it's clear that there's a correlation between quality of education and dollars spent
Nonsense. It's a cultural issue. Look at the DC school system, for example. One of the highest per-student expenditures in the country, and abyssmal results with high drop-out rates, persistent illiteracy in students holding diplomas, etc. At over $10,000 per student per year, it's an outrage. Private schools charging less than that per student while teaching the same kids (from the same demographic, in the same areas) have excellent results. And the current administration and congress are all about killing off the voucher programs that would allow parents to send their kids to such schools, in order to buy political support from the teacher union brigade. The supreme irony, of course, is that the children of most of the congressional and executive decision makers are themselves in private schools. The irony would be delicious if it weren't such a tragedy for the kids themselves.
Sure, your experience can be different. But your conclusions ("smokescreen to support cutting education funding, and a mind-trick to turn people against unions") are still invalid due to paranoia, and suggest that you have blinders on and have no interaction with other people in your industry. Or, you're actually BS-ing because you want to make a rhetorical point in support of unions and their supporting politics. When your point is so obviously, demonstrably incorrect with even the most casual observation, the most likely case is that you are, indeed, saying something you know is untrue.
Should they also lose their house, or a business that the spouse started, or any money that's in the bank? If not, why not, if they are all the product of his work? Why should you get to pick and choose which asset a person gets to work for and provide to his family? And if you get to choose, why shouldn't everyone else get to choose which of your assets can be capriciously removed from the people you want to give them to?
So, you can bank money over time, and call it an investment, but you can't bank hours at the keyboard writing something, and call it an investment?
And what if an author spends ten years writing a work that he knows is going to take a while to be picked up and appreciated by a wide audience, but which indeed has lots of commercial potential to reward him for his hard work. And he and his wife have been arranging their finances around that deferring of income while he finishes the project. It gets published! Yay! Things are looking great. And then he gets hit by a bus that week. Too bad, family that supported the author for ten years. You lose! The writer's desire and actions to have the proceeds from that work support you are history, because Anonymouse Coward thinks that his getting hit by a bus the day his book gets published means all of his work is now public domain.
Why shouldn't all of your parents' cash investments have become public domain the moment they died, if a writer's TIME investments should be? Oh, I know. Because by holding that position, it makes it easier to feel less guilty about ripping off music and videos using P2P.
The guy I'm referring to isn't the C-in-C, but the person in the White House's military planning office. Used to always be a general or an admiral - the sort of senior people who know better, and are otherwise active duty officers. Not any more - the post has been politicized by the new administration... and lookee what happens!
Apparently, yes. The political appointee in the White House who plans $300,000 photo ops involving Air Force One, F-16s, and major landmarks... he seems to be worth keeping an eye on.
Is there any place in this country for politicians who don't say only what everyone agrees with
My point exactly. Thank you.
So what would you have him say? The American character is to follow?
No, I would have him not say, when he's standing there in front of other countries' press corps, that we (the US) really need to recognize the leadership of Europe (as a recent example). I mean, he can and should say that if that's what he thinks, of course, but then he should also keep that posture when he speaks to the people who elected him.
How is trying to take a lead in R&D going to damage our relationship with foreign countries?
By fueling the long-held (long before the previous administration) resentment on the part other countries. There are two options: either the US actually is at the top of the heap, or it isn't. So, let's say it is. Then there are two options: the US takes advantage of its superior science output to improve its economy, or it gives the research away to countries that will realize they don't have to spend 3% of their GDP - all they have to do is wait for the US taxpayers to do it for them. So, which is it? Will the US leverage all its taxpayer's funds for the benefit of those taxpayers, or will it allow countries that don't similarly tax their citizens to leech off of the US-funded research?
Relations with other countries can be built around leeching, or around actual competition. If it's about leeching - which seems to be Obama's M.O. - then it hurts our ultimate relations with other countries by removing their incentive to constructively engage their own people in basic research, and adds to the culture of entitlement. If it's about competition... well, it won't be. Because that would be the big, mean ol' U.S. being selfish, right? And we can't have that, can we? Obama will protect his own interests abroad just as he's doing domestically: by encouraging dependence on increasingly aggressive taxes extracted from the middle and upper economic strata of the country his party rules.
