You can't re-invest 100% of your profits in growth; it doesn't make any sense. Large businesses can't simply diversify and grow exponentially larger; they can slowly grow, feel around other markets, work their way up, but not instantly. In that case, why hold so much money if so much more is coming?
Gates knew when to let go, and give it to Ballmer. Microsoft is now slowly dying, but it's so entrenched it'll survive quite a lot of failure. Last I heard, for example, their gaming ventures into XBox and friends have produced lots of revenue; sadly, less revenue than operating overhead, making a net loss. This talk of profit from that part of Microsoft is news to me.
I find a large logical disconnect with most people attempting to argue logic and reasoning with me, because they have none.
It is an unfortunate fact that I can most definitely come up with any number of ways to fix the world, just little changes that will shift the overarching base of society into something that's actually god damn stable and not falling apart like it is today without the moral and rational substructure necessary to keep us out of a world like Orwell's nightmarish 1984.
What's so unfortunate is that none of them fucking work. Society will always, generally, trend to individuals reaching more for a herd mentality, sheparded under Fearless Leader. Consider a society of people who spend 5-10 minutes a day meditating, occasionally half an hour or so. They put themselves in their own personal calm, which leads to organizing their thoughts, which leads to taking offense to the offensive things in the world like the constant tightening stranglehold on civil liberties. These are people who will develop their own philosophy, and who will rise up and concoct a bloody revolution to kill their own leaders when they are trying too hard to subjugate the people.
A nation of martial artists, philosophers, people who sit and think about shit. What a silly little fantasy right? Who needs all that anyway, that's hokey bullshit.
That's exactly where we'll get, too. Eventually, people will be too busy with their daily lives. I don't mean to "meditate," I mean to stop and think about anything. They'll be too busy to care. They'll start thinking, hey, we have police, the government should protect us. They need to take guns away. People need to not be violent. Save us from the terrorists. Everything they're doing is for our own good now.
Society decays. I don't care if you can 'Save' it. Go ahead, fix it. Watch what happens. It'll fall apart again. There's any number of approaches, from trying to shift culture to trying to shift education; they all fail (education especially, since we start this social promotion thing where everyone must graduate with straight As so we make school easier).
The root of raising a dog is to keep it convinced it's still a puppy. The way to raise a society is to convince people they are still children and thus entitled to the care and support of the government, who knows what's best for them. They grow up to be parents who understand that they beat their kids for their own good, and they take things away from their kids for their own good; the government is doing the same, no matter how abusive it seems.
What could Winston Smith have possibly done in 1984? Jihad? Started killing people? That's crazy. His society stagnated and decayed, and anything he did would be ineffective and would fail; he would destroy whatever aji remained if he gained any attention, forcing the party to tighten its grip-- and they had the propaganda to leap decades ahead in that situation, to show people that they need protection from people like Winston, that the party is saving them.
I have no desire to take it upon myself to "save everyone" by doing something violent and crazy like trying to stage a local revolution. That's logically ridiculous; the proper time for that is when all else HAS failed, and we currently can still make effective use of our ballot boxes-- our failing here is that we don't know how to use them. When people are being taken into the streets and shot for criticizing the government, it will be time to remove them from power by force. Unfortunately, we'll get there; hopefully I'll be dead by then.
You see, it's paradoxical. I look around thinking, "Why is everyone allowing this to happen to the world?" The few people that see it go, "Well... we can't do anything." Nobody will even try; and the ones trying to do something are not only ineffective, but bat-shit crazy and trying to do something ELSE stupid (Libertarians, Greens, etc). And I look around and realize, "Shit... I can't do any
Maybe when you decide to walk 4 miles to the next town and get found 15 miles away dead (now, 4 miles, then double back and walk the other 4 miles back, that makes 8 miles, back to family and blankets and warmth) you can comment about how bright you are.
i didn't read your comment after your first sentence
Ignorance detected. Ignorance DEFINED.
It's funny you think that putting your dick in something and making babies suddenly means you understand the gene pool. Complete logical failing.
Also, if you have a deep understanding of marine biology, toxicology, and food safety, I might find your advice about the relative safety of sushi based on origin of the food (wild caught vs farmed, tank sanitary conditions and parasites, temperature and storage conditions and times, etc) and the appropriate methods for manufacturing, handling, storing, and serving the sashimi quite useful. On the other hand, I eat sushi and I'm prone to eat things that are even a little off because, quite simply, it can't make me sick; I get a stomach ache and some bad gas at worst, and occasionally have found amusement when a restaurant served a bad dish that sent a coworker (my manager at the time) home for 3 days or to the hospital (oh, the IT guy) for 2 weeks paralyzed (he recovered fully, btw) while I spent the next 2 hours complaining that my tummy feels funny, and then farting a lot. You probably don't want to take my advice on much, although I'm prone to point out "safe for me" food as directly NOT recommended when I find something mildly questionable (probably more overkill; it's probably safe for everyone, but I'll take issue with things).
