As an example, take heavy drinking. There are two alternatives when it comes to alcohol. The first is for the parents to say 'no (or very little) alcohol allowed.' The other is to say 'if you drink a lot, you will probably embarrass yourself and in the morning you will feel terrible.' If the parents do the first, then as soon as they leave home, this restriction goes away, and you see the kind of binge drinking that is common at universities. With the second, the restrictions are self-imposed, and you see far fewer problems.
I think in this case, you also need to have a nuanced discussion regarding the law in many countries. In the US, it is illegial to drink under age 21. Whether that is a law you agree with or not, if you want to follow your second choice as a parent, you better also talk about legal consequences, bad laws vs good laws, and the entire gamut. Unless you want to give the impression that laws "are more like guidelines" and that you will help cover for breaking them.
So once 20,000,000 people have seen the movie, it ought to no longer be a revenue stream to the creators? I'm fine with that, but how would you track that, and how would you extend that generically to other artistic products?
And what should happen if only 10,000,000 people wanted to pay to see the movie? Why should they have a guaranteed return?
Now we're changing argument in midstream. That is, the original post was that artists should get paid forever for each of their creative works. I asked why should artists get paid more times than a carpenter does for their work. Your argument was because it cost 180,000,000 dollars to create a movie. My response was that was a specious argument, and I laid out how you can make movies for less, and moreso implied that price of a creation really doesn't at all affect how often and for how long the creator can get paid.
Now you've again gone off of my post regarding market price vs marginal price.
All this is interesting, but how does it at all address why artists should get paid for one piece of work forever when a carpenter does not? The cost has nothing to do with people's sense of fairness or economics, it costs a lot to make a golden throne, but that doesn't mean the "carpenter" should necessarily get paid every time someone sits in it forever.
That's why artists expect to be able to "sell" the same thing in perpetuity.
That's great, but it doesn't equal in perpetuity. It's a lot of money - for a modern blockbuster movie. But maybe, just maybe, that should not be the yardstick.
Writing a book doesn't have that upfront cost - even if you factor in 30 years of an average american salary @ $35,000. And most books do not take that long to write.
Producing an album doesn't cost that much, I know people who have done so for under $10,000.
Nor does painting a picture.
And even creating a special effects laden movie doesn't have to cost near that much - see Star Wrek: In the Pirkinning. Or there is Blair Witch. That is, there are different ways to get costs down. Now, the sub $100,000 productions often have shitty actors. But I would bet you could get passable actors for $50,000 a film as opposed to $5,000,000 or more.
Heck, studios could go back to offering salarys to actors. The point is, many people posit that the current state of affairs is untenable. Maybe we lose new blockbusters. Maybe we lose Hollywood. If you think that someone won't show up to try and fill that gap, be it YouTube, SciFi station style movies or something I can't imagine, I'd say you're crazy. Maybe movies do go away, and we end up with serials/TV shows that you subscribe to get made. Maybe it goes PBS.
Maybe enough people donate or maybe people don't care enough to pay enough or watch enough ads and it all goes away. But I seriously doubt that it all goes away. We just might not recognize it at the end of the shift.
This has been argued before, and before in this thread, but I will say this: I have no problem with people wanting to get paid for their work. I do have a problem with people feeling entitled to be paid in perpetuity for one time period's work.
Why is the time of the carpenter worth less than the time of the painter? That is, why is it when the carpenter creates a chair, he expects to sell that chair once, and no one is shocked by that idea, nor does anyone feel that transaction is unfair. But if a Painter could only sell their painting once, suddenly everyone finds that unworkable.
While I do see a problem with "free! free!", I also see a problem with trying to impose artifical scarcity.
I'm not a lawyer, but I still don't see how this makes MS a distributor.
As this has been explained, you do something to get a Voucher. The voucher is for support as far as I can see as GPLed stuff is still free. MS hands you a piece of paper, and they have distributed a piece of paper. But the paper isn't GPLed.
You give the paper to Novell, who then gives you the software. You go to (novell or MS) for support.
I just don't see where in any of this MS is even touching software, much less distributing GPLed software.
