Your numbers aren't so good. The first thing that caught my attention was the large gap between the average ($165,121) and the median ($2,400) - which suggests that a small percentage of developers are making the lions-share of the income. I've seen a statistic elsewhere that said the top 1% of the app developers made 33% of the app store revenue, and the top 20% make 97% of the revenue (http://www.industrygamers.com/news/iphone-devs-in-top-20-make-97-of-total-category-revenue/). I looked up your numbers by following the source (http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2011/09/28/results-ios-game-revenue-survey/).
"- Over 60% Of Those Surveyed Were Not Full-Time Game Developers"
Yeah, but you should be up front with these numbers. 36.1% were full time independent game developers and another 33% were part-rime independent game developers.
The survey was based on people who answered the survey. The person compiling the data says that explicitly in his article with a note "Disclaimer: I make no claims as to the statistical validity of this data. There is a good chance that the sample population is not representative of all game developers on the App Store." I'd suggest that app-store developers who went bankrupt are less likely to answer the survey than developers who are still actively working (i.e. successful), so the results will be biased towards people who are successful.
I also noticed that if you break-out revenue by the number of developers, companies with only one developer are well below the average in terms of revenue. The median lifetime revenue for a game company with one developer was $519.
I'd like to see things broken out by the number of hours developers spent on a project versus the amount of revenue they received. If someone spends an hour making an app and receives $1000 is a lot different than someone spending 500 hours making an app and receiving $1000.
"At some point we'll have to accept that intellectual property isn't a natural law; some people and some entire nations won't follow it simply because they don't believe in it, and America won't regain its economic prowess via all of this endless arm twisting, extortion, and bribery aimed at exporting our intellectual property law."
There is no such thing as "natural law". Get over it and start treating people fairly. It's the only rational basis for morality, not some pie-in-the-sky "natural law".
"We won't get away with basing our entire economy on licensing payments, Hollywood fantasies, and financial products. The sooner people just accept that the sooner we can start fixing shit."
The United States is still a manufacturing powerhouse - though you certainly wouldn't know it from reading slashdot. It was only last year that China surpassed the United States in manufacturing. Don't believe me? Here you go:
March 15, 2011:
"By measures of output, China edged by the United States to become the world's largest manufacturing country last year, ending US dominance over the last 110 years, according to a study Monday by economic research firm IHS Global Insight." http://www.china.org.cn/business/2011-03/15/content_22147078.htm
I know that intellectual property is (for some bizarre reason I can't fathom) panned on Slashdot, but it takes real work to make digital media. Based on your comment, it seems that even "for profit" piracy is condoned. I suppose the ultimate result of your argument is devaluing intellectual work in favor of physical products, even when IP-based products are more important. I mean, the whole reason the US manufacturing sector is so large (despite having far fewer workers in manufacturing than China) is because of computers and software. But, no, no, go ahead and take a swing at intellectual property in favor of "real" manufactured products. And feel free to bitch about tractor based farming and fertilizer in favor of "good old muscle with a shovel and hoe".
The real problem with the minimum wage is that it drives up the cost of labor
That's true if and only if the company was trying to pay someone less than the minimum wage and those people were willing to work for that amount. Minimum wage is $7.25. So, yes, it will drive up the cost of labor if you were planning on paying workers $5 or $6 an hour or less.
encourages people and companies to develop these kinds of inventions.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with encouraging people and companies to develop these kinds of inventions. If we can push-off all the $5 jobs to machines and expect our citizens to have a decent education, that's good in my book.
It's not a coincidence that McDonald's has started introducing more automation as well-intentioned, but economics-challenged, legislators have raised the minimum wage nationwide.
FYI: earning $6 an hour x 40 hours x 50 weeks = $12,000 per year. You're going to need to work a lot more hours to make ends meet at $6 / hour. The only way a sub-minimum wage paycheck makes sense is if you're a teenager living at home with your parents.
.. or for that matter, if we look at a chart of per capita GDP growth from 1790 to 2010, we see that 1875-1913 shows no larger growth than the rest of the graph. To see this, go here ( http://www.measuringworth.com/usgdp/ ) select "Real GDP per capita" and type in 1790 and 2010. Then select "Plot log of series".
> Yes, like the last time it was applied, from 1875-1913 in the USA. You know, the time where the US went from being a colonial backwater to an industrial superpower.
Even further: you should ban all loans for everything - car loans drive up the cost of cars, home loans drive up the cost of homes, etc, etc. We should ban all loans for everything because they drive up the price. (Nevermind that the "cure" is worse than the disease.)
Are you suggesting we ban all loans (even those from financial institutions)? Because I can't see your point in saying that unless you're going to ban all loans.
> "Healthcare totals about $1,600 billion in the federal budget. Get tort reform and mal-practice sorted out, reign in the absurd salaries that hospital executives can make and you can cut 30% out of healthcare as well for another $480 billion in savings."