Most companies are run by the guy who invented the damn thing. Microsoft was driven by Bill Gates; when Gates went away, so did Microsoft. Ballmer's Microsoft is living on the Microsoft Monopoly, but Ballmer is running the company into the ground; the cunning, foresight, and business sense that made Microsoft what it was is partially Bill Gates' leadership. When the CEO becomes a check-collector or just gets replaced by someone else, the company loses his insight and falls apart.
Apple without Steve Jobs will be Apple without Steve Jobs. It'll be run by a board-elected CEO who has some ideas on improvements to be made, which is just as well because he won't have Jobs' wit with the market. He might have other wit, and might be able to make Apple live; it won't be like today's Apple, the company direction will be at least a little off true and aligning to a new heading, but it might not be a huge change. On the other hand, it's likely he won't be able to make Apple run like Apple, and then Apple will fall apart.
Those people are stupid. Dividend-paying companies almost always do better than non-dividend-paying companies. Dividends are a sign that a company is run well, has great liquidity, great financial stability, and is turning a profit. IMB paid great dividends and was doing well until the banking crisis; when it fell into dire straits, its stock price dropped, its dividends shriveled, and they continued to work hard to keep it stable. It eventually failed when Schumer said that they were "falling apart" and "should be shut down," which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars a day in depositor withdrawals (bank runs, remember the great depression when people withdrew all the money from the banks and they collapsed?). Down it went.
I thought they were doing a fine job... they survived Schumer's idiocy for a while, under pressure of bank runs... they had a few million in cash at some point, which they had raised to about $4 billion cash on hand, propping the company up here and there, smoothing out business operations, getting things straightened out so they could live through the housing market madness.... then bang, bank runs, and $4 billion goes away quick when you're paying out $0.1 to $0.25 billion per day because everyone who sank money in your savings accounts wants it back (that's how banks operate: they're holding your money).
This is how dividend-paying companies die. They're run well, and they die in catastrophic, impossible-to-survive disasters beyond their control. They don't go down without a fight, either.
I don't breed and I don't associate with others. I've been out of the gene pool for quite a while; the water's too cold.
The only time I interfere with others is to fix their problems; I've got enough useful skills to make use of myself. When I have my own problems, I handle them myself. One of the larger reasons I never date is because if I do something wrong, if it doesn't work out, if I start having financial trouble, whatever, it incurs hardships on someone else. Not acceptable.
I have zero empathy for the dead, at all. Empathy for the dead is what's wrong with this country. It's what leads us to say, oh, it's so horrible people might die, we should play nice games with the terrorists when it comes to hostages, we should take away guns and teach people to be "non-violent," we should make sure nobody can fight because then nobody can get hurt in fights. Then the incidence of hostage situations goes up (but we lose fewer in each--ultimately more, but it looks cuter and more sensitive to life), we take away peoples' ability to defend themselves (fewer people are lethal, but the lethal ones have free rein), and we make sure people are both incapable of defending themselves and too scared AND incompetent to defend others (thus removing psychological barriers to violent crimes and possible even if unlikely mitigation factors when those barriers fail).
Think about that. We don't want everyone having guns, or knowing how to fight, because we might see violent things happen. That would be bad, because people get hurt; we can't facilitate that, it wouldn't be right. Never mind the long term impact of more people dying overall.
Japan is passing a law to make martial arts study compulsory in schools, starting in elementary school levels (that means third graders know Judo). This has gotten backlash because about 4 kids per year DIE of injuries sustained training in Judo. It's too many, and people feel we should make everyone defenseless sheep at the mercy of whoever feels like harming them, mostly arguing about how horrible some 50 deaths over the past 12 years are. I don't care. 50 people are dead, I don't fucking care. One hundred MILLION people are not going to die because they got lunged at with a knife; they are going to break your arm and take your knife while you're on the way through the air. The small subset of a few hundred or thousand of them over the next ten years that actually would have died in that projection is smaller than one hundred million, yes; it's bigger than the few tens of people that might die of judo-related injury over the next decade, a net positive, so screw them they're dead.
Sometimes your existence is only meant to serve as a warning to others.
So, they used paper maps, didn't read them correctly, thought a town was 4 miles away when 16 miles away was a closed lodge, ignored warning signs about snowy roads, decided to not take a major interstate in bad weather, then didn't have the sense to turn around when the weather proved bad (this has happened to me, I've taken a route and said "fuck this going another way").
I think claiming that people don't understand the difference between right and wrong is a little harsh. I think at a point people are going to start off naive; but you can't avoid at least eventually figuring out that "alternate channels" aren't intended and are a good way to get things that people don't want you to get for free.
