over minimum wage with little governmental assistance. If you ever pulled down $300k a year and find yourself in hard times, you pretty much fucked up and probably should be allowed to handle your personal finances anymore.
In fact I argue that using the government force to prop up the business model that is scarcity of information is the behaviour that is immoral
This is somehow moral different than using the gevernment force to prop up the buisness model that the resources of the country are to be controlled by individuals rather than the entirety of the citizenship?
Sorry I just don't see how one is any different than the other. Without legal enforcement through governmental action both of these situations would be handled either through ethical decisions (for those of us with ethics) or personal force (which is probably the strongest or most persuasive of us). If there were no government protecting you from your neighbor taking your property you would probably not have it, unless of course you were some how the most powerful person in the country. You only have personal property because your government says you can, which has not always been the case, and personal property has not always be the way property has been handled. Excuse the tautology but I think that needed to be said a few times.
I'm all for the freedom of information, but I think people should also have a right to survive on the basis of their hard work, and feel anything that deprives them of that ability to me immoral. Of course if a persons livelihood was not based on sale of goods this wouldn't really be a problem.
One can argue that all of earth's natural resource belong to no one, and thus, physical theft is no theft at all.
I was about to make a similar argument, but I learned long ago that people either are for or against personal property rights, and getting either side to change their mind takes a lot more than a/. post.
I would favor a system similar to patents, where copyrights have a physical, reasonable, non-extendable expiration date.
You should check out the US copyright system, it is exactly what you describe, beside the reasonable part, but that is subjective. Copyrights to expire at a given time, which for new works is the life of the auther plus 70 years (slightly different for works for hire, but still a fixed duration).
Yet the movie rental industry has proved to be a great financial benefit to Hollywood even though they were all up in arms at the beginning. Why?
To answer your question correctly, the financial benefit is because rental companies pay significant royalties each time that an item is rented. Also many countries are starting to pay royalties form their libraries for the books they supply.
Besides, not every art lends itself to rentals... Visual arts such as paintings or photography?
I don't actually pruchase the type of art you are refereing too so I don't have personal experience with it and so I will refrain from commenting. Once electronic music distribution becomes more popular there will be far more likely hood of rentals being available. I know there are some music out there I would like to listen too every once in a while, but are certainly not worth buying an album for. Image if you would having a party, and just renting some music for the evening. Sounds like a decent idea to me.
-1, Terrible analogy. I mean really. In my scenarios the people are actually acting within the bounds of societal expectations.
Since my stance is that the current societal expectations are not necessarily correct, it only seems fitting that your would see the analogy as being "Terrible."
If people start buying used coffee tables the economy will collapse!
Quite possibly, if everyone stopped buying originals and instead purchased only used products, the economy might collapse. At the very least it would stifle innovation faster than than the US patent system. A quick look at history will show that societies that stop innovating quikcly die off.
All these arguments people pose only make me more likely to purchased new rather than used. Seems like, atleast among the out spoke slashdot crowd, no one is buying anything new, so I can't even see why some one would be in the buisness of making new things. I will try my best to singlehandedly keep the music, movie, book, and video game industry alive.
Read my original post please. All I stated was that the PS3 is actually the best choice for my life style and personality. Some people were curious to get more details about why I chose to not purchase second hand. I chose to spend some limited time in supplying some food for thought on the subject. I was not actually trying to back up anything, since this is just personal preference. I chose to beleive that people should be compensated when someone recieves the benefit of their work. I chose to keep the creative people who's works I enjoy, feed, clothed, safe and healthy, to the best of my ability in the hopes that they will be able to continue producing great works. I chose to take steps in a direction that may reduce the cost of a product with out damaging the compensation received by the creator. The best part is that a certain group of people took the time to read what I had to say, and though few agreed, many atleast took the time to think about it.
I wanted to make some summary comments and since the parent poster was the most articulate with their arguments, as aposed to comments such as "you are a morron", I figure I'll post them here.