The US spends more money on healthcare than any other country in the world. If US healthcare costs (per capita) what the second-highest spending nation spends on healthcare per capita (i.e. Norway), it would save $750 billion dollars. (In actual numbers: the US spends $2500 more per capita than Norway. $2500 x 300 million = $750 billion.)
> "I imagine the States that are threatened by those things are more than capable of paying for the warning systems out of their own budgets."
So, you're advocating the usual "pay for it out of State tax dollars not Federal tax dollars", and then pretend this is any better for taxpayers?
> "Just because Uncle Sam isn't doing something doesn't mean that is can't/won't be done.... Some of the people here remind me of my children when they were very little."
Says the man who wants "Uncle Florida", "Uncle Georgia", "Uncle Carolinas", and "Uncle Louisiana" do something instead of "Uncle Sam". That's an *awesome* argument when you're advocating a different level of government do the work.
> "Is the aggregate effect of piracy lost profits? There has been no evidence to suggest this."
On that point, it's worth pointing out that you can make a distinction between "piracy rates as they exist" and "piracy rates as they could exist". If piracy rates are low and a game is not well-known, then one could make the argument that the extra visibility the game gets from piracy offsets the lost sales. However, if a game is already popular (i.e. it doesn't need the extra exposure) or if piracy rates in society are high (the extra visibility from piracy will just lead to more people pirating it, instead of sales) then the effects can quickly become negative. This means that piracy should be fought against, if for no other reason than to prevent it from becoming common which would cause the effects of piracy to become very negative.
And yet games in the smartphone app store get pirated.
Case in point: Remember that Slashdot post a while back involving the creator of "Tap Fu" complaining about his game getting pirated? Here's a link to the article: http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274
He was selling for $4, and the price (now) is only $2. Do you think he still gets pirated? Of course he does. From the article: "If you look at the total numbers, the percentage of of pirated copies of the game submitting high scores is 71.2%."
> "Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them."
Oh, really? I doubt that.
While the games industry has expanded a lot in the past 15 years, almost all the growth has been in console games (Microsoft cracks down on piracy, PS3 was impossible to pirate until recently) and online games (can't pirate). The PC market (which is the absolute easiest platform for pirating) has been stagnant for the same period.
I also find it suggestive that Modern Warfare 2 had roughly the same number of players on the PC and XBox360, but because the piracy rate of PCs was so much higher, the vast majority of revenue came from the XBox 360 version. 86% of the people playing Modern Warfare 2 on the PC had pirated it, while that number was 6% on the XBox 360. Of course, Microsoft really put the fear of god into a lot of pirates by banning 1 million XBox accounts before the game's release, and it seems to have had an effect. I have a hard time believing the explanation that 94% of MW2 players on the XBox thought MW2 was "worth the money" but only 14% of MW2 PC gamers thought the same. My explanation is much more obvious: people pirate it if they can because whether or not the game is good, it saves them the cost of having to pay for it.
You make the claim that "There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.", but ignore the fact that I could say the exact opposite "There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would NOT have paid for them if piracy was unavailable." My own opinion is sometimes people would pay for software if piracy was unavailable and sometimes people wouldn't pay for it. How do I know that? Conversations with people who are pirates. I know people who are big nerds who play lots of games but never ever pay for anything. They would most certainly be buying stuff if they couldn't pirate because they have money and they're big gamers. I also know pirates who say things like "why are you paying for something you can get online for free?" That always galls me because they're saying "it doesn't matter if the game is worth the money or not, because it's always better to not pay than to pay." If the game is great, they get to play a great game AND keep their money.
We've even got some examples of a developer having his game pirated, then he puts out an update telling pirates that they should pay for his software or he complains on Slashdot (like the guy who made Tap-Fu, got it pirated, and had a post on Slashdot) and a few of the pirates feel guilty and they pay. What this says is that some pirates felt the game was worth the money (which is why they paid up), they were just being lazy about paying for it until they were guilted into it.
My problem is in giving blank checks out like happened with the recent half billion dollars green energy scam.
Why do people keep using the word "blank check" and then following it with a dollar amount?
As far as Solyndra: haven't you ever made a bad investment with your money? I've bought stocks that I've lost money on. While I've never had a company go bankrupt while I was invested, I'm certain that those investors exist. Solyndra was only a small fraction of the money being put into alternative energy.
CO2 is a gas vital to all life on earth.
This doesn't mean that it doesn't have warming effects.
The concentration is very minute
Yes, it is. However, light interacts differently with greenhouse gases than it does other gases. Light passes through most gases without having any effect. Greenhouse gases absorb it and heat up. (On the topic of "concentration is very minute" the same thing could be said for chlorofluorocarbons which acted as catalysts for the breakdown of ozone - the same ozone that protected us from radiation. One molecule of chlorofluorocarbons helps catalyze the breakdown of 50,000 molecules of O3 within it's lifespan.)
