"As to your last point: There are some people, myself included, who believe that artists should be able to reap the fruits of their work, and retain full rights to them. I think that copyright is a basic moral right that in principle belongs with the artist, and is not something to be lightly toyed with in order to maximise the benefit to society, as if we're communists dividing up the harvest."
I call BS. I have not yet met one single Pro copyright person that actually believes that artists should retain full rights to their work. Case in point your entire post was made up of words coined by people in the past. The entire language was. If it was a basic right, then all previous art should be returned to their rightful owners, and society cans immediatly cease to function.
When I meet a single individual that can function without the use of (or after recieving the permission to use) any other persons intellectual creations, then we will be able to have a civil discussion on Copyright. Until then, the pro copyright group is just spewing crap.
They were pressed silver CD's with a graphic printed on them, a gem case and paper back and front inserts. I had always heard that the master was really expensive too, but when it came time for us to order demo disks for the VAR I worked for, we were finding the prices quite reasonable. It brought me to the belief that bands are getting screwed on the price of disk printing.
I call BS. Of the several bands that I have known who got contracts, all of them paid for most of their own promotions, and virtually every dime the record label paid out was listed as a loan to the band against any future profits. Virtually all of them eventually sold enough albums to pay back the record label, but when the royalty checks came in, they tended to be less than a dollar. I'm not buying that the record label losses millions on small acts that they are loosing money on.
It was obvious that they were playing games with the accounting when they charged the band $5k for a "master" CD, when the company I was working for had 1000 CDs made with gem cases and inserts for $1500. (this was many years ago.)
The record label had conned these poor saps into thinking the the "master" disk costs huge amounts of money to make. (not the music production. A physical disk) And that this master is used to press other disks at a cost of ~$2 a disk.
It's a blog. Thus, there is not necessarily, and unlikely, a specific theme. If they are writting in chinese, they are unlikely to give you a translation of every post. While it would be nice if everyone always told the truth, the reality is that many people don't. It is unfortunate, but the "good guys" tend to be just as likely to lie about their foe as the "bad guys". The "bad guys" might still be bad guys, but lies are still lies.
You pretty much have two options. Speak within the law, along with all of it's restrictions, or speak outside the law, and live with the fact that some people lie.
As for the fire/building example...All that shows is that free speech is a farce. Free speech is either absolute, or it does not exist. We definitly do not have free speech in the U.S.. We just have very liberal speech laws.
"plus if they post in chinese and you can't understand it, you may very well be hosting a government "agent provocateur"."
That should be just fine with the adopters. Free speech is free speech. If you start deciding that only certain kinds of speech should be allowed, then your no better than the government censors.
Unless he has gotten one of those cool perpetual patents, and thus no one else can build houses in half the time. Thus Person A can reduce his price by 5% thereby cornering the market. Given that this gives person A a 45% profit above and beyond what any of his competitors get. This soon allows person A to start keeping the houses, and renting them instead of selling them. As person A's profits rise due to continuing income now that they are renting, and still building at a deep discount, they start to buy up the units that they do not own. Soon, they have a monopoly on houses, and can charge twice the price to rent that they previously charged to sell.
Moral of the story: Automation is not necessarily a problem, but bad "IP" law is.
Wrong. US citizens don't do this work because the immigrant workers are willing to do the job for far less than US citizens will. The farm owners take the least expensive labor they can get.
Don't think for a second that if all immigration was cut off that the farms wouldn't be worked by US citizens. They would just be worked by US citizens that earn more per hour than what the immigrent workers make now.
You mean like the 11-13 year old girls in bikinis down on the street corner here in Sacramento? The ones shaking what boobs they have and shaking their asses at the passing cars? The ones that are doing this to try to entice people (men?) to pay for a "car wash" (obviously not for the pleasure of watching wet bikini clad prepubecint girls rub down their car. The ones that are doing this with the endorsment and encouragement of our public schools to raise money for the sports program? After all sports in school teaches team work!
If only we could have taken care of Iraq that way. I'm not sure it would have worked, but it sure would have been cool if we could have defused Iraq by building a space elevator.
Hehe..Ok, Yes a one year old. Yes, he actually listens to it. He seems to be partial to power metal, although I have to make sure that the MP3 have been normalized to a level that he cannot damage his ears by turning up full blast. He doesn't seem to have any trouble using it. He plugs the headphones into the socket, and uses the skip forward/back, and the play pause buttons. He does not generally mess with the volume, and does not understand the on/off because it requires holding the play button for ~8 seconds. The player became his because he kept taking the earphones off of my head and putting them on his. Once I had played with the player for a couple of days, I realized the fact taht it only had 128MB of memory mad it impracticle for me. Since it was fee and mostly useless for me, I saw no reason not to let him play with it.