It seems to me that the voucher is like a gift card - Once I give you the gift card, any transactions are between you and the vendor and I have nothing to do with them.
Even if MS is offering support for SLES, they don't have to distribute any software to talk to you via e-mail or phone...
This is why I really wish sites would code strictly to standards, so the entire browser could be a choice - rather than every browser trying to be everything to everybody so that they get enough market share for the webdevs to test in them.
In general, youtube and the like work in Opera. There are some pages that use odd non standard code to load a flash object that do not work. The major downside is that you will find yourself back at the 1% userbase trying to convince sites to fix broken code or not block the browser again. The upshot is that you have to try pretty hard to make code that works in firefox that fails in Opera, but Google and some OSS control apps (Zenoss console, GLPI console) manage.
It is really annoying when OSS web consoles feel that they only need to work in Firefox, and don't test for IE, Opera or Safari.
I have to ask - how often do you have to update your adblockers? I've used proxomitron for 6-7 years now, and I've had to update filters maybe on average once a quarter anymore? I get 97% ads blocked now adays?
I am technical, and do manage a filterset, but it's just not that much time spent on it. As a user, you could do an update install about as often as you might update Opera or Thunderbird.
Use - if I wasn't doing filterset maintenance, AdMuncher or Proxomitron (the two I've used at all extensively) are pretty much setup (takes 3 minutes) and forget. Occasionally I need to bypass the filters for some reason - rightclick, bypass - reload. Or even easier, click on the prox menu in the upper left corner, bypass all filters. Bam new tab automatically.
I suppose the only thing I can see being easier would be if I could highlight a text area (like the annoying ad tables) and have it eat that. I keep hoping Opera ads something like a cut tool that would work like in paint.net, drag a little edit box, and clear it - but then have the browser no longer show that and collapse the space.
My problem is I can't stand firefox long enough to really try out Adblock.
The problem seems to be the same problem users complain about on the Opera forums with Opera. That is, that the browser will use available memory. I strongly believe that many users start playing with task manager, have no idea what the Virtual Memory use is/means and see some large number there. I fully expect this is half of the "anectadotal" issues. I constantly see people posting (for any app)
"Application FOOBAR is using ZOMG 300MB MEMORY WTFBBQBUNNIES!" . . .
So then we ask - "is there some issue with the system?"
and about half of the time, it's "Errr, no - but IT'S A BIG NUMBER!"
Past that, I wonder if it's not OS problems managing swap space properly. I use Opera, and I use a LOT sites for a long time often useing a lot of memory. Only once did I have problems, when VM use was 1.3GB on my 1GB RAM machine, and that was just that Opera was slow.
However, I have seen Firefox on Windows and Linux seem to heavily affect overall system speed over time, but I've never really looked too hard as I don't use it much.
Wait, isn't this basically what freenet 0.5 was doing? I have no idea how much of the issue with that was the anonyminity part, and how much was the distributed server part, but it was painfully slow. Maybe if everyone was using it it would be faster...
But doesn't this have several major issues?
1) all the freenet problems - that is:
1a)what if people don't want to share bandwidth or just some specific content? At one end, you have the freenet solution where you either share or don't use it (with that driving people away), at the other, there is another huge administrative issue for anyone who wants to manage what they share (which also will serve to drive people away).
1b) slow as hell - even non anonymous protocols that handle the search like gnutella are pretty slow and finding stuff, and getting the actual transfer setup. bittorrent is slightly better, but there's still the overhead time of the out of band/protocol search. Metalinks might solve this however. I just worry that for most data, by the time a torrent got started, you'll have loaded the page over HTTP... Unless he's just suggesting squid style proxies, which have all of their own caching problems.
2) Do people want to share their resources? Sometimes, but not everyone.
3) Why is copyright considered a bogus question? I'm sorry, but with the current way the MAFIAA is working, I can already smell the lawsuits.
I don't buy this would happen... I've read up on Freenet. As far as I know, the local cache is gibberish for which I don't have the key to decrypt. I would guess the government would have to spend an awful lot of time tracking down which cache is serving what content. If that's even possible without grabbing your PC, and then they would basically have to make freenet illegal...