Or what, would you take pride in America limply following other nations achievements? Or do you want America to strive to be the best?
You're totally missing the point. I want the US to be a leader in all (constructive) things. I want the US to be militarily unassailable, economically unrivaled, scientifically years ahead of everyone else, and a shining beacon in the cause of individual liberty, self-reliance, freedom of expression, and the fight against dangerious, irrational, retrograde theocratic lunacy as seen festering in so many places. There. How's that?
My problem is that Obama's obsequious, apologetic, "gee, America sure does get out of line a lot, doesn't it" persona as displayed overseas is completely at odds with this topic's "those other countries should be following us" notion.
I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow -- but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again
Which implies that he expects other people to be followers. That he expects that other nations won't, can't, or shouldn't be doing the same or better (otherwise, we wouldn't be leading them). Which is it? His international apology tour doesn't really jive with the message that, "Don't worry, Estonia, we're superior, and we'll do the research, you just follow us, OK?" Talk about your fair-weather meritocracy. This whole manifest destiny stuff doesn't sit well with him unless he can use it to woo academics, unions, and other "I'll need your votes in three years" demographics.
I completely trust a restaurant's food suppliers, chef, wait staff, sanitation, and even their "non-free" recipes, when I outsource meal preparation because I'm feeling lazy that night. So? That's the whole point of it. Let someone else worry about it, and understand that you're making some compromises. I'm not sure which is worse, The Prophet's loopy, hippy-dippy hyperbole, or his condescension and patronizing nonsense.
The problem is that the judge is part of several organizations that are clearly against the accused.
So? If the judge was a member of Swedish Citizens Against Drunk Driving, and he was presiding over the trial of a guy that killed somebody while driving drunk, would that make his personal interest in reducing the crime of drunk driving somehow wrong, or prejudicial? I mean, driving drunk is naughty. Being a member of a group that says, "Driving drunk is naughty" doesn't prevent you from being objective about the facts in a trial that's determining if someone was doing the naughty thing. Likewise, being a member of an organization that says, "Ripping off artists is naughty, and setting up web sites specifically to help do that on a massive scale is also naughty," doesn't mean you can't be objective about the finding of facts in a given case about whether or not a particular person/people were actually doing so or not.
Should every judge who supports an organization aimed at reducing heroin use through prevention and the punishment of pushers and traffickers be considered incapable of weighing in on whether or not a given person is a heroin dealer? Should a judge who - among many, many other professional affiliations - considers it important to cut down on fraud in the judicial system and thus supports a bar association sub-group aimed at integrity in the practice of law recuse himself from the trial of a lawyer that's been defrauding his clients? Why? It's rational to support such interests if you're in that profession, but you only want judges that don't support it to judge such cases?
It's likewise rational to support copyrights, and to discourage the wholesale ripping off of artists. Why would you want a judge who doesn't get that to be involved in such a trial?
More importantly, do you consider yourself rational enough to be a member of a jury in such a case? Do you know anyone who supports the EFF? Should they be considered too corrupt and biased to be a juror on such a case? Why?
You should try designing, manufacturing, marketing, selling to individuals through a retail web presence, supporting, and perpetually providing the bandwidth for something sometime, and then rethink your term "excessive."
What I'm addressing, here, is that large contingent of posters here and elsewhere who insist that since you CAN record an acoustic guitar with a $50 microphone, then anyone who has the recording budget for a big project must surely be rolling in ill-gotten gains, and therefor should be ripped off. It's a strange, and frequently repeated sentiment.
It can do, but you can also produce stunning music with some $50 microphones, a soundcard, and Ardour. If you need weeks in the studio to produce something of acceptable quality, maybe you need to take a step back and think whether you're doing things in the right way.