While I would like to think he is a little genius, realistically, I think that most people just really underestimate children. Unfortunatly this means that many children don't get to streach themselves intellectually until they are old enough to get away from Mom and Dad. There are very few toys that a properly supervised child cannot play with.
He doesn't NEED one any more than he NEEDS MegaBlocks. It is a toy. As I said, it was free from the cable company. Don't you own anything that you don't NEED?
As for a chocking hazard. No, it is not. I supervise my child when he plays with toys that he is not ready to play with alone. I understand that many parents do not, and would agree that their children should not be given headphones.
If by tought, you mean that they are aware of it, actually, yes. I knew exactly what sex was by seven. Most kids do, unless their parents do things like take them out in the middle on no where so that they can't see animals. No zoos, no pets. Nothing. Trying to convince yourself that 7 year olds don't know what sex is seems kind of silly.
Your comparing a solid state machine to a machine with a harddrive. Harddrive players are not suitable for use in as rough of environments.
For example, the 128mb creative muvo that my 1 year old uses is great for him. It was free from the cable company, but sells for ~$50. I would never consider giving him a $450 music player. I also would not consider giving him a player with a harddrive, as the device is likely to be repeatedly dropped, stepped on, and chewed. Even though, the device is
128mb Creative Muvo=$50 base price = $400 per GB
Personally I think that the harddrive players are too little and too much at the same time. I either want a device that can hold all of my music, which is several hundred GB of data (the hard drive players are not even close) or I want a device that takes removable media like SD. (which no hard drive player does) Who wants to have to hook up their player to reload their music. That is a pain. If I can't keep everything on the player, I want to be able to keep several SD cards in my pocket, and have access to however much music I care to buy SD cards for, as well as be able to hand a GB or 2 of music to my wife so that she can listen to some of the songs I brough, or to delete one of the music cards when I run out of space on the picture card I took with me on vacation.
The reason the that the rating would be 15+ (Actually 13+) is because the ratings are designed to cater to the most retarded kid in society. The child abuse is not in letting your child grow abnormally quick. It is in this current attitude that until the child has experienced something, they shouldn't be allowed to experience it, and it is down right harmful.
Look at where we are at now. People are not considered adults until they are somewhere between 18 and 25. 18 AND 25!!! Just a few generations ago human reached adulthood between 10 and 14.
And don't try to give me the "we live in more complex times" garbage. We live in the simplest and safest time in history. Not once in my entire life have I had to worry about defending my home from the blood thirsty hordes coming over the hill, just because our crops are in season. Not once have I had help Dad dig a grave because another sibling died in child birth. Not once have I had to worry that me and my family are going to starve to death this winter because we had a bad growing season.
Life now has become so easy that parents have time to try and "protect" their children from life. Unfortunitly this artificially retards them.
Microsoft did NOT invent the spreadsheet.
Microsoft did NOT invent the database.
To be consistent you should not support any patants that Microsoft claims surrounding these two products.
Really, you don't want to charge a dollar. What you want to do is charge $1 for access to the FOSS library. So, you send your dollar to a FOSS advocacy organization, and you have licensed all software from their "library" of software. It's called bundling, right? Of course, MS knows how hard it is to stop piracy, so if someone downloads and runs the FOSS software without paying their fee, there might not be much they can do about it.
And in other news...Airport security job applications from pedophiles is up 800%. One pedophile tells us under demand of anonymity, "Why would I pay for internet broadband, when the airport can give me WAY higher resolution, real-time kiddie porn. AND THEY PAY ME?!?! Can you believe it?!?! No more risk of imprisionment, and they pay me...Woohoo! bring on the kiddies!"
(Do you really want to take your kids on a plane now?)
Speed enforcement largely has nothing to do with safety. It is a revenue generating system. So, next time you get a speeding ticket, you can think of it like winning th lottery. Obviously there comes a point where it does become a safety issue. That is why things like (at least here in CA) speeding ver 100mph has a different law.
As for "taking someones property"...The idea that ideas are property is the problem. Since we are discussing changing the current laws. Remember, IP is new. The constitution is pretty clear that you do NOT own the idea, but get a limited monopoly on it for coming up with it first. Even if the idea of IP was not new, that doesn't make it right.