Well, yes, for the uninitiated. For the people who take about a day to learn about these issues, AnoNet, Freenet, I2P, and TOR all provide methods for distribution significantly more difficult to take down than a website.
That's true... I'm not a videophile by any means, but now that I think about it, the movies always look like they need to get a new reel... like the 15 year old things shown in my high school that had been watched a million times. Even on opening day.
And I think it is all the splotches etc. At least DVD is still clean.
Well, when I still used Inkjets, I used Epson, precisly because using 3rd party ink did not void your warrenty. So if you fucked up your printer within the 1 year warrenty (and if the ink's gonna do it, I'd think it would happen before a year's up) Epson would replace the printer.
I think the undercurrent here is many people are starting to reconsider whether copyright laws currently fit what they agree with. That is, like with prohibition, there is some apparently large group of people who for whatever reasons don't agree with the current laws.
We can certainly argue that there might be better methods to affect change, but mass breaking of laws has happened in the past with some effect. Of course, we mostly are hearing about the people who didn't commit the tort being sued. One thing that is interesting is it seems no big cases have been brought criminally. It seems likely that those who did commit the tort are settling, and I'm not sure what the exact terms are.
At some level, laws only have the power that people give to them, if no one follows the law, it's not going to matter what it says(beyond perhaps some token lawsuits - but that won't fix anyone's loss). Copyright law has swung way against consumers, and I can't think that it will never swing back.
Plus, no one I've seen(even pirates) has ever said that they are ok with claiming the work they pirated was their own, or ok with selling the pirated work for profit. In general, commercial copyright infringment seems to be frowned apon by most pirates also - it's the occasional (or even constant) download at home, for personal use that they feel should be ok.
Slashdot Mirror
As an example, take heavy drinking. There are two alternatives when it comes to alcohol. The first is for the parents to say 'no (or very little) alcohol allowed.' The other is to say 'if you drink a lot, you will probably embarrass yourself and in the morning you will feel terrible.' If the parents do the first, then as soon as they leave home, this restriction goes away, and you see the kind of binge drinking that is common at universities. With the second, the restrictions are self-imposed, and you see far fewer problems.
I think in this case, you also need to have a nuanced discussion regarding the law in many countries. In the US, it is illegial to drink under age 21. Whether that is a law you agree with or not, if you want to follow your second choice as a parent, you better also talk about legal consequences, bad laws vs good laws, and the entire gamut. Unless you want to give the impression that laws "are more like guidelines" and that you will help cover for breaking them.
So once 20,000,000 people have seen the movie, it ought to no longer be a revenue stream to the creators? I'm fine with that, but how would you track that, and how would you extend that generically to other artistic products?
And what should happen if only 10,000,000 people wanted to pay to see the movie? Why should they have a guaranteed return?
Now we're changing argument in midstream. That is, the original post was that artists should get paid forever for each of their creative works. I asked why should artists get paid more times than a carpenter does for their work. Your argument was because it cost 180,000,000 dollars to create a movie. My response was that was a specious argument, and I laid out how you can make movies for less, and moreso implied that price of a creation really doesn't at all affect how often and for how long the creator can get paid.
Now you've again gone off of my post regarding market price vs marginal price.
All this is interesting, but how does it at all address why artists should get paid for one piece of work forever when a carpenter does not? The cost has nothing to do with people's sense of fairness or economics, it costs a lot to make a golden throne, but that doesn't mean the "carpenter" should necessarily get paid every time someone sits in it forever.
But it doesn't cost $9. It costs $180,000,000.
That's why artists expect to be able to "sell" the same thing in perpetuity.
That's great, but it doesn't equal in perpetuity. It's a lot of money - for a modern blockbuster movie. But maybe, just maybe, that should not be the yardstick.
Writing a book doesn't have that upfront cost - even if you factor in 30 years of an average american salary @ $35,000. And most books do not take that long to write.
Producing an album doesn't cost that much, I know people who have done so for under $10,000.
Nor does painting a picture.
And even creating a special effects laden movie doesn't have to cost near that much - see Star Wrek: In the Pirkinning. Or there is Blair Witch. That is, there are different ways to get costs down. Now, the sub $100,000 productions often have shitty actors. But I would bet you could get passable actors for $50,000 a film as opposed to $5,000,000 or more.
