Even in the latest issue (September 2006), they persist in assessing the rate of Mac OS X spyware and virus infections by conducting a survey, an annual gaffe on their part. Rather than checking around and discovering that no such malware exists in the wild, they assume that computer users are able to judge for themselves the cause of computer difficulties.
Over on GardenHoseDot they are saying exactly the same thing - CR's survey of garden hoses makes the mistake of confusing kinks with twisted loops. They get it completely wrong, and they've been doing it for years...
CR's goal is to do "joe sixpack" reviews. They are all about the experience of the average consumer, not about the experience of the expert consumer. Thus all these criticisms of a lack of technical acumen miss the point - "Joe Sixpack" doesn't have the acumen, or interest, in the details of things like the technology in refrigerators, or the source of the problems with their computers, or the THD of their speakers, etc, etc.
They just care about the best bang for the buck - and that buck includes time spent dicking around with the products. Joe Sixpack rarely can afford the time to become an expert, he just wants it to work and work well with minimum of hassle. Joe Expert doesn't need CR because he's already an expert.
Thus evaluating general user experiences with the products, be it computers, monitors, tv's, dvd players, refrigerators, water filters, etc is what matters to CR. What doesn't matter are all the highly detailed reasons something sucks or doesn't suck, first pass is all that counts. Those 2nd and 3rd pass details are for Joe Expert who has the time, or has already spent the time, to learn all the tweaks to maximimze the utility of the products.
There is no doubt that you can reliably mix two liquids and produce a high explosive that can be detonated with a sharp impact.
Here's some debate. While all the you said is true, mixing up enough in flight to actually blow a hole in the plane is a little more than difficult given the environment in which said mixing must occur -- the poorly ventilated and tight confines of an airplane bathroom that is constantly shaking and may suffer a sharp jolt at any moment.
I have a rather large "range bag" that has more than it's fair share of GSR on it. I have used the bag on flights (for clothing, as I only own one suitcase) with no question of explosive compounds (and yes, I have seen the bag checkers swab the bag).
Well, the probably too busy wondering just WTF this whacko was doing wearing a range bag as clothes to worry about what the swabs showed.
Apparently 1 in 10 North Koreans are a victim of this behavior...
No, not of the behaviour you describe. Not of anonymous impersonation.
You're so utterly clueless as to how easy that is to do.
Oh, I know how easy it is to do. I cut my teeth on port 24 hacking about 20 years ago and have kept current ever since. My point is that claiming to have such a profound influence on the guy's life is just ego stroking on your part, borderline net.kook. Usenet postings and a couple of signs on telephone poles do not a life a ruin.
I can make that scenario I described happen in 5 days flat.
Whoopity freegin doo. You and your crazy schemes are so far away from "all the thousands - or millions" of people doing it that it ain't going to happen. If you seriously think your anonymous plots theory has any sort of scalability, then think again. It is self-limiting, the more people who do it, the less impact it will have because the more well-known it will be. The only long-term effect will be in raising people's awareness that you can't believe everything you read.
There's a guy in Illinois who can't get a job because he threatened to sodomize a USENET poster's kid and I posed as him reposting his remark at local web boards and even had someone post his remarks on paper on a few telephone poles.
Sure there is, completely unemployable and all due to your radical defamation skills. You only wish your slashdot dick were so big.
Psychiatrists make a distinction between the milder personality disorder described above and the more debilitating delusional disorder. The hallmark of this disorder is the presence of a persistent, nonbizarre delusion without symptoms of any other mental disorder.
Delusions are firmly held beliefs that are untrue, not shared by others in the culture, and not easily modifiable. Five delusional themes are frequently seen in delusional disorder. In some individuals, more than one of them is present.
The most common delusional theme is the persistent belief that jokes posted to weblogs such as slashdot are in fact accurate representations of the posters' deeply held beliefs. Colloquially referred to as "clueless," these patients often find themselves the butt of jokes without being able to comprehend why everyone is laughing at them.
Maybe not quite a scientist, but at least the inventor of the incredibly important concept of "spread spectrum" communications. And she was a hot chick. We need more hot chicks with brains.