The fallicy that the IP supporters alway use is that it is the law because it it moral, and that it is moral because it is the law. We know that something being the law does not make it moral.
On the law side, with the number of violators, obviously the law needs to be changed. To date, I have never met a single individual that has not, and does not violate some kind of "IP" law.
On the moral side...If we feel that putting a permenant monopoly on ideas for the original creator, then this should be retro-active to the begining of time. When speaking morally, either ideas belong to who created them, and then their decendents, or they do no. Of courese this means that all society must stop. We can no longer use any existing idea, as they are all based on other peoples "IP". Right down to the language itself.
So, the "Moral" argument is obviously absud, which means people can just stop trying to use it. The "Legal" argument is not obsurd, but should seriously be reconsidered without the fake "moral" fallicy involved.
For traditional sake, I will add my analogy.:
I own the oxygen manufacturing plant ( you know the tree) in my back yard. Thus the oxygen produced by it belongs to me. The same as any other kind of manufacturing plant. Just because MY OP (Oxygen Property) is floating out there, and you can easily STEAL it, doesn't make it right. Because everyone is STEALING other peoples OP, I am loosing millions in lost potential revinue. Obviosly the market for oxygen, while not completely dead, is severly limited by several orders of magnitued due to the flagrent piracy of OP. Yes, yes, we still have people creating breathable air even though the law does not recognize OP, but the quality, is really not as good. How many commercial oxygen plants exit in the world today compared to the number of people who use oxygen daily? When is the last time you actually paid for the OP that you so casually STEAL for the OP creator?
This may sound silly today, but not long ago, the idea that you could do jail time for singing a song around a campfire would have sounded just as silly.
I hear you! Every Tom and Jerry cartoon they air that has a human in it, has the top half of the human's body chopped off. You can only see them from the waist down!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they would give back. Not Microsoft mind you, but many software producers. Here is a link to a few of them... http://www.sourceforge.net/
"As to your last point: There are some people, myself included, who believe that artists should be able to reap the fruits of their work, and retain full rights to them. I think that copyright is a basic moral right that in principle belongs with the artist, and is not something to be lightly toyed with in order to maximise the benefit to society, as if we're communists dividing up the harvest."
I call BS. I have not yet met one single Pro copyright person that actually believes that artists should retain full rights to their work. Case in point your entire post was made up of words coined by people in the past. The entire language was. If it was a basic right, then all previous art should be returned to their rightful owners, and society cans immediatly cease to function.
When I meet a single individual that can function without the use of (or after recieving the permission to use) any other persons intellectual creations, then we will be able to have a civil discussion on Copyright. Until then, the pro copyright group is just spewing crap.
They were pressed silver CD's with a graphic printed on them, a gem case and paper back and front inserts. I had always heard that the master was really expensive too, but when it came time for us to order demo disks for the VAR I worked for, we were finding the prices quite reasonable. It brought me to the belief that bands are getting screwed on the price of disk printing.
I call BS. Of the several bands that I have known who got contracts, all of them paid for most of their own promotions, and virtually every dime the record label paid out was listed as a loan to the band against any future profits. Virtually all of them eventually sold enough albums to pay back the record label, but when the royalty checks came in, they tended to be less than a dollar. I'm not buying that the record label losses millions on small acts that they are loosing money on.
It was obvious that they were playing games with the accounting when they charged the band $5k for a "master" CD, when the company I was working for had 1000 CDs made with gem cases and inserts for $1500. (this was many years ago.)
The record label had conned these poor saps into thinking the the "master" disk costs huge amounts of money to make. (not the music production. A physical disk) And that this master is used to press other disks at a cost of ~$2 a disk.
It's a blog. Thus, there is not necessarily, and unlikely, a specific theme. If they are writting in chinese, they are unlikely to give you a translation of every post. While it would be nice if everyone always told the truth, the reality is that many people don't. It is unfortunate, but the "good guys" tend to be just as likely to lie about their foe as the "bad guys". The "bad guys" might still be bad guys, but lies are still lies.
You pretty much have two options. Speak within the law, along with all of it's restrictions, or speak outside the law, and live with the fact that some people lie.
As for the fire/building example...All that shows is that free speech is a farce. Free speech is either absolute, or it does not exist. We definitly do not have free speech in the U.S.. We just have very liberal speech laws.
"plus if they post in chinese and you can't understand it, you may very well be hosting a government "agent provocateur"."