First of All I never once said there should be some law regulating sale of used products. I was merely stating why I don't purchase used artistic works as long as the artist is continuing to make the work available with out providing compensation to the artist. The idea here was not to undermine the current economic structure where original sales are priced to compensate for future resale. Instead I chose to purchase new in the hope that free market economy (the system we supposedly have in the United States) would work out and cause the price of initial sales to be reduced. I had hoped that by doing such we would avoid the future possibility that resale will no longer even be a choice, but rather enforced by licensing of the producers.
Now that licensing is here, and appears to be to stay, I just don't see it as problematic. It does not effect me negatively.
Now to address the scenarios laid out by the parent comment.
Most people, who weren't following this context, would agree that using a product that is available for sale, and not supplied by the creator for free, without paying for it would be considered theft. I know that analogies prove nothing, but I will turn to one for just a momment. If a person walks into a store, takes a product of the shelf and walks out with it without paying they are a theif. If someone else comes along and pays for it does not make the original person any less of a theif.
The first scenario above discribes a situation where a person gains use of a product while effectively not paying for it and instead passing the cost on to the second person who enjoys the work. "Person (a) buys a photograph from me for $100. Five years from now, he sells it to person (b) for $100, who also keeps it for five years."
I can say for certain that if I started a service where I purchased the first copy of every artistic work for the standard price and then proceeded to "sell" these originals to others for a small fee with a contract that states it must be resold to me for 1/100th the price I charge after one week, alot of people would be crying foul because of lost royalties. In the end this would be perfectly legal, but I would basically be providing a rental service, reaping all the benifits, and the original artist only sells one copy of the work and receives no compensation for the hundreds or thousands of people that enjoy the work.
Personally I don't like having to pay for the expected resale. I would rather have the price of original purchase to be reduced. I don't expect others to agree or even see the possibility. All I can do is attempt to educate.
Every item everywhere winds up in the trash after the first owner gets tired of it?
Now that is actually an interesting argument that I would hope the market would handle. First products could be recycleable, sell video games on rewriteables, you can take it to the store and have a new game printed over it reducing distributions cost. Make the products biodegradeable. Sell products virtually (like iTunes).
Better yet, make products that the original owner will want to reuse. If you couldn't resell your product you would be more likely to buy the ones that you can get the most use out of, there for putting more emphasis on the length and replayablity of games.
Personally I still have all my PS1 and PS2 games. I own hundreds of CDs, some I rarely listen too. But I don't buy things I'm going to use and throw away if I can avoid it. You can rent (or use the library in the case of books if you are in a country that pays royalties) if you only want to use something once.
Basically, stop buying crap you won't want a year later and we won't have all this crap in out land fills (which shouldn't actually be a problem since rarely do we actually produce more matter).
DVDs are a product...Movie theatres are a service.
And this is why the idea of a product is soon to be a thing of the past. More and more products are being converted into services. This was seen comming years ago when leasingof automobiles became more and more popular. This is after all what this thread started from. If sony choses to license games rather than sell them, then more power too them. I support the move. I think in my life time we will see the same for DVDs and Videos. Once Network access becomes so common that most people have it, like running water, we will see physical products for artistic works disappear. Instead of going to the store to purchase something, you will pay a feee to use it for a period of time online.
What's worse is that at a movie theater you are paying to watch a product (the movie) someone else owns. Do you think theaters should purchase a film and be able to show it as many times as they like with the studio and those involved getting no further benifit? In reality the theater pays a royalty every time the movie is show, based on number of tickets sold even though the movie itself is a product.
Read my other comments on why a used car is atleast somewhat different than an artistic work with unlimited usage. I will add that I wouldn't mind if Automakers received a royalty from used car resales. By your logic about artist not working any harder when you resell a used work, we might as well make the first sale of any one artistic work fully compensate the artist and the rest of the sales simply cover the cost of replication (after all the artist doesn't have to reproduce the hard work it took to original create each time it is replicated). Since I doubt any one person will pay a million dollars for being the first one to buy a particular CD, I don't see this working out. The current model is that the orignal purchaser pays enough to cover the orignal sale and a certain number of resales. If we are talking about video games it makes the orginal sale around $50 with an expectation of at least one resale, or about $25 per purchaser. If we all purchased new, and free market economy worked, the original cost of video games would drop the about $25 a peice, which is less than many games go for second hand, with the manufacturer droping the sale price over time (as can already be seen in the likes of Sonys Greatest Hits pricing).