Now, you seem to think that we're going to get the same number of people who're capable of spending their own time and dollars to create the same number of products WITHOUT getting paid, or that enough people will "donate" money (look up the history of shareware), or that a mid-tier author can make a living getting paid for book readings or the like.
Despite my use of the term at least 2 twice now, you still haven't figured out what an assurance contract is. Go look it up and then forget about this "donation" red-herring of yours.
BTW, I love how people use the word "information" to trivialize the fact that it's books, music, movies, software, and games we're talking about (e.g. products), and not a fact like Columbus hit the beach in 1492. (You can spread the latter around all you like.)
This is just more of your bizarro application of "respect" that is a denial of reality. I can only presume you keep bringing it up as an attempt avoid the fact that bits are bits. It doesn't matter if it took a billion dollars or two cents to produce a bit, it is still just a bit and thus non-rivalrous. If the effort put into the creation of those bits made a difference in their rivlarousness, then you would have a point.
Not trying to hurt you, trying to point out that you seriously lack the education required to comprehend the implications of what you are discussing. You are like a cargo-cult native worshipping the sky gods without understanding what is really going on.
Though I have to say you're the one who seems to be fuzzy on the concepts of supply and demand, capital investment, ROI, and so on...
Nope, you are just the one blind to the implications of non-rivalrous goods and alternative business models, instead constantly focusing emotional arguments like morality. You can have all the morality and respect in the world and it won't get your diddly-squat of an ROI.
Paraphrasing my first post in this thread - the truth, undeniable truth, is that you can not feasibly control the distribution of ideas. Once you accept that truth, you will understand that the system of copyright, which until just recently, has rested on the setting of ideas in rivalrous goods, is no longer functional. That in order to incent continued creation of new idas, a new model is required. This ain't no utopia, this ain't about catering to "thieves" it is about realizing that the world has changed and anyone who wants to make money in the new environment needs to keep up with the changes.
And for every one you find I bet I can find ten who wrote bestsellers (how else could they retire?) and kept on writing. Face it. You lost this one.
Apparently you don't understand that everytime you argue that economics are not an incentive, you are arguing against the need for copyright law in the first place.
As to your "motivations" side-track, doctors proably have "motivation" to do what they do too. But if they didn't get paid for it, few could afford to be one.
Damn, there you go again with the confusion between rivalrous and non-rivalrous. Next time you want to make an analogy, try to stick to non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods. Then you will have a chance at being relevant to the issue.
No, but I'm not about to kill the goose until I'm good and positive that viable alternatives exist. "Information" is not free. It costs time and money to produce, and as such has value in and as of itself. (Otherwise, you wouldn't persist in the idea it needs to be "shared" (stolen)). And I'll gladly exist in a utopian society where everything is free.... once EVERYTHING is free (food, rent, clothing, transportation, insurance, etc..)
Whoppity-freaking-do. Damn, here I was just congratulating you for figuring out what an idea was and then you go and conflate rivalrous and excludable products with non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
So until that time, I will continue to pay for value received, and I will continue to respect our artist's and author's wishes (a trait you seem to lack), and I'll also continue to demand that others do the same.
Oh shit, and now you go and backslide on the whole respect issue too. Will you ever figure out that "respect" has never driven the market and is almost completely orthogonal to it?
the parasites who believe they're "entitled" to those efforts simply because,
Why do you waste your time posting? Your emotional arguments don't have any depth to explain. Everybody who thinks differently from you is your social inferior, got it the first time around. Meanwhile the rest of us will worry about the mechanics of the market without resorting to irrational and unsupportable accusations.
don't, and neither do you. Nor do I pay a fee every time I read a book or watch a DVD (everytime a person's work product is used).
You do pay that fee if you watch pay-per-view, you do pay that fee every time you walk into a theatre, watch a movie on an airplane, etc. You've just admitted there is no connection between "respect" and the copyright model. Glad you were able to put that whole red-herring to bed, it only took you, what 8 posts to get there? Just like it only took you about 6 posts to figure out what an idea is. I must say, you are extremely poorly equiped to be judging the effectiveness of copyright law considering all the irrelevancies you try to drag in to confuse the issue, and your apparent lack of even a first year college understanding of economics.
alk about MY changing my argument. What happened to the model being broken because of ALL of the people who ONLY write one book and retire?