That should be just fine with the adopters. Free speech is free speech. If you start deciding that only certain kinds of speech should be allowed, then your no better than the government censors.
Unless he has gotten one of those cool perpetual patents, and thus no one else can build houses in half the time. Thus Person A can reduce his price by 5% thereby cornering the market. Given that this gives person A a 45% profit above and beyond what any of his competitors get. This soon allows person A to start keeping the houses, and renting them instead of selling them. As person A's profits rise due to continuing income now that they are renting, and still building at a deep discount, they start to buy up the units that they do not own. Soon, they have a monopoly on houses, and can charge twice the price to rent that they previously charged to sell.
Moral of the story: Automation is not necessarily a problem, but bad "IP" law is.
Wrong. US citizens don't do this work because the immigrant workers are willing to do the job for far less than US citizens will. The farm owners take the least expensive labor they can get.
Don't think for a second that if all immigration was cut off that the farms wouldn't be worked by US citizens. They would just be worked by US citizens that earn more per hour than what the immigrent workers make now.
Simple supply and demand.
You mean like the 11-13 year old girls in bikinis down on the street corner here in Sacramento? The ones shaking what boobs they have and shaking their asses at the passing cars? The ones that are doing this to try to entice people (men?) to pay for a "car wash" (obviously not for the pleasure of watching wet bikini clad prepubecint girls rub down their car. The ones that are doing this with the endorsment and encouragement of our public schools to raise money for the sports program? After all sports in school teaches team work!
Since they were going to fire him the next day anyways, now he can sue for discrimination!!!
If only we could have taken care of Iraq that way. I'm not sure it would have worked, but it sure would have been cool if we could have defused Iraq by building a space elevator.
Hehe..Ok, Yes a one year old. Yes, he actually listens to it. He seems to be partial to power metal, although I have to make sure that the MP3 have been normalized to a level that he cannot damage his ears by turning up full blast. He doesn't seem to have any trouble using it. He plugs the headphones into the socket, and uses the skip forward/back, and the play pause buttons. He does not generally mess with the volume, and does not understand the on/off because it requires holding the play button for ~8 seconds. The player became his because he kept taking the earphones off of my head and putting them on his. Once I had played with the player for a couple of days, I realized the fact taht it only had 128MB of memory mad it impracticle for me. Since it was fee and mostly useless for me, I saw no reason not to let him play with it.
While I would like to think he is a little genius, realistically, I think that most people just really underestimate children. Unfortunatly this means that many children don't get to streach themselves intellectually until they are old enough to get away from Mom and Dad. There are very few toys that a properly supervised child cannot play with.
He doesn't NEED one any more than he NEEDS MegaBlocks. It is a toy. As I said, it was free from the cable company. Don't you own anything that you don't NEED?
As for a chocking hazard. No, it is not. I supervise my child when he plays with toys that he is not ready to play with alone. I understand that many parents do not, and would agree that their children should not be given headphones.
If by tought, you mean that they are aware of it, actually, yes. I knew exactly what sex was by seven. Most kids do, unless their parents do things like take them out in the middle on no where so that they can't see animals. No zoos, no pets. Nothing. Trying to convince yourself that 7 year olds don't know what sex is seems kind of silly.
Your comparing a solid state machine to a machine with a harddrive. Harddrive players are not suitable for use in as rough of environments.
For example, the 128mb creative muvo that my 1 year old uses is great for him. It was free from the cable company, but sells for ~$50. I would never consider giving him a $450 music player. I also would not consider giving him a player with a harddrive, as the device is likely to be repeatedly dropped, stepped on, and chewed. Even though, the device is 128mb Creative Muvo=$50 base price = $400 per GB
Personally I think that the harddrive players are too little and too much at the same time. I either want a device that can hold all of my music, which is several hundred GB of data (the hard drive players are not even close) or I want a device that takes removable media like SD. (which no hard drive player does) Who wants to have to hook up their player to reload their music. That is a pain. If I can't keep everything on the player, I want to be able to keep several SD cards in my pocket, and have access to however much music I care to buy SD cards for, as well as be able to hand a GB or 2 of music to my wife so that she can listen to some of the songs I brough, or to delete one of the music cards when I run out of space on the picture card I took with me on vacation.
The reason the that the rating would be 15+ (Actually 13+) is because the ratings are designed to cater to the most retarded kid in society. The child abuse is not in letting your child grow abnormally quick. It is in this current attitude that until the child has experienced something, they shouldn't be allowed to experience it, and it is down right harmful.