People aren't going to think, "Well this must be legal, I mean what's wrong with it?" They're going to be going, "Oh this isn't wrong, I'm not hurting anyone." They'll still fundamentally understand that what they're doing is, somehow, "wrong;" but they'll have a flimsy moral structure that fails to see how, and thus bypasses it and says "well you guys are just dumb, you think this is wrong but it doesn't hurt anyone." It's the same right-and-wrong justification as cheating husbands/wives who never get caught: they figure it's just for fun, they love their spouse, their spouse won't know, so it won't hurt anyone, so it's not really wrong. The only difference is society hammers in that it's wrong harder in that case.
In essence, I think people will always fully understand that they're getting something they'd otherwise have to pay for for free; as for understanding what that means, maybe not. It'll be as normal as taking an apple out of a street vendor's bin when no one's looking: we're harsh about that today, but in some places at some time it was just normal to once in a while just nip an apple when nobody's looking if it's convenient, because you just don't feel like paying and don't have time to stop and count money and besides, it's just once in a while, and just an apple. Something everyone does once in a while. That's what file sharing will be, except we're stealing ALL the apples.
In the market, it's generally actually what you can get it for, and if the demand is there. For example, if the demand for an album for $5 exists at a peak, where 200,000 people will buy the album for $5, that's the price-demand peak. If I sell for $2.50, only 210,000 people will buy; selling for $5 is more profitable, but deprives 10,000 people of the album because they won't pay $5 for it. On the other hand, if they can get it for $2.50, those 200,000 people that would buy it for $5 will buy it for $2.50.
A donation-ware market would result largely in people who don't care to donate. A 1% population instead of whatever piracy numbers you want to make up (do 99% of listeners pirate these days, or do we have more than 2% actually buying songs?). Only the moral idealists. Trust me, I've spent $50-$100 on music in one month before.
There are a lot of "I never pay for music" people in the world that talk about how it costs nothing so they shouldn't have to pay for it. They aren't simply arguing against the law; they're arguing that the music has no value, because although a lot goes into making it, actually distributing it is valueless. Because I can get it for free without, at the time of taking and by the act of keeping, reducing the wealth of another person, it must have no value and thus is free, thus this is not theft.
There are a lot of people not just making the argument, but the justification that they should be allowed to download stuff without paying for it. Some even go the Canadian route and argue that they're not the one sharing it, thus they're not in the wrong; the person who is making copies should be the one blamed. And thus they ignore the law; but more importantly they ignore the impact.
You're competent enough to verify that the license is GPL, build a program, package it, submit it, and sell it on the Apple app store; but you're not competent enough to notice the EULA stating that the content is non-free?
Amazon isn't all over this because expanding your cloud is worth it when you're actually paying your service provider, and not worth it when you're rarely overrunning your capacity and not paying them but 5 bucks a month. Amazon doesn't want to support a business case that effectively goes "hey, we owe you money this month; don't worry, we won't next month."
The issue is that people seem to think that stealing shit for personal use is different than stealing it and selling it for crack money.
The large argument used against the RIAA here is a knee-jerk to their horrible inability to adapt to market and their abuse of the court systems. They are wrong in that. But people seem to want to argue that if someone (working under a marketing agent, etc, whatever the circumstance, indie or signed) puts in their time and effort to produce a work, record that work, refine that work, and publish that work, that then it should be okay for us to just take that work.
The premise here is that by either not buying that work or taking a copy, I'm not depriving you of anything: both actions are equivalent to you. The fallacy is that by either taking a copy or buying a copy, I'm gaining a specific benefit: I get a copy of your music. The exchange of work for value here is that I pay you for a value we agree on for the work, and you give me a copy of the work. This is the same exchange as I pay you a value I see as worth losing in money in exchange for, say, a tea pot, and you give me a teapot worth $x in raw materials + $y value added for your time making it == $z that I'm willing to pay to acquire it.
In either case, I might prefer the risk of not giving you any money for your work, but taking it anyway: I benefit, you don't. That's called stealing. Around here, people decide that if you lose some kind of asset, I've stolen from you; if you're no poorer than when you started, then apparently I've created wealth by making myself richer (I now have music I've stolen) without making someone else poorer (you haven't lost anything). This is a fallacy: the time investment hasn't paid off, and others who are actually purchasing are subsidizing the value I'm not (i.e. 300 people pay 33% more so that 100 people can steal it).
The truth of the matter is if nobody ever stepped in, iTunes wouldn't have gained momentum. Napster was becoming widely popular, easy to use by everyone, kids and old people who barely knew how to use a computer. It only shipped MP3 files, not videos (porn) or programs (viruses). Music of today would largely be available for free online. A few early adopters would spend gazillions on CDs, rip them, share them. I know this is an "overblown doomsday scenario" but think about how popular iTunes is: Napster almost filled that gap, for FREE. Napster is why MP3 players became popular in the first place.