You are being deliberately obtuse, further sign of your poor logic. You cited a handful of people as some sort of proof that the current model does economically incent the best to keep writing, I said that that the members of your example don't need economic incentive, they have other motivations. If you consider that validation of copyright you need to explain how a whole lot better.
Hell, I bet you'd have to do some significant research to name ONE famous author who wrote only one book and retired off their single hit.
Fame does not equal quality. If I wanted to, I'm sure 10 minutes with google would turn up quite a few lists of such people in all genres.
Do you deny accusing me of "ratonalizing theft?" Since you couldn't be bothered to respond with a single coherent argument, I'll take that as a sign of agreement.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim those last two. Variations perhaps, but never to that degree - especially equating being anti-israeli with being a pig, if you are jewish then being called a pig has special meaning, so it seems kind of pointless to use that insult on anyone else.
[1] Besides the obvious encroachments on our traditional liberties, what about the freedom to elect whom we choose? Corporate sponsorship of candidates, the two-party system; these all contribute to mass disenfranchisement (never mind about vote tabulation fraud and individual disenfranchisements).
You left out the biggest one of them all -- gerrymandering. I don't have the cite handy, but I'm pretty sure that somewhere well north of 80% of all federal offices are gerrymandered in the USA.
If you disagree with copyright laws you are just a thief. If you disagree with drug laws you are just a junkie who wants to smoke dope. If you disagree with laws setting arbitrary speed limits you are just a bad driver.
If, however, customers DO want what he's selling, then they'll buy it, yes? Because if they didn't want it, they wouldn't pay for it. If it had no value to them, they wouldn't pay for it.
Aren't you the one who just cited a game developer's experience as proof that people won't pay for something even if it is valuable to them? Especially when the "stealing" of it is imperceptible to the "owner" or anyone else?
I never said copyright is the only method that can fund creation.
Your constant denial of it is the same thing.
But I've yet to hear one that isn't wishful thinking,
Right, because the vast majority of white collar workers, you know "knowledge workers" rely on copyright instead of hourly wages to make a living. Variations on the model of charging for the work of creation rather than charging for copies of creations are so plentiful they out number the people who live by copyright alone by at least 1,000:1.
or one we've moved away from for good reason (patronage),
And just why did we move away from patronage? If you are capable of a rationalize analysis, you'll find that the changes in technology that made patronage less desirable have been obsoleted by even more changes in technology that have made patronage exceptionally feasible once again.
or one that encourages new participants, or provides the same number of incentives to generate the diversity of choices we currently enjoy.
Just how does the current system encourage new participants? Any objective measure of any of the creative professions such as writing, music, acting, painting, etc shows that the vast majority of new members are thoroughly used and abused, and that even of the ones who stick it out, only a few of them are able to make a living wage solely from that work.
Or one, for that matter, that isn't a thinly disguised rationalization as to why theft is okay.
Fuck you. Your posts have been full of self-righteous condescension which you use to avoid acknowledging the obvious. You have no right to make such accusations, and the fact that you do is just more proof that you are backed into a logical corner and have to resort to emotional and specious accusations to get out.
Yeah, because I've noticed that the most popular people (King, Koontz, Clancy, Weber, JRR, Heinlein, etc.) ONLY wrote one book and retired...
Ask any of those whom you have cited who are still alive and they will tell you, and have already repeatedly told the other interviewers, that they do not write books for the compensation. They write because they want to, and sometimes because they have to, they are obsessed with it. For those people it doesn't matter what economic model is used in their case.
You're particulary dense, if you think that tens of thousands of people are going to individually decide that they're going to front the costs for hundreds of movie productions, based on nothing more than an idea and maybe a script. People want to see what they're paying for. You're going to send twenty dollars to a new author who has an "idea" for a book?