Gee, or maybe it's up to the artist to decide if they want to fly in a cellist for a particular track, and they can't be there until next week... or maybe it's a film soundtrack that takes hundreds of people and thousands of hours to produce. Are you really going to draw a line in the sand, and say that someone who could keep their production costs under some given price level or degree of logistical difficulty should not be ripped off, but someone who has a larger or more expensive production facility or complex project should be ripped off? Are your personal ethics really that relative and situational? What's that like?
artists that record and market expensively make their investments back within days--not years
Really? All of them? You don't say. How about the ones that record expensively, but don't market expensively? And, is it your personal evaluation of which they've done, and at what threshold it's considered "expensive" that dictates whether or not you endorse their work being hugely ripped off by leeches? Can you provide some hard numbers that help show when you think ripping them off is OK, vs when it's not?
digital music costs NOTHING to copy and distribute
But it can cost a great deal (of time and money) to produce. And you want to make sure that someone who makes that investment is deprived of the option to offer their work up only to people who are willing to pay for it.
It has already been quite clearly demonstrated that the artists are rarely the recipients of the revenue.
Nonsense. The artist is the recipient of whatever the artist agrees to when they form and sign a contract. Some artists start their own record labels to have more control over the process, and some artists want absolutely NOTHING to do with marketing, liability insurance, copyright arguments, distribution, etc., and they'd rather have someone who specialzes in such things do all of that work. You know, a publisher. Some people are professional violin players and some people are professional publishers. Whatever deal those two people strike between them is up to them. Your laughably sophomoric notion that it's appropriate to rip off the artist's work because the artist has chosen to let someone else handle their business affairs while they focus on making music (or other creative works) is really you saying, "This artist is so dumb that she's chosen a record label to do business with, and I hate that, so I'm going to steal her stuff to teach her a lesson." Now, why you'd want to consume the creative works of someone you hate is a second, and mysterious issue.
Face it, the traditional music and media distribution industries are obsolete
So why do you care about an artist that has made the choice to work through a publishing company? If you consider someone to be obsolete in their thinking, and just thrashing around in their attempts to shape a career and make a living, why don't you just ignore them? There are plenty of artists willing to use your shiny new "give everything away for free" business model, and I'm sure they'll all be thrilled with the proceeds that they'll get from project a that it took them years to create, and won't mind having to litter their web site with simpering "please donate" links to PayPal. If you think an artist is wrong headed or obsolete or evil for using a publishing company, why do you find it so hard to just ignore them? Or do you still want what they create, and just don't want to pay what they're asking? Do you have any intellectual integrity?
If you feel so strongly about this, show your support and buy some shares of Blockbuster.
How about I just meet the artists I respect and do business with them in the manner they have chosen? If I don't want their works enough to agree to the terms they have chosen when offering their work for sale, then I must not want it enough to acquire it. The difference between us is that you're willing to use the lame "I'm teaching them a lesson by stealing from them" excuse as a way to justify ripping off entertainment for free. Pretty embarassing for you, I guess, but then you clearly have only a spoiled child's view and sense of entitlement on the issue.
So what percentage of legal/illegal content should there be that tips you from completely innocent to doing jail time?
Who cares? In this case we're talking about an organization that was formed around the specific notion of deliberately ripping off copyrighted material, regularly and publicly talks about that being their purpose, and named itself in the spirit of deliberately doing so. They exist to facilitate the acquistion of pirated content. Of course, you know that, and you're being deliberately disengenuous.
When an unfair judgement happens in a court of law
That's very interesting. But how does it apply in this case? An organization that proudly named itself after and continually celebrated it role in ripping off artists and businesses was found to be actively supporting exactly that activity. Unless by "unfair" you mean "not harsh enough," but you don't seem to mean that.
If a large number of websites post just one "infringing" link on their pages, then the law becomes moot
Interesting! And if a large number of people held musicians chained up in their basements and forced them to provide free entertainment for them, would that also make kidnapping laws moot? If everyone steals cable service, does that make any law against it moot?
What's it like to have such an acute case of moral relativism? Does it hurt?
they've never cooperated with the countless photographers claiming copyright infringement through their Google Images service
Sure they have. It's called "robots.txt" - and a photographer publishing their works on a web site simply has to ask Google not to index them. And they won't. They'll also lose the potential exposure, but that's a choice.