There's stealing.
The OP is complaining that people use these arguments that "copying data for personal use" is not stealing when the RIAA is involved, but want to act like they know what they're talking about here after making gratuitous use of phrases like "Imaginary Property."
That you "did it by accident" is a lolclause that will get you slapped by a judge in court. I mean he will literally climb over the bench, reach out, and slap you for being such an ignorant jackass as to try.
Well Microsoft's response is sort of self-incriminating really. I mean the summary here basically paints their response as simple posturing and trying to get out of getting caught doing something they're not supposed to. "How dare you! We're better than them! We're smarter than they are! Those people are just trying to make us look bad! That's it, THEY'RE cheating! They're rigging tests and accusing us of things! They're trying to make US look bad because THEY know we're BETTER and it gets their pants all in a knot! Why would WE ever do something like that?!"
We have some of the best minds in the world... after Google, who invented some truly creative and innovative search methods, and then patented them. We have to find a completely different direction that works the same way, kind of, then improve on it.
Maybe; but the concept of a finite universe is immediate proof of some God-like being. Not proof of intelligence, just proof that something can fart out a universe. I mean if the universe is 14 gazillion years old and it's the result of the last universe collapsing into a singularity, then we have an infinitely old matter-energy structure. If the universe is 14 gazillion years old because, back then, it just appeared, it seems largely likely that Jehovah or something called it into existence. Or maybe Shiva danced it into existence. Depends on who you ask. I mean where the hell else does something just appear out of nothing?
If the universe expands to nothing, then it has exactly the same amount of energy as the last universe, which thus would have expanded to heat death instead of cycling. In that case this universe wouldn't exist; so we must assume the last one collapsed, meaning this one collapses too. If that isn't the case, then this universe was created from nothing at the beginning of its life; in which case, how the hell...? QED, deity.
Time and space warp around a black hole. If we assume that the black hole really does affect the curvature of time, then when we collapse all matter into a singularity we get a super massive black hole that not only warps space into a sphere (like a regular black hole-- there is no physical path out), but also warps time into a sphere.
Thus if the universe is cyclically expanding, slowing, contracting, then repeating a big bang event, what we have is a closed loop time system: All of history will repeat identically because we reset to the zero point. Time loops. Interestingly, since our point in time is isolate and repeating, an outside observer won't see this; in effect, we don't exist in the continuum of reality. This isn't a philosophical thing; everything inside this universe is quite real and solid, but from outside the universe there is no way to travel through reality and land physically in this universe, because this universe is not part of the external time continuum.
That means the center of our universe could be exactly in the same place as the center of an alternate, completely different universe; we wouldn't physically encounter them not because of an extra spatial dimension, but because the mechanics of time are collapsed to a singularity and removed from the temporal continuum: both universes can't exist at the same time-- or rather, they "can" in the sense that you can make them parallel lines on a graph and show their cycling as a concept, overlapping, but the fact that time has been condensed and loops in that way has removed them from the ability to interact with any other axis of time not contained entirely within these universes and thus they don't exist in any other concept of "time."
Welcome to God 101. When you were studying to be Creator didn't they explain this?
They don't actually teach you a formalized method for solving those, they just tell you "figure it out." They don't show you that you can subtract 2 from both sides and get [] = 5 - 2 = 3.
And yes, I am a pedant against oversimplification, and only do so as lack of knowledge on my part. We should label things with correct technical jargon at all times; I'm tired of people telling me it's okay for non-technical people to refer to the system as the "CPU" or "hard drive," and in fact I was taught in 10th grade that the system is "The CPU." The CPU is a micro-processor (MPU) inside the damn system and it's called the CPU for a reason (someone tried to tell me technically I was referring to "the MPU," but the FPU and GPU and DSP are all MPUs too; guess what CPU means?).
Coming back 5 years later and telling you all this shit is wrong or all this shit is right but we now have to label everything properly is detrimental. I take this as far as to say we should teach kids what addends, minuends, subtrahends, multiplicands, multipliers, dividends, and divisors are; in school they told us what a dividend and a divisor are. It just gives good structure and makes talking about stuff easier. I've also seen ridiculousness where we try to do reverse-abstraction, talking about technical things "in non-technical terms" at length... so the conversation is full of overly verbose explanations of things that actually do have a name, but we won't say it because it's "confusing jargon." Do you know why we name shit?
Slashdot Mirror
You can't re-invest 100% of your profits in growth; it doesn't make any sense. Large businesses can't simply diversify and grow exponentially larger; they can slowly grow, feel around other markets, work their way up, but not instantly. In that case, why hold so much money if so much more is coming?