Take away from this what you want. I was only saying that even with all the nay sayers out there the PS3 price model and licensing plan does not negatively impact everyone, and it is actually perfectly suited for some of us.
By your logic it seems the reselling of the tic tacs should be theft as well. In either case the manufacturer of the product is denied the sale that would have occured had you not been there to provide the used good to the buyer.
By logic, my or otherwise, you happen to be incorrect. The reason there is a difference in the intended use. For products like food they are intended for a single use. A turkey is not sold for the intent of being used by a single person. Also there is no third party benifiting from someone elses work. In the case of the tic tacs, unless you have found someone to pay more than the original value, the worse thing that is happening here is two people purchased half amounts. An Automobile, a peice of clothing, a house, they all have limited usage. Software, music and other artistic works wich are observed and not consumed have no limited usage. Therefor there has to be some other reasonable exceptable usage. Most people don't find the rules against public presentations to be unreasonable, such as renting a movie and charging people to come see it, but this is in effect what you are facilitating my selling used works with unlimited usage. This is why rental companies pay royalties on works they rent (yes there is a royalty paid for each time netflix sends out a dvd).
It has been said for many years that the cost of software is as high as it is because of the lost sales due to copying and used sales. You can choice to not beleive that, but from where I sit I can't see how those things do not ultimately effect the bottom line.
Personally I have seen enough great artists fail, I just don't want to be facilitating that failure. If I do by a used product, it is because there is no other choice, and I try to make sure the artist is compensated (though this does leave out those that helped get that work of art out to the public).
This is where things get interesting. I won't write off all reselling as immoral. Most people do not consider reselling a used DVD as immoral. But on the other hand most people would consider reusing (with or without reselling) a movie theater ticket to get into a movie twice would be immoral. When purchasing a used product, you are, in most cases, receiving the benifit of the product without any compensation given to the people who worked hard to produce the product. I would have no problem with second hand purchases if royalties where to paid to makers. Personally I find reselling used artistic products, items with unlimited usage, to be theft (Reselling your half used pack of tic tacs doesn't bother me).
No I am not an artist or a musician or even a manufacturer. The only benefit I get out of supporting original purchases, is the hope that the money will allow those that I support to create more and better products.
Likely they will not have take any programming basics/fundamentals classes (Pascal, Turing, etc.) as Java is now being used in most high-schools at least as the introductary programming language.
This may be off topic, but this is the problem with the students coming out of school with CS degrees today. Arguing over wether to use an editor with or without syntax highlighting and code completion is certainly not a major issue. The basics supplied by many IDEs do not diminish the ability to learn the basic of programing. One does hurt learning the basics is teaching an OO language as the first language with out giving some understanding of what the computer is doing. As far as I am aware no one has yet to build an Object Orient Processor (The Cell may be closest thing out there). I don't know that we need to go to the level of teaching logic gates and registers (thought this is probably how I would teach it), but certainly something a little closer to the root than a OO language that runs in a Virtual Machine would be a much better place to start.
My suggest of using an IDE was not to teach an IDE. Most major IDEs can be used with very limited coding assitance. Eclipse, for example, which is a fairly powerful IDE, can be used to create all sorts of code, completely from scratch. True, nost people that use IDEs, use all the help the IDE gives them, but these are not things that need to be specifically talk. Simple things like code completion will allow an instructor to teach the language with out needing to teach the libraries, which are often well documented and should be easy to figure out by a competent student. In the end teaching the language is the most important thing, and an IDE is just a way to assist in that teaching.
Again, this is a class on Java and Python (which is interesting to see taught together having completly different inheritance patterns) so the students should already have a decent background in programing fundimentals.
Lastly, before learning an interpreted language the student shold learn any Machine Language and Assembly, which is after learning the fundimentals of Computer science.