Slashdot Mirror
it's clear that there's a correlation between quality of education and dollars spent
Nonsense. It's a cultural issue. Look at the DC school system, for example. One of the highest per-student expenditures in the country, and abyssmal results with high drop-out rates, persistent illiteracy in students holding diplomas, etc. At over $10,000 per student per year, it's an outrage. Private schools charging less than that per student while teaching the same kids (from the same demographic, in the same areas) have excellent results. And the current administration and congress are all about killing off the voucher programs that would allow parents to send their kids to such schools, in order to buy political support from the teacher union brigade. The supreme irony, of course, is that the children of most of the congressional and executive decision makers are themselves in private schools. The irony would be delicious if it weren't such a tragedy for the kids themselves.
And our experiences cannot be different?
Sure, your experience can be different. But your conclusions ("smokescreen to support cutting education funding, and a mind-trick to turn people against unions") are still invalid due to paranoia, and suggest that you have blinders on and have no interaction with other people in your industry. Or, you're actually BS-ing because you want to make a rhetorical point in support of unions and their supporting politics. When your point is so obviously, demonstrably incorrect with even the most casual observation, the most likely case is that you are, indeed, saying something you know is untrue.
Yes. They Lose.
Should they also lose their house, or a business that the spouse started, or any money that's in the bank? If not, why not, if they are all the product of his work? Why should you get to pick and choose which asset a person gets to work for and provide to his family? And if you get to choose, why shouldn't everyone else get to choose which of your assets can be capriciously removed from the people you want to give them to?
So, you can bank money over time, and call it an investment, but you can't bank hours at the keyboard writing something, and call it an investment? And what if an author spends ten years writing a work that he knows is going to take a while to be picked up and appreciated by a wide audience, but which indeed has lots of commercial potential to reward him for his hard work. And he and his wife have been arranging their finances around that deferring of income while he finishes the project. It gets published! Yay! Things are looking great. And then he gets hit by a bus that week. Too bad, family that supported the author for ten years. You lose! The writer's desire and actions to have the proceeds from that work support you are history, because Anonymouse Coward thinks that his getting hit by a bus the day his book gets published means all of his work is now public domain. Why shouldn't all of your parents' cash investments have become public domain the moment they died, if a writer's TIME investments should be? Oh, I know. Because by holding that position, it makes it easier to feel less guilty about ripping off music and videos using P2P.
The guy I'm referring to isn't the C-in-C, but the person in the White House's military planning office. Used to always be a general or an admiral - the sort of senior people who know better, and are otherwise active duty officers. Not any more - the post has been politicized by the new administration... and lookee what happens!
I don't want to come off as more racist than I already do or anything, but the last few miraculous discoveries in China were faked.
You're not coming off as racist. That's a cultural observation, and it's entirely appropriate.
Anything else we need to be worrying about?
Apparently, yes. The political appointee in the White House who plans $300,000 photo ops involving Air Force One, F-16s, and major landmarks... he seems to be worth keeping an eye on.
Half a billion dollars in micro translation, click fraud, link farming, and captch busting services?
Wrong two different ideas.
Is there any place in this country for politicians who don't say only what everyone agrees with
My point exactly. Thank you.
So what would you have him say? The American character is to follow?
No, I would have him not say, when he's standing there in front of other countries' press corps, that we (the US) really need to recognize the leadership of Europe (as a recent example). I mean, he can and should say that if that's what he thinks, of course, but then he should also keep that posture when he speaks to the people who elected him.
How is trying to take a lead in R&D going to damage our relationship with foreign countries?
By fueling the long-held (long before the previous administration) resentment on the part other countries. There are two options: either the US actually is at the top of the heap, or it isn't. So, let's say it is. Then there are two options: the US takes advantage of its superior science output to improve its economy, or it gives the research away to countries that will realize they don't have to spend 3% of their GDP - all they have to do is wait for the US taxpayers to do it for them. So, which is it? Will the US leverage all its taxpayer's funds for the benefit of those taxpayers, or will it allow countries that don't similarly tax their citizens to leech off of the US-funded research?
Relations with other countries can be built around leeching, or around actual competition. If it's about leeching - which seems to be Obama's M.O. - then it hurts our ultimate relations with other countries by removing their incentive to constructively engage their own people in basic research, and adds to the culture of entitlement. If it's about competition... well, it won't be. Because that would be the big, mean ol' U.S. being selfish, right? And we can't have that, can we? Obama will protect his own interests abroad just as he's doing domestically: by encouraging dependence on increasingly aggressive taxes extracted from the middle and upper economic strata of the country his party rules.