Gates knew when to let go, and give it to Ballmer. Microsoft is now slowly dying, but it's so entrenched it'll survive quite a lot of failure. Last I heard, for example, their gaming ventures into XBox and friends have produced lots of revenue; sadly, less revenue than operating overhead, making a net loss. This talk of profit from that part of Microsoft is news to me.
I overuse semicolons because I overuse redundancy; I have a tendency to repeat the same thing in a different way as a second clause.
I find a large logical disconnect with most people attempting to argue logic and reasoning with me, because they have none.
It is an unfortunate fact that I can most definitely come up with any number of ways to fix the world, just little changes that will shift the overarching base of society into something that's actually god damn stable and not falling apart like it is today without the moral and rational substructure necessary to keep us out of a world like Orwell's nightmarish 1984.
What's so unfortunate is that none of them fucking work. Society will always, generally, trend to individuals reaching more for a herd mentality, sheparded under Fearless Leader. Consider a society of people who spend 5-10 minutes a day meditating, occasionally half an hour or so. They put themselves in their own personal calm, which leads to organizing their thoughts, which leads to taking offense to the offensive things in the world like the constant tightening stranglehold on civil liberties. These are people who will develop their own philosophy, and who will rise up and concoct a bloody revolution to kill their own leaders when they are trying too hard to subjugate the people.
A nation of martial artists, philosophers, people who sit and think about shit. What a silly little fantasy right? Who needs all that anyway, that's hokey bullshit.
That's exactly where we'll get, too. Eventually, people will be too busy with their daily lives. I don't mean to "meditate," I mean to stop and think about anything. They'll be too busy to care. They'll start thinking, hey, we have police, the government should protect us. They need to take guns away. People need to not be violent. Save us from the terrorists. Everything they're doing is for our own good now.
Society decays. I don't care if you can 'Save' it. Go ahead, fix it. Watch what happens. It'll fall apart again. There's any number of approaches, from trying to shift culture to trying to shift education; they all fail (education especially, since we start this social promotion thing where everyone must graduate with straight As so we make school easier).
The root of raising a dog is to keep it convinced it's still a puppy. The way to raise a society is to convince people they are still children and thus entitled to the care and support of the government, who knows what's best for them. They grow up to be parents who understand that they beat their kids for their own good, and they take things away from their kids for their own good; the government is doing the same, no matter how abusive it seems.
What could Winston Smith have possibly done in 1984? Jihad? Started killing people? That's crazy. His society stagnated and decayed, and anything he did would be ineffective and would fail; he would destroy whatever aji remained if he gained any attention, forcing the party to tighten its grip-- and they had the propaganda to leap decades ahead in that situation, to show people that they need protection from people like Winston, that the party is saving them.
I have no desire to take it upon myself to "save everyone" by doing something violent and crazy like trying to stage a local revolution. That's logically ridiculous; the proper time for that is when all else HAS failed, and we currently can still make effective use of our ballot boxes-- our failing here is that we don't know how to use them. When people are being taken into the streets and shot for criticizing the government, it will be time to remove them from power by force. Unfortunately, we'll get there; hopefully I'll be dead by then.
You see, it's paradoxical. I look around thinking, "Why is everyone allowing this to happen to the world?" The few people that see it go, "Well... we can't do anything." Nobody will even try; and the ones trying to do something are not only ineffective, but bat-shit crazy and trying to do something ELSE stupid (Libertarians, Greens, etc). And I look around and realize, "Shit... I can't do any
Maybe when you decide to walk 4 miles to the next town and get found 15 miles away dead (now, 4 miles, then double back and walk the other 4 miles back, that makes 8 miles, back to family and blankets and warmth) you can comment about how bright you are.
i didn't read your comment after your first sentence
Ignorance detected. Ignorance DEFINED.
It's funny you think that putting your dick in something and making babies suddenly means you understand the gene pool. Complete logical failing.
Also, if you have a deep understanding of marine biology, toxicology, and food safety, I might find your advice about the relative safety of sushi based on origin of the food (wild caught vs farmed, tank sanitary conditions and parasites, temperature and storage conditions and times, etc) and the appropriate methods for manufacturing, handling, storing, and serving the sashimi quite useful. On the other hand, I eat sushi and I'm prone to eat things that are even a little off because, quite simply, it can't make me sick; I get a stomach ache and some bad gas at worst, and occasionally have found amusement when a restaurant served a bad dish that sent a coworker (my manager at the time) home for 3 days or to the hospital (oh, the IT guy) for 2 weeks paralyzed (he recovered fully, btw) while I spent the next 2 hours complaining that my tummy feels funny, and then farting a lot. You probably don't want to take my advice on much, although I'm prone to point out "safe for me" food as directly NOT recommended when I find something mildly questionable (probably more overkill; it's probably safe for everyone, but I'll take issue with things).