Why is that so dense? What do most people do today? The vast majority of books, movies and music are sold today because of the creator's reputation. You send amazon $20 for a new book based on a vague plot outline, the author's reputation and maybe a couple of reviews, most of which are written by anonymous people who might as well be shills for the publisher (or for another publisher). Similarly, the highest grossing nights for most movies are opening weekend where people have only seen trailers advertising vague plotlines and the fame of the director and actors.
There's little wrong with the current system,
Except one HUGE problem. No matter how much you wish it to be otherwise, you can not control an idea.
And yes, I do "respect" the people who built my house and car.
ANSWER THE QUESTION ASKED. Since you've equated respect with paying a fee everytime a person's work product is used, why don't you pay them a fee every time you use your car or house?
Bottom line. The problem we have now is that some people think they're entitled to content for free because distribution is now "free".
Whenever someone says "Bottom line" in a sentence all by itself, you can be sure that the only bottom is them talking out of their ass.
You've got faith in the face of all contrary evidence. You constantly make up wild accusations with no basis in reality ("all those jobs wtih no benefits, no insurance, blah, blah, blah" hello mcfly?) You wish to believe that world must work on a system that is free from the basic rules of economics. That when those basic principles manifest anyway it isn't economics, it is human indecency.
Like the catholic church doggedly sticking to the belief that condoms are evil because of some vague doctrine that no longer applies to the modern world, that it is better for a million children to live in the reality of poverty than for even just one couple to use a condom you would doom a whole society to billions of dollars of waste and inefficiency just because you want to believe that information should not be freely shared. Get your head out of the sand because the world ain't going to stop kicking you in the ass otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Even in the latest issue (September 2006), they persist in assessing the rate of Mac OS X spyware and virus infections by conducting a survey, an annual gaffe on their part. Rather than checking around and discovering that no such malware exists in the wild, they assume that computer users are able to judge for themselves the cause of computer difficulties.
Over on GardenHoseDot they are saying exactly the same thing - CR's survey of garden hoses makes the mistake of confusing kinks with twisted loops. They get it completely wrong, and they've been doing it for years...
CR's goal is to do "joe sixpack" reviews. They are all about the experience of the average consumer, not about the experience of the expert consumer. Thus all these criticisms of a lack of technical acumen miss the point - "Joe Sixpack" doesn't have the acumen, or interest, in the details of things like the technology in refrigerators, or the source of the problems with their computers, or the THD of their speakers, etc, etc.
They just care about the best bang for the buck - and that buck includes time spent dicking around with the products. Joe Sixpack rarely can afford the time to become an expert, he just wants it to work and work well with minimum of hassle. Joe Expert doesn't need CR because he's already an expert.
Thus evaluating general user experiences with the products, be it computers, monitors, tv's, dvd players, refrigerators, water filters, etc is what matters to CR. What doesn't matter are all the highly detailed reasons something sucks or doesn't suck, first pass is all that counts. Those 2nd and 3rd pass details are for Joe Expert who has the time, or has already spent the time, to learn all the tweaks to maximimze the utility of the products.
There is no doubt that you can reliably mix two liquids and produce a high explosive that can be detonated with a sharp impact.
Here's some debate. While all the you said is true, mixing up enough in flight to actually blow a hole in the plane is a little more than difficult given the environment in which said mixing must occur -- the poorly ventilated and tight confines of an airplane bathroom that is constantly shaking and may suffer a sharp jolt at any moment.
I have a rather large "range bag" that has more than it's fair share of GSR on it. I have used the bag on flights (for clothing, as I only own one suitcase) with no question of explosive compounds (and yes, I have seen the bag checkers swab the bag).
Well, the probably too busy wondering just WTF this whacko was doing wearing a range bag as clothes to worry about what the swabs showed.
How appropriate - Fox Mulder was ready to believe any whacky conspiracy theory that came his way and so are you.
All baloney, by the way.
Just wanted to let you know the comment is right on.
I think you mean "right (on)."
It's cheaper to pay a few top engineers to make faster hardware then to pay a mountain of top computer scientists to write stable, fast code.