You can fail to teach/learn the basics of programing with or without and IDE. I don't think the fact that an IDE was used in a class is the cause for not knowing the programing basics. I assume the original poster was not talking about using a drag an drop IDE like Visual Studio for VB, but something more on the lines of JCreator, JEdit or Eclipse (sorry for the Java centricity). Knowing the basics of programing is very important yet most developers under the age of 30 have no clue what those are. But since the original poster was talking about teaching a java class the students should probably have already taking a programing basics/fundimentals class.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly why copyright law had to be inacted. The tools that were benefitial to publishers and artists would be of no benefit at all if there was no legal right to control of the copying of a work. The best part about this is that the people that use modern copy techniques own that all to the original copyright holders. If there was no legal rights of copy protection then the copy technologies would not have received funding for coporations hoping to use it the technology to their own benefit.
This is were you are correct but missing some important information. Most paid artists, not hobbyists, who would actually be affected by copyright infringement, which is probably far more than you realize, do receive income through commisions; commisions which are paid by people purchasing the work in the hopes of exploiting copyrights, as you put it. To publisher would buy the rights to a story, or song, or video game if their were no copyright law.
Mixing archaic arts like painting, sculpture and non-recorded perfroming arts, with modern arts like audio and video recording or video games only muddies up the issue and makes people think they are all applicable to the same rules. The rules should protect all artists but we don't have copyright law and DMCA because of painters.
Copyright, wether it be by institutional law or other form of enforcement (limitation of knowledge, or force for example) has been around as long as the ability to copy or forge artistic works has been easily accesible to the everyday citizen. When forgeries cost as much and took as much skill as the original there was less need for copyright, since may forgers actually took claim and pride in there ability to copy the works of the masters of their art. Today there is no skill involved in making mass produced copies of print, photographic, recorded or digital art and the cost in resources, including time, is considerably less than that required to create the work. Without copyright protection we would be without most of the art that we have today. Artists would not find themselves free enough , do to the obligation to make a living elsewise, to produce the amount of art, wether you like it or not, that we have available to us.
Art through the years has change from a single solitary task, to works that require many people hundreds of thousands of man hours to create. When a painter, one of the older reproducible art forms, were to spend even a hundred hours on a painting, they could find someone willing to pay over a thousand dollars for the original and there for provide a living wage. Music records take easily a dozen people hundreds of man hours to produce, and with the complaints about the high cost of CDs today I doubt anyone would be willing to pay 10 thousand dollars or more to have the original. If we look at movies or video games, those numbers become astronomic. Now that these newer artforms are pure digital in also adds another difference between the art of today, and the historical art you speak of. Digital art loses no quality in replication, where as a painting, for example, can not be easily replicated with the same qualities except by someone who is also a painter of the same skill as the original.
Many Things have changed throughout history and you should not look at something like art in isolation and instead look at it in a grander scope, such as including the technology of replication.
I agree with you completely on the face value of that statement. To bad copyright infringment does harm people by taking away their ability to survive in a capitalist society. Once artistic work does not supply the resource to keep a person living (read that very carefully because it is worded that way specifically), then mass promotion, regardless of production, of art will be a thing of the past. Sure there will always be artist, such as people who create artistic works in there free time, but they will only be available to a small audiance due to the amount of resources needed to make people aware of the artistic work.
There is a solution if you would truely like art, or for that matter all creations, to be freely available to all people, but it would require a much larger change than copyright infringement or the abolishment of copyright law.
I guess I don't prescribe to the idea that just because you can copy something that you should copy it, and lucky neither do the law makers of this country which is why we have copyrights.
Apple is very smart to keep there OS tied to their hardware. This is a big reason behind Apple stability. They can concentrate on supporting a small set of hardware and not worry about a thousand conflicting drivers. It's stupid that this argument never even came up when macs ran on power architecture. Stop thinking of Mac intel machines as the same thing as windows intel machines, they have components that are not the same. An Apple coreduo machine is not a dell coreduo machine evenif the processors are the same. This is out right false, as the guy who sits a couple desks down from me is right now running windows XP on his MacBook Pro.
Not liking Apple or DRM is one thing, but lies are another, please stop spreading the fud.
Yeah that's it. I could have just looked at my book shelf had I been home. Of course I probably could have looked it up online too. But hey I knew someone would know what I was talking.