Look at where we are at now. People are not considered adults until they are somewhere between 18 and 25. 18 AND 25!!! Just a few generations ago human reached adulthood between 10 and 14.
And don't try to give me the "we live in more complex times" garbage. We live in the simplest and safest time in history. Not once in my entire life have I had to worry about defending my home from the blood thirsty hordes coming over the hill, just because our crops are in season. Not once have I had help Dad dig a grave because another sibling died in child birth. Not once have I had to worry that me and my family are going to starve to death this winter because we had a bad growing season.
Life now has become so easy that parents have time to try and "protect" their children from life. Unfortunitly this artificially retards them.
That is absolutly correct. Our government has official policy that our schools are to teach this kind of eating...
p 75.PDF
http://www.usda.gov/cnpp/KidsPyra/PyrBook.pdf
http://www.usda.gov/cnpp/FENR/fenrv12n4/fenrv12n4
And this is after they lightend up on the grains.
Microsoft did NOT invent the spreadsheet. Microsoft did NOT invent the database. To be consistent you should not support any patants that Microsoft claims surrounding these two products.
Really, you don't want to charge a dollar. What you want to do is charge $1 for access to the FOSS library. So, you send your dollar to a FOSS advocacy organization, and you have licensed all software from their "library" of software. It's called bundling, right? Of course, MS knows how hard it is to stop piracy, so if someone downloads and runs the FOSS software without paying their fee, there might not be much they can do about it.
Battlezone: 1980
Because they guy that is posting your nude photos on the internet wouldn't be your boyfriend...he would be your husband?
Soviet Russia was never the phrase....Oceania has always been the phrase....
And in other news...Airport security job applications from pedophiles is up 800%. One pedophile tells us under demand of anonymity, "Why would I pay for internet broadband, when the airport can give me WAY higher resolution, real-time kiddie porn. AND THEY PAY ME?!?! Can you believe it?!?! No more risk of imprisionment, and they pay me...Woohoo! bring on the kiddies!"
(Do you really want to take your kids on a plane now?)
Speed enforcement largely has nothing to do with safety. It is a revenue generating system. So, next time you get a speeding ticket, you can think of it like winning th lottery. Obviously there comes a point where it does become a safety issue. That is why things like (at least here in CA) speeding ver 100mph has a different law.
As for "taking someones property"...The idea that ideas are property is the problem. Since we are discussing changing the current laws. Remember, IP is new. The constitution is pretty clear that you do NOT own the idea, but get a limited monopoly on it for coming up with it first. Even if the idea of IP was not new, that doesn't make it right.
The fallicy that the IP supporters alway use is that it is the law because it it moral, and that it is moral because it is the law. We know that something being the law does not make it moral.
On the law side, with the number of violators, obviously the law needs to be changed. To date, I have never met a single individual that has not, and does not violate some kind of "IP" law.
On the moral side...If we feel that putting a permenant monopoly on ideas for the original creator, then this should be retro-active to the begining of time. When speaking morally, either ideas belong to who created them, and then their decendents, or they do no. Of courese this means that all society must stop. We can no longer use any existing idea, as they are all based on other peoples "IP". Right down to the language itself.
So, the "Moral" argument is obviously absud, which means people can just stop trying to use it. The "Legal" argument is not obsurd, but should seriously be reconsidered without the fake "moral" fallicy involved.
For traditional sake, I will add my analogy.:
I own the oxygen manufacturing plant ( you know the tree) in my back yard. Thus the oxygen produced by it belongs to me. The same as any other kind of manufacturing plant. Just because MY OP (Oxygen Property) is floating out there, and you can easily STEAL it, doesn't make it right. Because everyone is STEALING other peoples OP, I am loosing millions in lost potential revinue. Obviosly the market for oxygen, while not completely dead, is severly limited by several orders of magnitued due to the flagrent piracy of OP. Yes, yes, we still have people creating breathable air even though the law does not recognize OP, but the quality, is really not as good. How many commercial oxygen plants exit in the world today compared to the number of people who use oxygen daily? When is the last time you actually paid for the OP that you so casually STEAL for the OP creator?
This may sound silly today, but not long ago, the idea that you could do jail time for singing a song around a campfire would have sounded just as silly.
I hear you! Every Tom and Jerry cartoon they air that has a human in it, has the top half of the human's body chopped off. You can only see them from the waist down!