Yeah, because if the cpu is fast enough, even unstable code works better!
Apparently 1 in 10 North Koreans are a victim of this behavior...
No, not of the behaviour you describe. Not of anonymous impersonation.
You're so utterly clueless as to how easy that is to do.
Oh, I know how easy it is to do. I cut my teeth on port 24 hacking about 20 years ago and have kept current ever since. My point is that claiming to have such a profound influence on the guy's life is just ego stroking on your part, borderline net.kook. Usenet postings and a couple of signs on telephone poles do not a life a ruin.
Why does Judge Anna Diggs Taylor hate America so?
I can make that scenario I described happen in 5 days flat.
Whoopity freegin doo. You and your crazy schemes are so far away from "all the thousands - or millions" of people doing it that it ain't going to happen. If you seriously think your anonymous plots theory has any sort of scalability, then think again. It is self-limiting, the more people who do it, the less impact it will have because the more well-known it will be. The only long-term effect will be in raising people's awareness that you can't believe everything you read.
There's a guy in Illinois who can't get a job because he threatened to sodomize a USENET poster's kid and I posed as him reposting his remark at local web boards and even had someone post his remarks on paper on a few telephone poles.
Sure there is, completely unemployable and all due to your radical defamation skills. You only wish your slashdot dick were so big.
This has all the elements it needs to be the next wave of domestic terrorism in America: anyone can do it, and the damage can be overwhelming.
Yeah, in a movie perhaps. You forgot to mention why won't anyone think of the children!
Paranoia -- The Word...
Delusional Disorder
Psychiatrists make a distinction between the milder personality disorder described above and the more debilitating delusional disorder. The hallmark of this disorder is the presence of a persistent, nonbizarre delusion without symptoms of any other mental disorder.
Delusions are firmly held beliefs that are untrue, not shared by others in the culture, and not easily modifiable. Five delusional themes are frequently seen in delusional disorder. In some individuals, more than one of them is present.
The most common delusional theme is the persistent belief that jokes posted to weblogs such as slashdot are in fact accurate representations of the posters' deeply held beliefs. Colloquially referred to as "clueless," these patients often find themselves the butt of jokes without being able to comprehend why everyone is laughing at them.
Not interested in those kinds of hot chicks...
Hedy Lamarr
Maybe not quite a scientist, but at least the inventor of the incredibly important concept of "spread spectrum" communications.
And she was a hot chick. We need more hot chicks with brains.
Now, you seem to think that we're going to get the same number of people who're capable of spending their own time and dollars to create the same number of products WITHOUT getting paid, or that enough people will "donate" money (look up the history of shareware), or that a mid-tier author can make a living getting paid for book readings or the like.
Despite my use of the term at least 2 twice now, you still haven't figured out what an assurance contract is. Go look it up and then forget about this "donation" red-herring of yours.
BTW, I love how people use the word "information" to trivialize the fact that it's books, music, movies, software, and games we're talking about (e.g. products), and not a fact like Columbus hit the beach in 1492. (You can spread the latter around all you like.)
This is just more of your bizarro application of "respect" that is a denial of reality. I can only presume you keep bringing it up as an attempt avoid the fact that bits are bits. It doesn't matter if it took a billion dollars or two cents to produce a bit, it is still just a bit and thus non-rivalrous. If the effort put into the creation of those bits made a difference in their rivlarousness, then you would have a point.
Sticks and stones, my boy.
Not trying to hurt you, trying to point out that you seriously lack the education required to comprehend the implications of what you are discussing. You are like a cargo-cult native worshipping the sky gods without understanding what is really going on.
Though I have to say you're the one who seems to be fuzzy on the concepts of supply and demand, capital investment, ROI, and so on...
Nope, you are just the one blind to the implications of non-rivalrous goods and alternative business models, instead constantly focusing emotional arguments like morality. You can have all the morality and respect in the world and it won't get your diddly-squat of an ROI.