Having been around and active in Role Playing when the first edition of SR came out I will say you are way off base. Yes, SR does use concepts of fantasy fiction, which in turn borrowed from folk lore. The SR world has Elves, Trolls and other so called Meta Humans as well as magic, but that is about as close as it comes to D&D. Much of the races are significatly different, such as the trolls don't regenerate naturally and dwarves (which are even real, in a form, today) don't have a natural sense of direction under ground. The Background stroy justifying the SR world is actually one of the better ones I have read, IMHO, and it is enhanced further by the tie in with FASAs fantasy world RPG (who's name is slipping my mind for some reason).
SR is also in the Cyber Punk genre, though more cyber than punk. Being cyber punk, there is then some association with Gibson, whom they do give thanks to in the original hard back edition. Being a fan of Gibson as well as SR I can say there are some significant differences there as well.
In the end shadow run is a combination of two genres, so of that you are not off base, but they happen to have take the best of the two world and melded them very well and create a decent universe around it. The world of shadow run is no Al Amarja but still pretty decent.
Having an add on optical drive would work out really well. It would put Microsoft up there with Sega and the highly succesful SegaCD. Expandablity in consoles has always been a great selling point, which is now doubt why the most exapandable console every made, the Dreamcast, was so succesful and put Sega on top as a console manufacture.
On the other hand, like you said it's a good bet that no game within the next 2 years will use that extra Bluray space for anything other than "HI Def FMV". I mean It has held up that no one has been able to use more the 640k of memory or need more than 1.44 megs of disk space. The chances that a game company will ever use the full space and power of the environment they get to work in is totally laughable.
so you buy a nice little condo for $1.5 million, which is perfectly reasonble given your [$300k a year] salary and the size of your savings [enough money saved up for several years worth of bill].
See that there is the problem, people think 5 time their yearly income is a reasonable amount to pay for a home. And if you have enough money saved up for several years worth of bills I just don't see how you go from there to broken. What could possibly happen, outside of illness which I exempted earlier, that could cause your cost of living to rise so much that your savings is useless? The only think I can think of is still poor financial and personal choices.
Obviously you are a card carrying elitist libertarian asshole...
My associates would laugh at that, but hey one out of 3 ain't bad. If you read through any of my other posts you will see I am the exact opposite of an "elitist libertarian," but since I live in a capitalist society I have learn how to make sure my family is well taken care of. I still don't see how you can go from making $300k a year to living on the street without managing your money poorly. I could pay of my house (which is certainly not a small condo) and still have plenty to spare if I had $300k. This is why I am not libertarian, I don't think most of the public have the where-with-all to handle their own finances. If people weren't allowed to blow their lifes earnings on million dollar condos the whole of society would have a hell of a lot more to share. Next thing you will be telling me is there is justification for multi-million dollar a year earners like some musicians and athletes to end up bankrupt.
When you do have that run of bad luck, and need a hand to get back on your feet, I hope the only people you find are also card carrying elitist libertarian assholes that slap you in the face instead.
I have been down on my luck a few times in my life (mind you this was when I was much younger and made $20-30k at the most), but I stayed on my feet because of the personal decisions I made, like always being there for my friends and family, and not giving up on them when they were having hard times, so they helped me out when I needed it. But I assume that someone who refers to the mother of his children and wife of 8 years as a "psychopathic bitch" probably doesn't do much to help out what little they have in the way of friends and family.
Poor choices in life are no excuse for being a failure. I mean beyond the possibility of illness the thing mentioned in the parent comment are all things you would have control over at one point. If you some how thought it was resonable to purchase a little condo for $1.5 million then you deserve the hardship when the house market crashes (since it would have to crash enough to offset how ever many years of rent you would have otherwise paid.). If you can't figure out how to make a marriage work, or are a poor judge of people then once again I don't feel any sympathy.
There are families in the united states that survive on just over minimum wage with little governmental assistance. If you ever pulled down $300k a year and find yourself in hard times, you pretty much fucked up and probably should be allowed to handle your personal finances anymore.
In fact I argue that using the government force to prop up the business model that is scarcity of information is the behaviour that is immoral
This is somehow moral different than using the gevernment force to prop up the buisness model that the resources of the country are to be controlled by individuals rather than the entirety of the citizenship?