Most companies are run by the guy who invented the damn thing. Microsoft was driven by Bill Gates; when Gates went away, so did Microsoft. Ballmer's Microsoft is living on the Microsoft Monopoly, but Ballmer is running the company into the ground; the cunning, foresight, and business sense that made Microsoft what it was is partially Bill Gates' leadership. When the CEO becomes a check-collector or just gets replaced by someone else, the company loses his insight and falls apart.
Apple without Steve Jobs will be Apple without Steve Jobs. It'll be run by a board-elected CEO who has some ideas on improvements to be made, which is just as well because he won't have Jobs' wit with the market. He might have other wit, and might be able to make Apple live; it won't be like today's Apple, the company direction will be at least a little off true and aligning to a new heading, but it might not be a huge change. On the other hand, it's likely he won't be able to make Apple run like Apple, and then Apple will fall apart.
Those people are stupid. Dividend-paying companies almost always do better than non-dividend-paying companies. Dividends are a sign that a company is run well, has great liquidity, great financial stability, and is turning a profit. IMB paid great dividends and was doing well until the banking crisis; when it fell into dire straits, its stock price dropped, its dividends shriveled, and they continued to work hard to keep it stable. It eventually failed when Schumer said that they were "falling apart" and "should be shut down," which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars a day in depositor withdrawals (bank runs, remember the great depression when people withdrew all the money from the banks and they collapsed?). Down it went.
I thought they were doing a fine job... they survived Schumer's idiocy for a while, under pressure of bank runs... they had a few million in cash at some point, which they had raised to about $4 billion cash on hand, propping the company up here and there, smoothing out business operations, getting things straightened out so they could live through the housing market madness.... then bang, bank runs, and $4 billion goes away quick when you're paying out $0.1 to $0.25 billion per day because everyone who sank money in your savings accounts wants it back (that's how banks operate: they're holding your money).
This is how dividend-paying companies die. They're run well, and they die in catastrophic, impossible-to-survive disasters beyond their control. They don't go down without a fight, either.
I don't breed and I don't associate with others. I've been out of the gene pool for quite a while; the water's too cold.
The only time I interfere with others is to fix their problems; I've got enough useful skills to make use of myself. When I have my own problems, I handle them myself. One of the larger reasons I never date is because if I do something wrong, if it doesn't work out, if I start having financial trouble, whatever, it incurs hardships on someone else. Not acceptable.
I have zero empathy for the dead, at all. Empathy for the dead is what's wrong with this country. It's what leads us to say, oh, it's so horrible people might die, we should play nice games with the terrorists when it comes to hostages, we should take away guns and teach people to be "non-violent," we should make sure nobody can fight because then nobody can get hurt in fights. Then the incidence of hostage situations goes up (but we lose fewer in each--ultimately more, but it looks cuter and more sensitive to life), we take away peoples' ability to defend themselves (fewer people are lethal, but the lethal ones have free rein), and we make sure people are both incapable of defending themselves and too scared AND incompetent to defend others (thus removing psychological barriers to violent crimes and possible even if unlikely mitigation factors when those barriers fail).
Think about that. We don't want everyone having guns, or knowing how to fight, because we might see violent things happen. That would be bad, because people get hurt; we can't facilitate that, it wouldn't be right. Never mind the long term impact of more people dying overall.
Japan is passing a law to make martial arts study compulsory in schools, starting in elementary school levels (that means third graders know Judo). This has gotten backlash because about 4 kids per year DIE of injuries sustained training in Judo. It's too many, and people feel we should make everyone defenseless sheep at the mercy of whoever feels like harming them, mostly arguing about how horrible some 50 deaths over the past 12 years are. I don't care. 50 people are dead, I don't fucking care. One hundred MILLION people are not going to die because they got lunged at with a knife; they are going to break your arm and take your knife while you're on the way through the air. The small subset of a few hundred or thousand of them over the next ten years that actually would have died in that projection is smaller than one hundred million, yes; it's bigger than the few tens of people that might die of judo-related injury over the next decade, a net positive, so screw them they're dead.
Sometimes your existence is only meant to serve as a warning to others.
a p value of less than 10^-11 would be a 0.000000001% chance. Or less.
http://www.bernhardtwatch.com/officerswatch.html
So, they used paper maps, didn't read them correctly, thought a town was 4 miles away when 16 miles away was a closed lodge, ignored warning signs about snowy roads, decided to not take a major interstate in bad weather, then didn't have the sense to turn around when the weather proved bad (this has happened to me, I've taken a route and said "fuck this going another way").
This is a tragedy indeed: he already has 2 kids.
I think claiming that people don't understand the difference between right and wrong is a little harsh. I think at a point people are going to start off naive; but you can't avoid at least eventually figuring out that "alternate channels" aren't intended and are a good way to get things that people don't want you to get for free.