Heck, studios could go back to offering salarys to actors. The point is, many people posit that the current state of affairs is untenable. Maybe we lose new blockbusters. Maybe we lose Hollywood. If you think that someone won't show up to try and fill that gap, be it YouTube, SciFi station style movies or something I can't imagine, I'd say you're crazy. Maybe movies do go away, and we end up with serials/TV shows that you subscribe to get made. Maybe it goes PBS.
Maybe enough people donate or maybe people don't care enough to pay enough or watch enough ads and it all goes away. But I seriously doubt that it all goes away. We just might not recognize it at the end of the shift.
This has been argued before, and before in this thread, but I will say this: I have no problem with people wanting to get paid for their work. I do have a problem with people feeling entitled to be paid in perpetuity for one time period's work.
Why is the time of the carpenter worth less than the time of the painter? That is, why is it when the carpenter creates a chair, he expects to sell that chair once, and no one is shocked by that idea, nor does anyone feel that transaction is unfair. But if a Painter could only sell their painting once, suddenly everyone finds that unworkable.
While I do see a problem with "free! free!", I also see a problem with trying to impose artifical scarcity.
Please tell me - what games are they? Some of that does sound like Dawn of War... but not all of it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I still don't see how this makes MS a distributor.
As this has been explained, you do something to get a Voucher. The voucher is for support as far as I can see as GPLed stuff is still free. MS hands you a piece of paper, and they have distributed a piece of paper. But the paper isn't GPLed.
You give the paper to Novell, who then gives you the software. You go to (novell or MS) for support.
I just don't see where in any of this MS is even touching software, much less distributing GPLed software.
It seems to me that the voucher is like a gift card - Once I give you the gift card, any transactions are between you and the vendor and I have nothing to do with them.
Even if MS is offering support for SLES, they don't have to distribute any software to talk to you via e-mail or phone...
This is why I really wish sites would code strictly to standards, so the entire browser could be a choice - rather than every browser trying to be everything to everybody so that they get enough market share for the webdevs to test in them.
In general, youtube and the like work in Opera. There are some pages that use odd non standard code to load a flash object that do not work. The major downside is that you will find yourself back at the 1% userbase trying to convince sites to fix broken code or not block the browser again. The upshot is that you have to try pretty hard to make code that works in firefox that fails in Opera, but Google and some OSS control apps (Zenoss console, GLPI console) manage.
It is really annoying when OSS web consoles feel that they only need to work in Firefox, and don't test for IE, Opera or Safari.
I have to ask - how often do you have to update your adblockers? I've used proxomitron for 6-7 years now, and I've had to update filters maybe on average once a quarter anymore? I get 97% ads blocked now adays?
I am technical, and do manage a filterset, but it's just not that much time spent on it. As a user, you could do an update install about as often as you might update Opera or Thunderbird.
Use - if I wasn't doing filterset maintenance, AdMuncher or Proxomitron (the two I've used at all extensively) are pretty much setup (takes 3 minutes) and forget. Occasionally I need to bypass the filters for some reason - rightclick, bypass - reload. Or even easier, click on the prox menu in the upper left corner, bypass all filters. Bam new tab automatically.
I suppose the only thing I can see being easier would be if I could highlight a text area (like the annoying ad tables) and have it eat that. I keep hoping Opera ads something like a cut tool that would work like in paint.net, drag a little edit box, and clear it - but then have the browser no longer show that and collapse the space.
My problem is I can't stand firefox long enough to really try out Adblock.
Actually, we get the same sorts of posts on the Opera forums. I think it's either something to do with the computer environment, or PEBCAK.
The problem seems to be the same problem users complain about on the Opera forums with Opera. That is, that the browser will use available memory. I strongly believe that many users start playing with task manager, have no idea what the Virtual Memory use is/means and see some large number there. I fully expect this is half of the "anectadotal" issues. I constantly see people posting (for any app)
"Application FOOBAR is using ZOMG 300MB MEMORY WTFBBQBUNNIES!" . . .