Sorry I just don't see how one is any different than the other. Without legal enforcement through governmental action both of these situations would be handled either through ethical decisions (for those of us with ethics) or personal force (which is probably the strongest or most persuasive of us). If there were no government protecting you from your neighbor taking your property you would probably not have it, unless of course you were some how the most powerful person in the country. You only have personal property because your government says you can, which has not always been the case, and personal property has not always be the way property has been handled. Excuse the tautology but I think that needed to be said a few times.
I'm all for the freedom of information, but I think people should also have a right to survive on the basis of their hard work, and feel anything that deprives them of that ability to me immoral. Of course if a persons livelihood was not based on sale of goods this wouldn't really be a problem.
One can argue that all of earth's natural resource belong to no one, and thus, physical theft is no theft at all.
/. post.
I was about to make a similar argument, but I learned long ago that people either are for or against personal property rights, and getting either side to change their mind takes a lot more than a
I would favor a system similar to patents, where copyrights have a physical, reasonable, non-extendable expiration date.
You should check out the US copyright system, it is exactly what you describe, beside the reasonable part, but that is subjective. Copyrights to expire at a given time, which for new works is the life of the auther plus 70 years (slightly different for works for hire, but still a fixed duration).
Yet the movie rental industry has proved to be a great financial benefit to Hollywood even though they were all up in arms at the beginning. Why?
To answer your question correctly, the financial benefit is because rental companies pay significant royalties each time that an item is rented. Also many countries are starting to pay royalties form their libraries for the books they supply.
Besides, not every art lends itself to rentals... Visual arts such as paintings or photography?
I don't actually pruchase the type of art you are refereing too so I don't have personal experience with it and so I will refrain from commenting. Once electronic music distribution becomes more popular there will be far more likely hood of rentals being available. I know there are some music out there I would like to listen too every once in a while, but are certainly not worth buying an album for. Image if you would having a party, and just renting some music for the evening. Sounds like a decent idea to me.
-1, Terrible analogy. I mean really. In my scenarios the people are actually acting within the bounds of societal expectations.
Since my stance is that the current societal expectations are not necessarily correct, it only seems fitting that your would see the analogy as being "Terrible."
If people start buying used coffee tables the economy will collapse!
Quite possibly, if everyone stopped buying originals and instead purchased only used products, the economy might collapse. At the very least it would stifle innovation faster than than the US patent system. A quick look at history will show that societies that stop innovating quikcly die off.
All these arguments people pose only make me more likely to purchased new rather than used. Seems like, atleast among the out spoke slashdot crowd, no one is buying anything new, so I can't even see why some one would be in the buisness of making new things. I will try my best to singlehandedly keep the music, movie, book, and video game industry alive.
Read my original post please. All I stated was that the PS3 is actually the best choice for my life style and personality. Some people were curious to get more details about why I chose to not purchase second hand. I chose to spend some limited time in supplying some food for thought on the subject. I was not actually trying to back up anything, since this is just personal preference. I chose to beleive that people should be compensated when someone recieves the benefit of their work. I chose to keep the creative people who's works I enjoy, feed, clothed, safe and healthy, to the best of my ability in the hopes that they will be able to continue producing great works. I chose to take steps in a direction that may reduce the cost of a product with out damaging the compensation received by the creator. The best part is that a certain group of people took the time to read what I had to say, and though few agreed, many atleast took the time to think about it.
I wanted to make some summary comments and since the parent poster was the most articulate with their arguments, as aposed to comments such as "you are a morron", I figure I'll post them here. First of All I never once said there should be some law regulating sale of used products. I was merely stating why I don't purchase used artistic works as long as the artist is continuing to make the work available with out providing compensation to the artist. The idea here was not to undermine the current economic structure where original sales are priced to compensate for future resale. Instead I chose to purchase new in the hope that free market economy (the system we supposedly have in the United States) would work out and cause the price of initial sales to be reduced. I had hoped that by doing such we would avoid the future possibility that resale will no longer even be a choice, but rather enforced by licensing of the producers.
Now that licensing is here, and appears to be to stay, I just don't see it as problematic. It does not effect me negatively.