People aren't going to think, "Well this must be legal, I mean what's wrong with it?" They're going to be going, "Oh this isn't wrong, I'm not hurting anyone." They'll still fundamentally understand that what they're doing is, somehow, "wrong;" but they'll have a flimsy moral structure that fails to see how, and thus bypasses it and says "well you guys are just dumb, you think this is wrong but it doesn't hurt anyone." It's the same right-and-wrong justification as cheating husbands/wives who never get caught: they figure it's just for fun, they love their spouse, their spouse won't know, so it won't hurt anyone, so it's not really wrong. The only difference is society hammers in that it's wrong harder in that case.
In essence, I think people will always fully understand that they're getting something they'd otherwise have to pay for for free; as for understanding what that means, maybe not. It'll be as normal as taking an apple out of a street vendor's bin when no one's looking: we're harsh about that today, but in some places at some time it was just normal to once in a while just nip an apple when nobody's looking if it's convenient, because you just don't feel like paying and don't have time to stop and count money and besides, it's just once in a while, and just an apple. Something everyone does once in a while. That's what file sharing will be, except we're stealing ALL the apples.
It's not "OK," it's just "Normal."
In the market, it's generally actually what you can get it for, and if the demand is there. For example, if the demand for an album for $5 exists at a peak, where 200,000 people will buy the album for $5, that's the price-demand peak. If I sell for $2.50, only 210,000 people will buy; selling for $5 is more profitable, but deprives 10,000 people of the album because they won't pay $5 for it. On the other hand, if they can get it for $2.50, those 200,000 people that would buy it for $5 will buy it for $2.50.
A donation-ware market would result largely in people who don't care to donate. A 1% population instead of whatever piracy numbers you want to make up (do 99% of listeners pirate these days, or do we have more than 2% actually buying songs?). Only the moral idealists. Trust me, I've spent $50-$100 on music in one month before.
There are a lot of "I never pay for music" people in the world that talk about how it costs nothing so they shouldn't have to pay for it. They aren't simply arguing against the law; they're arguing that the music has no value, because although a lot goes into making it, actually distributing it is valueless. Because I can get it for free without, at the time of taking and by the act of keeping, reducing the wealth of another person, it must have no value and thus is free, thus this is not theft.
There are a lot of people not just making the argument, but the justification that they should be allowed to download stuff without paying for it. Some even go the Canadian route and argue that they're not the one sharing it, thus they're not in the wrong; the person who is making copies should be the one blamed. And thus they ignore the law; but more importantly they ignore the impact.
You're competent enough to verify that the license is GPL, build a program, package it, submit it, and sell it on the Apple app store; but you're not competent enough to notice the EULA stating that the content is non-free?
Amazon isn't all over this because expanding your cloud is worth it when you're actually paying your service provider, and not worth it when you're rarely overrunning your capacity and not paying them but 5 bucks a month. Amazon doesn't want to support a business case that effectively goes "hey, we owe you money this month; don't worry, we won't next month."
Dell likes to load their own firmware and drivers onto standard manufacturer hardware.
The issue is that people seem to think that stealing shit for personal use is different than stealing it and selling it for crack money.
The large argument used against the RIAA here is a knee-jerk to their horrible inability to adapt to market and their abuse of the court systems. They are wrong in that. But people seem to want to argue that if someone (working under a marketing agent, etc, whatever the circumstance, indie or signed) puts in their time and effort to produce a work, record that work, refine that work, and publish that work, that then it should be okay for us to just take that work.
The premise here is that by either not buying that work or taking a copy, I'm not depriving you of anything: both actions are equivalent to you. The fallacy is that by either taking a copy or buying a copy, I'm gaining a specific benefit: I get a copy of your music. The exchange of work for value here is that I pay you for a value we agree on for the work, and you give me a copy of the work. This is the same exchange as I pay you a value I see as worth losing in money in exchange for, say, a tea pot, and you give me a teapot worth $x in raw materials + $y value added for your time making it == $z that I'm willing to pay to acquire it.
In either case, I might prefer the risk of not giving you any money for your work, but taking it anyway: I benefit, you don't. That's called stealing. Around here, people decide that if you lose some kind of asset, I've stolen from you; if you're no poorer than when you started, then apparently I've created wealth by making myself richer (I now have music I've stolen) without making someone else poorer (you haven't lost anything). This is a fallacy: the time investment hasn't paid off, and others who are actually purchasing are subsidizing the value I'm not (i.e. 300 people pay 33% more so that 100 people can steal it).