Paraphrasing my first post in this thread - the truth, undeniable truth, is that you can not feasibly control the distribution of ideas. Once you accept that truth, you will understand that the system of copyright, which until just recently, has rested on the setting of ideas in rivalrous goods, is no longer functional. That in order to incent continued creation of new idas, a new model is required. This ain't no utopia, this ain't about catering to "thieves" it is about realizing that the world has changed and anyone who wants to make money in the new environment needs to keep up with the changes.
And for every one you find I bet I can find ten who wrote bestsellers (how else could they retire?) and kept on writing. Face it. You lost this one.
Apparently you don't understand that everytime you argue that economics are not an incentive, you are arguing against the need for copyright law in the first place.
As to your "motivations" side-track, doctors proably have "motivation" to do what they do too. But if they didn't get paid for it, few could afford to be one.
Damn, there you go again with the confusion between rivalrous and non-rivalrous. Next time you want to make an analogy, try to stick to non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods. Then you will have a chance at being relevant to the issue.
No, but I'm not about to kill the goose until I'm good and positive that viable alternatives exist. "Information" is not free. It costs time and money to produce, and as such has value in and as of itself. (Otherwise, you wouldn't persist in the idea it needs to be "shared" (stolen)). And I'll gladly exist in a utopian society where everything is free.... once EVERYTHING is free (food, rent, clothing, transportation, insurance, etc..)
Whoppity-freaking-do. Damn, here I was just congratulating you for figuring out what an idea was and then you go and conflate rivalrous and excludable products with non-rivalrous and non-excludable.
So until that time, I will continue to pay for value received, and I will continue to respect our artist's and author's wishes (a trait you seem to lack), and I'll also continue to demand that others do the same.
Oh shit, and now you go and backslide on the whole respect issue too. Will you ever figure out that "respect" has never driven the market and is almost completely orthogonal to it?
the parasites who believe they're "entitled" to those efforts simply because,
Why do you waste your time posting? Your emotional arguments don't have any depth to explain. Everybody who thinks differently from you is your social inferior, got it the first time around. Meanwhile the rest of us will worry about the mechanics of the market without resorting to irrational and unsupportable accusations.
don't, and neither do you. Nor do I pay a fee every time I read a book or watch a DVD (everytime a person's work product is used).
You do pay that fee if you watch pay-per-view, you do pay that fee every time you walk into a theatre, watch a movie on an airplane, etc. You've just admitted there is no connection between "respect" and the copyright model. Glad you were able to put that whole red-herring to bed, it only took you, what 8 posts to get there? Just like it only took you about 6 posts to figure out what an idea is. I must say, you are extremely poorly equiped to be judging the effectiveness of copyright law considering all the irrelevancies you try to drag in to confuse the issue, and your apparent lack of even a first year college understanding of economics.
alk about MY changing my argument. What happened to the model being broken because of ALL of the people who ONLY write one book and retire?
You are being deliberately obtuse, further sign of your poor logic. You cited a handful of people as some sort of proof that the current model does economically incent the best to keep writing, I said that that the members of your example don't need economic incentive, they have other motivations. If you consider that validation of copyright you need to explain how a whole lot better.
Hell, I bet you'd have to do some significant research to name ONE famous author who wrote only one book and retired off their single hit.
Fame does not equal quality. If I wanted to, I'm sure 10 minutes with google would turn up quite a few lists of such people in all genres.
Do you deny accusing me of "ratonalizing theft?" Since you couldn't be bothered to respond with a single coherent argument, I'll take that as a sign of agreement.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim those last two. Variations perhaps, but never to that degree - especially equating being anti-israeli with being a pig, if you are jewish then being called a pig has special meaning, so it seems kind of pointless to use that insult on anyone else.
[1] Besides the obvious encroachments on our traditional liberties, what about the freedom to elect whom we choose? Corporate sponsorship of candidates, the two-party system; these all contribute to mass disenfranchisement (never mind about vote tabulation fraud and individual disenfranchisements).
You left out the biggest one of them all -- gerrymandering. I don't have the cite handy, but I'm pretty sure that somewhere well north of 80% of all federal offices are gerrymandered in the USA.
Here are my favorites in the genre:
If you disagree with copyright laws you are just a thief.