Or what, would you take pride in America limply following other nations achievements? Or do you want America to strive to be the best?
You're totally missing the point. I want the US to be a leader in all (constructive) things. I want the US to be militarily unassailable, economically unrivaled, scientifically years ahead of everyone else, and a shining beacon in the cause of individual liberty, self-reliance, freedom of expression, and the fight against dangerious, irrational, retrograde theocratic lunacy as seen festering in so many places. There. How's that?
My problem is that Obama's obsequious, apologetic, "gee, America sure does get out of line a lot, doesn't it" persona as displayed overseas is completely at odds with this topic's "those other countries should be following us" notion.
I believe it is not in our character, American character, to follow -- but to lead. And it is time for us to lead once again
Which implies that he expects other people to be followers. That he expects that other nations won't, can't, or shouldn't be doing the same or better (otherwise, we wouldn't be leading them). Which is it? His international apology tour doesn't really jive with the message that, "Don't worry, Estonia, we're superior, and we'll do the research, you just follow us, OK?" Talk about your fair-weather meritocracy. This whole manifest destiny stuff doesn't sit well with him unless he can use it to woo academics, unions, and other "I'll need your votes in three years" demographics.
I completely trust a restaurant's food suppliers, chef, wait staff, sanitation, and even their "non-free" recipes, when I outsource meal preparation because I'm feeling lazy that night. So? That's the whole point of it. Let someone else worry about it, and understand that you're making some compromises. I'm not sure which is worse, The Prophet's loopy, hippy-dippy hyperbole, or his condescension and patronizing nonsense.
And.... the parent(s) of the suicide boy are being e-mailed taunting pictures of the kid, hanging from a belt in the closet? Really?
The problem is that the judge is part of several organizations that are clearly against the accused.
So? If the judge was a member of Swedish Citizens Against Drunk Driving, and he was presiding over the trial of a guy that killed somebody while driving drunk, would that make his personal interest in reducing the crime of drunk driving somehow wrong, or prejudicial? I mean, driving drunk is naughty. Being a member of a group that says, "Driving drunk is naughty" doesn't prevent you from being objective about the facts in a trial that's determining if someone was doing the naughty thing. Likewise, being a member of an organization that says, "Ripping off artists is naughty, and setting up web sites specifically to help do that on a massive scale is also naughty," doesn't mean you can't be objective about the finding of facts in a given case about whether or not a particular person/people were actually doing so or not.
Should every judge who supports an organization aimed at reducing heroin use through prevention and the punishment of pushers and traffickers be considered incapable of weighing in on whether or not a given person is a heroin dealer? Should a judge who - among many, many other professional affiliations - considers it important to cut down on fraud in the judicial system and thus supports a bar association sub-group aimed at integrity in the practice of law recuse himself from the trial of a lawyer that's been defrauding his clients? Why? It's rational to support such interests if you're in that profession, but you only want judges that don't support it to judge such cases?
It's likewise rational to support copyrights, and to discourage the wholesale ripping off of artists. Why would you want a judge who doesn't get that to be involved in such a trial?
More importantly, do you consider yourself rational enough to be a member of a jury in such a case? Do you know anyone who supports the EFF? Should they be considered too corrupt and biased to be a juror on such a case? Why?
excessive mark-up
You should try designing, manufacturing, marketing, selling to individuals through a retail web presence, supporting, and perpetually providing the bandwidth for something sometime, and then rethink your term "excessive."
What I'm addressing, here, is that large contingent of posters here and elsewhere who insist that since you CAN record an acoustic guitar with a $50 microphone, then anyone who has the recording budget for a big project must surely be rolling in ill-gotten gains, and therefor should be ripped off. It's a strange, and frequently repeated sentiment.
It can do, but you can also produce stunning music with some $50 microphones, a soundcard, and Ardour. If you need weeks in the studio to produce something of acceptable quality, maybe you need to take a step back and think whether you're doing things in the right way.