So then we ask - "is there some issue with the system?"
and about half of the time, it's "Errr, no - but IT'S A BIG NUMBER!"
Past that, I wonder if it's not OS problems managing swap space properly. I use Opera, and I use a LOT sites for a long time often useing a lot of memory. Only once did I have problems, when VM use was 1.3GB on my 1GB RAM machine, and that was just that Opera was slow.
However, I have seen Firefox on Windows and Linux seem to heavily affect overall system speed over time, but I've never really looked too hard as I don't use it much.
except that restarting a web browser seems about the stupidest thing ever.
Come on, it's the Microsoft design method!
I never understand why people want to open PDF in their browser. It's a file, pass it off to the proper app. Much better PDF experiance.
Wait, isn't this basically what freenet 0.5 was doing? I have no idea how much of the issue with that was the anonyminity part, and how much was the distributed server part, but it was painfully slow. Maybe if everyone was using it it would be faster...
But doesn't this have several major issues?
1) all the freenet problems - that is:
1a)what if people don't want to share bandwidth or just some specific content? At one end, you have the freenet solution where you either share or don't use it (with that driving people away), at the other, there is another huge administrative issue for anyone who wants to manage what they share (which also will serve to drive people away).
1b) slow as hell - even non anonymous protocols that handle the search like gnutella are pretty slow and finding stuff, and getting the actual transfer setup. bittorrent is slightly better, but there's still the overhead time of the out of band/protocol search. Metalinks might solve this however. I just worry that for most data, by the time a torrent got started, you'll have loaded the page over HTTP... Unless he's just suggesting squid style proxies, which have all of their own caching problems.
2) Do people want to share their resources? Sometimes, but not everyone.
3) Why is copyright considered a bogus question? I'm sorry, but with the current way the MAFIAA is working, I can already smell the lawsuits.
AdMuncher???
Well, with AdMuncher or Proxomitron, you certainly do not end up with any large gaps. I would assume you can do similar things with privoxy.
AdMuncher or proxomitron or Privoxy will cover all browsers on windows...
I don't buy this would happen... I've read up on Freenet. As far as I know, the local cache is gibberish for which I don't have the key to decrypt. I would guess the government would have to spend an awful lot of time tracking down which cache is serving what content. If that's even possible without grabbing your PC, and then they would basically have to make freenet illegal...
Well, yes, for the uninitiated. For the people who take about a day to learn about these issues, AnoNet, Freenet, I2P, and TOR all provide methods for distribution significantly more difficult to take down than a website.
That's true... I'm not a videophile by any means, but now that I think about it, the movies always look like they need to get a new reel... like the 15 year old things shown in my high school that had been watched a million times. Even on opening day.
And I think it is all the splotches etc. At least DVD is still clean.
IDK, I looked at the Redbox site - isn't it basically the same as the horribly failed CC Divx ...
There are - banner page rolls are supported in certain IBM printers, HP etc. You just have to look outside home printers for that.
Well, when I still used Inkjets, I used Epson, precisly because using 3rd party ink did not void your warrenty. So if you fucked up your printer within the 1 year warrenty (and if the ink's gonna do it, I'd think it would happen before a year's up) Epson would replace the printer.
I think the undercurrent here is many people are starting to reconsider whether copyright laws currently fit what they agree with. That is, like with prohibition, there is some apparently large group of people who for whatever reasons don't agree with the current laws.
We can certainly argue that there might be better methods to affect change, but mass breaking of laws has happened in the past with some effect. Of course, we mostly are hearing about the people who didn't commit the tort being sued. One thing that is interesting is it seems no big cases have been brought criminally. It seems likely that those who did commit the tort are settling, and I'm not sure what the exact terms are.
At some level, laws only have the power that people give to them, if no one follows the law, it's not going to matter what it says(beyond perhaps some token lawsuits - but that won't fix anyone's loss). Copyright law has swung way against consumers, and I can't think that it will never swing back.
Plus, no one I've seen(even pirates) has ever said that they are ok with claiming the work they pirated was their own, or ok with selling the pirated work for profit. In general, commercial copyright infringment seems to be frowned apon by most pirates also - it's the occasional (or even constant) download at home, for personal use that they feel should be ok.