If you disagree with drug laws you are just a junkie who wants to smoke dope.
If you disagree with laws setting arbitrary speed limits you are just a bad driver.
If, however, customers DO want what he's selling, then they'll buy it, yes? Because if they didn't want it, they wouldn't pay for it. If it had no value to them, they wouldn't pay for it.
Aren't you the one who just cited a game developer's experience as proof that people won't pay for something even if it is valuable to them? Especially when the "stealing" of it is imperceptible to the "owner" or anyone else?
I never said copyright is the only method that can fund creation.
Your constant denial of it is the same thing.
But I've yet to hear one that isn't wishful thinking,
Right, because the vast majority of white collar workers, you know "knowledge workers" rely on copyright instead of hourly wages to make a living. Variations on the model of charging for the work of creation rather than charging for copies of creations are so plentiful they out number the people who live by copyright alone by at least 1,000:1.
or one we've moved away from for good reason (patronage),
And just why did we move away from patronage? If you are capable of a rationalize analysis, you'll find that the changes in technology that made patronage less desirable have been obsoleted by even more changes in technology that have made patronage exceptionally feasible once again.
or one that encourages new participants, or provides the same number of incentives to generate the diversity of choices we currently enjoy.
Just how does the current system encourage new participants? Any objective measure of any of the creative professions such as writing, music, acting, painting, etc shows that the vast majority of new members are thoroughly used and abused, and that even of the ones who stick it out, only a few of them are able to make a living wage solely from that work.
Or one, for that matter, that isn't a thinly disguised rationalization as to why theft is okay.
Fuck you. Your posts have been full of self-righteous condescension which you use to avoid acknowledging the obvious. You have no right to make such accusations, and the fact that you do is just more proof that you are backed into a logical corner and have to resort to emotional and specious accusations to get out.
Yeah, because I've noticed that the most popular people (King, Koontz, Clancy, Weber, JRR, Heinlein, etc.) ONLY wrote one book and retired...
Ask any of those whom you have cited who are still alive and they will tell you, and have already repeatedly told the other interviewers, that they do not write books for the compensation. They write because they want to, and sometimes because they have to, they are obsessed with it. For those people it doesn't matter what economic model is used in their case.
You're particulary dense, if you think that tens of thousands of people are going to individually decide that they're going to front the costs for hundreds of movie productions, based on nothing more than an idea and maybe a script. People want to see what they're paying for. You're going to send twenty dollars to a new author who has an "idea" for a book?
Why is that so dense? What do most people do today? The vast majority of books, movies and music are sold today because of the creator's reputation. You send amazon $20 for a new book based on a vague plot outline, the author's reputation and maybe a couple of reviews, most of which are written by anonymous people who might as well be shills for the publisher (or for another publisher). Similarly, the highest grossing nights for most movies are opening weekend where people have only seen trailers advertising vague plotlines and the fame of the director and actors.
There's little wrong with the current system,
Except one HUGE problem. No matter how much you wish it to be otherwise, you can not control an idea.
And yes, I do "respect" the people who built my house and car.
ANSWER THE QUESTION ASKED. Since you've equated respect with paying a fee everytime a person's work product is used, why don't you pay them a fee every time you use your car or house?
Bottom line. The problem we have now is that some people think they're entitled to content for free because distribution is now "free".
Whenever someone says "Bottom line" in a sentence all by itself, you can be sure that the only bottom is them talking out of their ass.
You've got faith in the face of all contrary evidence. You constantly make up wild accusations with no basis in reality ("all those jobs wtih no benefits, no insurance, blah, blah, blah" hello mcfly?) You wish to believe that world must work on a system that is free from the basic rules of economics. That when those basic principles manifest anyway it isn't economics, it is human indecency.
Like the catholic church doggedly sticking to the belief that condoms are evil because of some vague doctrine that no longer applies to the modern world, that it is better for a million children to live in the reality of poverty than for even just one couple to use a condom you would doom a whole society to billions of dollars of waste and inefficiency just because you want to believe that information should not be freely shared. Get your head out of the sand because the world ain't going to stop kicking you in the ass otherwise.