Gee, or maybe it's up to the artist to decide if they want to fly in a cellist for a particular track, and they can't be there until next week... or maybe it's a film soundtrack that takes hundreds of people and thousands of hours to produce. Are you really going to draw a line in the sand, and say that someone who could keep their production costs under some given price level or degree of logistical difficulty should not be ripped off, but someone who has a larger or more expensive production facility or complex project should be ripped off? Are your personal ethics really that relative and situational? What's that like?
artists that record and market expensively make their investments back within days--not years
Really? All of them? You don't say. How about the ones that record expensively, but don't market expensively? And, is it your personal evaluation of which they've done, and at what threshold it's considered "expensive" that dictates whether or not you endorse their work being hugely ripped off by leeches? Can you provide some hard numbers that help show when you think ripping them off is OK, vs when it's not?
digital music costs NOTHING to copy and distribute
But it can cost a great deal (of time and money) to produce. And you want to make sure that someone who makes that investment is deprived of the option to offer their work up only to people who are willing to pay for it.
It has already been quite clearly demonstrated that the artists are rarely the recipients of the revenue.
Nonsense. The artist is the recipient of whatever the artist agrees to when they form and sign a contract. Some artists start their own record labels to have more control over the process, and some artists want absolutely NOTHING to do with marketing, liability insurance, copyright arguments, distribution, etc., and they'd rather have someone who specialzes in such things do all of that work. You know, a publisher. Some people are professional violin players and some people are professional publishers. Whatever deal those two people strike between them is up to them. Your laughably sophomoric notion that it's appropriate to rip off the artist's work because the artist has chosen to let someone else handle their business affairs while they focus on making music (or other creative works) is really you saying, "This artist is so dumb that she's chosen a record label to do business with, and I hate that, so I'm going to steal her stuff to teach her a lesson." Now, why you'd want to consume the creative works of someone you hate is a second, and mysterious issue.
Face it, the traditional music and media distribution industries are obsolete
So why do you care about an artist that has made the choice to work through a publishing company? If you consider someone to be obsolete in their thinking, and just thrashing around in their attempts to shape a career and make a living, why don't you just ignore them? There are plenty of artists willing to use your shiny new "give everything away for free" business model, and I'm sure they'll all be thrilled with the proceeds that they'll get from project a that it took them years to create, and won't mind having to litter their web site with simpering "please donate" links to PayPal. If you think an artist is wrong headed or obsolete or evil for using a publishing company, why do you find it so hard to just ignore them? Or do you still want what they create, and just don't want to pay what they're asking? Do you have any intellectual integrity?
If you feel so strongly about this, show your support and buy some shares of Blockbuster.
How about I just meet the artists I respect and do business with them in the manner they have chosen? If I don't want their works enough to agree to the terms they have chosen when offering their work for sale, then I must not want it enough to acquire it. The difference between us is that you're willing to use the lame "I'm teaching them a lesson by stealing from them" excuse as a way to justify ripping off entertainment for free. Pretty embarassing for you, I guess, but then you clearly have only a spoiled child's view and sense of entitlement on the issue.
So what percentage of legal/illegal content should there be that tips you from completely innocent to doing jail time?
Who cares? In this case we're talking about an organization that was formed around the specific notion of deliberately ripping off copyrighted material, regularly and publicly talks about that being their purpose, and named itself in the spirit of deliberately doing so. They exist to facilitate the acquistion of pirated content. Of course, you know that, and you're being deliberately disengenuous.
When an unfair judgement happens in a court of law
That's very interesting. But how does it apply in this case? An organization that proudly named itself after and continually celebrated it role in ripping off artists and businesses was found to be actively supporting exactly that activity. Unless by "unfair" you mean "not harsh enough," but you don't seem to mean that.
If a large number of websites post just one "infringing" link on their pages, then the law becomes moot
Interesting! And if a large number of people held musicians chained up in their basements and forced them to provide free entertainment for them, would that also make kidnapping laws moot? If everyone steals cable service, does that make any law against it moot?
What's it like to have such an acute case of moral relativism? Does it hurt?
they've never cooperated with the countless photographers claiming copyright infringement through their Google Images service
Sure they have. It's called "robots.txt" - and a photographer publishing their works on a web site simply has to ask Google not to index them. And they won't. They'll also lose the potential exposure, but that's a choice.