The truth of the matter is if nobody ever stepped in, iTunes wouldn't have gained momentum. Napster was becoming widely popular, easy to use by everyone, kids and old people who barely knew how to use a computer. It only shipped MP3 files, not videos (porn) or programs (viruses). Music of today would largely be available for free online. A few early adopters would spend gazillions on CDs, rip them, share them. I know this is an "overblown doomsday scenario" but think about how popular iTunes is: Napster almost filled that gap, for FREE. Napster is why MP3 players became popular in the first place.
There's stealing.
The OP is complaining that people use these arguments that "copying data for personal use" is not stealing when the RIAA is involved, but want to act like they know what they're talking about here after making gratuitous use of phrases like "Imaginary Property."
That you "did it by accident" is a lolclause that will get you slapped by a judge in court. I mean he will literally climb over the bench, reach out, and slap you for being such an ignorant jackass as to try.
Well Microsoft's response is sort of self-incriminating really. I mean the summary here basically paints their response as simple posturing and trying to get out of getting caught doing something they're not supposed to. "How dare you! We're better than them! We're smarter than they are! Those people are just trying to make us look bad! That's it, THEY'RE cheating! They're rigging tests and accusing us of things! They're trying to make US look bad because THEY know we're BETTER and it gets their pants all in a knot! Why would WE ever do something like that?!"
We have some of the best minds in the world... after Google, who invented some truly creative and innovative search methods, and then patented them. We have to find a completely different direction that works the same way, kind of, then improve on it.
If it's on an access point it won't use EDGE/3G ... my phone doesn't ened anything for EDGE/3G except a SIM card.
Maybe; but the concept of a finite universe is immediate proof of some God-like being. Not proof of intelligence, just proof that something can fart out a universe. I mean if the universe is 14 gazillion years old and it's the result of the last universe collapsing into a singularity, then we have an infinitely old matter-energy structure. If the universe is 14 gazillion years old because, back then, it just appeared, it seems largely likely that Jehovah or something called it into existence. Or maybe Shiva danced it into existence. Depends on who you ask. I mean where the hell else does something just appear out of nothing?
If the universe expands to nothing, then it has exactly the same amount of energy as the last universe, which thus would have expanded to heat death instead of cycling. In that case this universe wouldn't exist; so we must assume the last one collapsed, meaning this one collapses too. If that isn't the case, then this universe was created from nothing at the beginning of its life; in which case, how the hell...? QED, deity.
Time and space warp around a black hole. If we assume that the black hole really does affect the curvature of time, then when we collapse all matter into a singularity we get a super massive black hole that not only warps space into a sphere (like a regular black hole-- there is no physical path out), but also warps time into a sphere.
Thus if the universe is cyclically expanding, slowing, contracting, then repeating a big bang event, what we have is a closed loop time system: All of history will repeat identically because we reset to the zero point. Time loops. Interestingly, since our point in time is isolate and repeating, an outside observer won't see this; in effect, we don't exist in the continuum of reality. This isn't a philosophical thing; everything inside this universe is quite real and solid, but from outside the universe there is no way to travel through reality and land physically in this universe, because this universe is not part of the external time continuum.
That means the center of our universe could be exactly in the same place as the center of an alternate, completely different universe; we wouldn't physically encounter them not because of an extra spatial dimension, but because the mechanics of time are collapsed to a singularity and removed from the temporal continuum: both universes can't exist at the same time-- or rather, they "can" in the sense that you can make them parallel lines on a graph and show their cycling as a concept, overlapping, but the fact that time has been condensed and loops in that way has removed them from the ability to interact with any other axis of time not contained entirely within these universes and thus they don't exist in any other concept of "time."
Welcome to God 101. When you were studying to be Creator didn't they explain this?
They don't actually teach you a formalized method for solving those, they just tell you "figure it out." They don't show you that you can subtract 2 from both sides and get [] = 5 - 2 = 3.
And yes, I am a pedant against oversimplification, and only do so as lack of knowledge on my part. We should label things with correct technical jargon at all times; I'm tired of people telling me it's okay for non-technical people to refer to the system as the "CPU" or "hard drive," and in fact I was taught in 10th grade that the system is "The CPU." The CPU is a micro-processor (MPU) inside the damn system and it's called the CPU for a reason (someone tried to tell me technically I was referring to "the MPU," but the FPU and GPU and DSP are all MPUs too; guess what CPU means?).
Coming back 5 years later and telling you all this shit is wrong or all this shit is right but we now have to label everything properly is detrimental. I take this as far as to say we should teach kids what addends, minuends, subtrahends, multiplicands, multipliers, dividends, and divisors are; in school they told us what a dividend and a divisor are. It just gives good structure and makes talking about stuff easier. I've also seen ridiculousness where we try to do reverse-abstraction, talking about technical things "in non-technical terms" at length... so the conversation is full of overly verbose explanations of things that actually do have a name, but we won't say it because it's "confusing jargon." Do you know why we name shit?