Now to address the scenarios laid out by the parent comment.
Most people, who weren't following this context, would agree that using a product that is available for sale, and not supplied by the creator for free, without paying for it would be considered theft. I know that analogies prove nothing, but I will turn to one for just a momment. If a person walks into a store, takes a product of the shelf and walks out with it without paying they are a theif. If someone else comes along and pays for it does not make the original person any less of a theif.
The first scenario above discribes a situation where a person gains use of a product while effectively not paying for it and instead passing the cost on to the second person who enjoys the work. "Person (a) buys a photograph from me for $100. Five years from now, he sells it to person (b) for $100, who also keeps it for five years."
I can say for certain that if I started a service where I purchased the first copy of every artistic work for the standard price and then proceeded to "sell" these originals to others for a small fee with a contract that states it must be resold to me for 1/100th the price I charge after one week, alot of people would be crying foul because of lost royalties. In the end this would be perfectly legal, but I would basically be providing a rental service, reaping all the benifits, and the original artist only sells one copy of the work and receives no compensation for the hundreds or thousands of people that enjoy the work.
Personally I don't like having to pay for the expected resale. I would rather have the price of original purchase to be reduced. I don't expect others to agree or even see the possibility. All I can do is attempt to educate.
Every item everywhere winds up in the trash after the first owner gets tired of it?
Now that is actually an interesting argument that I would hope the market would handle. First products could be recycleable, sell video games on rewriteables, you can take it to the store and have a new game printed over it reducing distributions cost. Make the products biodegradeable. Sell products virtually (like iTunes).
Better yet, make products that the original owner will want to reuse. If you couldn't resell your product you would be more likely to buy the ones that you can get the most use out of, there for putting more emphasis on the length and replayablity of games.
Personally I still have all my PS1 and PS2 games. I own hundreds of CDs, some I rarely listen too. But I don't buy things I'm going to use and throw away if I can avoid it. You can rent (or use the library in the case of books if you are in a country that pays royalties) if you only want to use something once.
Basically, stop buying crap you won't want a year later and we won't have all this crap in out land fills (which shouldn't actually be a problem since rarely do we actually produce more matter).
DVDs are a product...Movie theatres are a service.
And this is why the idea of a product is soon to be a thing of the past. More and more products are being converted into services. This was seen comming years ago when leasingof automobiles became more and more popular. This is after all what this thread started from. If sony choses to license games rather than sell them, then more power too them. I support the move. I think in my life time we will see the same for DVDs and Videos. Once Network access becomes so common that most people have it, like running water, we will see physical products for artistic works disappear. Instead of going to the store to purchase something, you will pay a feee to use it for a period of time online.
What's worse is that at a movie theater you are paying to watch a product (the movie) someone else owns. Do you think theaters should purchase a film and be able to show it as many times as they like with the studio and those involved getting no further benifit? In reality the theater pays a royalty every time the movie is show, based on number of tickets sold even though the movie itself is a product.
Read my other comments on why a used car is atleast somewhat different than an artistic work with unlimited usage. I will add that I wouldn't mind if Automakers received a royalty from used car resales. By your logic about artist not working any harder when you resell a used work, we might as well make the first sale of any one artistic work fully compensate the artist and the rest of the sales simply cover the cost of replication (after all the artist doesn't have to reproduce the hard work it took to original create each time it is replicated). Since I doubt any one person will pay a million dollars for being the first one to buy a particular CD, I don't see this working out. The current model is that the orignal purchaser pays enough to cover the orignal sale and a certain number of resales. If we are talking about video games it makes the orginal sale around $50 with an expectation of at least one resale, or about $25 per purchaser. If we all purchased new, and free market economy worked, the original cost of video games would drop the about $25 a peice, which is less than many games go for second hand, with the manufacturer droping the sale price over time (as can already be seen in the likes of Sonys Greatest Hits pricing).
Take away from this what you want. I was only saying that even with all the nay sayers out there the PS3 price model and licensing plan does not negatively impact everyone, and it is actually perfectly suited for some of us.
By your logic it seems the reselling of the tic tacs should be theft as well. In either case the manufacturer of the product is denied the sale that would have occured had you not been there to provide the used good to the buyer.
By logic, my or otherwise, you happen to be incorrect. The reason there is a difference in the intended use. For products like food they are intended for a single use. A turkey is not sold for the intent of being used by a single person. Also there is no third party benifiting from someone elses work. In the case of the tic tacs, unless you have found someone to pay more than the original value, the worse thing that is happening here is two people purchased half amounts. An Automobile, a peice of clothing, a house, they all have limited usage. Software, music and other artistic works wich are observed and not consumed have no limited usage. Therefor there has to be some other reasonable exceptable usage. Most people don't find the rules against public presentations to be unreasonable, such as renting a movie and charging people to come see it, but this is in effect what you are facilitating my selling used works with unlimited usage. This is why rental companies pay royalties on works they rent (yes there is a royalty paid for each time netflix sends out a dvd).
It has been said for many years that the cost of software is as high as it is because of the lost sales due to copying and used sales. You can choice to not beleive that, but from where I sit I can't see how those things do not ultimately effect the bottom line.
Personally I have seen enough great artists fail, I just don't want to be facilitating that failure. If I do by a used product, it is because there is no other choice, and I try to make sure the artist is compensated (though this does leave out those that helped get that work of art out to the public).
This is where things get interesting. I won't write off all reselling as immoral. Most people do not consider reselling a used DVD as immoral. But on the other hand most people would consider reusing (with or without reselling) a movie theater ticket to get into a movie twice would be immoral. When purchasing a used product, you are, in most cases, receiving the benifit of the product without any compensation given to the people who worked hard to produce the product. I would have no problem with second hand purchases if royalties where to paid to makers. Personally I find reselling used artistic products, items with unlimited usage, to be theft (Reselling your half used pack of tic tacs doesn't bother me).
No I am not an artist or a musician or even a manufacturer. The only benefit I get out of supporting original purchases, is the hope that the money will allow those that I support to create more and better products.
I...
If the games are there I will probably own a Wii as well, but so far I can't see any reason not to buy a PS3.
And just so I have said it, be expecting a last minute price reduction announcement by Sony.
Likely they will not have take any programming basics/fundamentals classes (Pascal, Turing, etc.) as Java is now being used in most high-schools at least as the introductary programming language.
This may be off topic, but this is the problem with the students coming out of school with CS degrees today. Arguing over wether to use an editor with or without syntax highlighting and code completion is certainly not a major issue. The basics supplied by many IDEs do not diminish the ability to learn the basic of programing. One does hurt learning the basics is teaching an OO language as the first language with out giving some understanding of what the computer is doing. As far as I am aware no one has yet to build an Object Orient Processor (The Cell may be closest thing out there). I don't know that we need to go to the level of teaching logic gates and registers (thought this is probably how I would teach it), but certainly something a little closer to the root than a OO language that runs in a Virtual Machine would be a much better place to start.
My suggest of using an IDE was not to teach an IDE. Most major IDEs can be used with very limited coding assitance. Eclipse, for example, which is a fairly powerful IDE, can be used to create all sorts of code, completely from scratch. True, nost people that use IDEs, use all the help the IDE gives them, but these are not things that need to be specifically talk. Simple things like code completion will allow an instructor to teach the language with out needing to teach the libraries, which are often well documented and should be easy to figure out by a competent student. In the end teaching the language is the most important thing, and an IDE is just a way to assist in that teaching.
Again, this is a class on Java and Python (which is interesting to see taught together having completly different inheritance patterns) so the students should already have a decent background in programing fundimentals.
Lastly, before learning an interpreted language the student shold learn any Machine Language and Assembly, which is after learning the fundimentals of Computer science.
You can fail to teach/learn the basics of programing with or without and IDE. I don't think the fact that an IDE was used in a class is the cause for not knowing the programing basics. I assume the original poster was not talking about using a drag an drop IDE like Visual Studio for VB, but something more on the lines of JCreator, JEdit or Eclipse (sorry for the Java centricity). Knowing the basics of programing is very important yet most developers under the age of 30 have no clue what those are. But since the original poster was talking about teaching a java class the students should probably have already taking a programing basics/fundimentals class.