Speaking of "very minute" concentrations of CO2: It's also worth pointing out that CO2 concentrations before 1850 AD were around 280 ppm. During the past ice ages, CO2 levels were around 180 ppm, and currently, they're at 390 ppm. If a "very minute" drop from 280 ppm to 180 ppm can be the difference between a normal global temperature and an ice age, then why can't a "very minute" increase from 280 ppm to 390 ppm (or more) cause global warming?
and its effects on global temperature are totally dwarfed by the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor.
Yes, water vapor is a larger greenhouse gas than CO2 (see chart):
Gas Contribution(%)
Water vapor (H2O) 36 – 72%
Carbon dioxide (CO2) 9 – 26%
Methane (CH4) 4 – 9%
Ozone (O3) 3 – 7%
However: it's impossible to regulate water vapor going into the atmosphere, water vapor concentration is relatively static over time (unless something is causing it to increase; see below), water vapor has a short term effect on climate change (as opposed to CO2 and CH4, which affect climate change for hundreds of years), and it's known that greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 cause warming which increases the water vapor. So, the increase in water vapor is partially the result of CO2.
The "climatologists" are politically and economically driven, not scientifically.
Then I'm actually amazed that there aren't more climate scientists on the oil companies side, since the oil companies have billions of dollars to throw around to protect their industry. There are still over a trillion barrels of known oil reserves in the world. At a price of $100 per barrel, this means oil companies stand to earn $100 trillion in revenue from oil that's still buried in the ground. If climatologists are economically motivated, they should be jumping on the oil industry bandwagon.
"dumped onto the masses"? How about: "pop culture is about making stuff that a large number of people are willing to *pay money for*"? Suggesting that it is "dumped onto the masses" suggests that it is something that people don't want and have no choice in, when the reality is that they are buying it (showing that they want it).
So you're admitting that it's a move from a democratic-type system (where the author attempts to please the masses) to a aristocratic system (where the wealthy get the books they want, and reflect their worldview and biases)
I heard a statistic recently on a podcast. It said that in the year 1450 A.D. (i.e. before copyright), there were a total of 100 new books published. Only 100 books. Yeah, the patronage system works great.
>>Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea. >5-7 years is the period in which a profitable creative work typically makes the overwhelming majority of its profit.
While I generally agree that a profitable work will typically see the majority of it's profit in the first 7 years. When he says, "was considered" it raises the obvious question "by whom"? By society? Society reached a well-known consensus on that question? I doubt he has any kind of source to backup the assertion that this is true.
Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea.
Do you have a source? Because copyright lengths were getting longer a long time before digital distribution. And, as I recall, the very first time someone asked for copyright (he was an author in Venice asking the government for exclusive rights to print his book as that he could get adequately compensated for his hard work), he was granted a term of 10 years. I've *never* heard of 5-7 years as being "considered adequate".
No, my argument is why copyright can't work anymore, unless we break or illegalize nearly every computer. The disappearence of producers in a market where production capacity is ubiquitous and production cost is infitessmal is just a side effect.
And we should legalize child pornography (it's on computers!) and legalize money counterfeiting, too because you can't make every copy machine illegal. I just love how people who use this argument are really just rewording the old "might makes right" argument - you can't stop us, therefore we're right.
Correction: the article states "It must be made absolutely clear that the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time; it regulates commercial, intent-to-profit activity only. Specifically, file sharing is always legal."
So, file sharing would be legal and the 20-year copyright doesn't apply to it? That's some bullshit crazy talk. Why even have a copyright at all? If we ditched copyright entirely and allowed people to sell copyrighted work, they'd quickly get undermined by people giving it away for free. So, the 20-year copyright is worthless.
Wow, the Pirate Party must be pissed that they can't take everything they want. Twenty years is way too long to wait for copyright to expire - based on many of the pirate comments I read about how "information wants to be free" and how the top pirated movies are always one that were released within the last year. Personally, I'm fine with a 20 year copyright, but I can't imagine why any pirate would be.
Piracy, in reality, is simply the free market at work, balancing out prices that are higher than the actual value of the art being sold.
Your assumption here is that all piracy involves people who aren't willing to pay for it, and no piracy ever occurs when people are willing (in the absence of the piracy option) to pay for it. I know pirates who have said things like "Why are you paying for something that you can get for free on the internet". With that statement, they're admitting that it has nothing to do with price. It has to do with the fact that it's always better to pay nothing than pay something. In other words, even if you are willing to pay $20 for movie that only costs $5, you should always pirate it because piracy costs $0.
Slashdot Mirror
Your numbers aren't so good. The first thing that caught my attention was the large gap between the average ($165,121) and the median ($2,400) - which suggests that a small percentage of developers are making the lions-share of the income. I've seen a statistic elsewhere that said the top 1% of the app developers made 33% of the app store revenue, and the top 20% make 97% of the revenue (http://www.industrygamers.com/news/iphone-devs-in-top-20-make-97-of-total-category-revenue/). I looked up your numbers by following the source (http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2011/09/28/results-ios-game-revenue-survey/).
"- Over 60% Of Those Surveyed Were Not Full-Time Game Developers"
Yeah, but you should be up front with these numbers. 36.1% were full time independent game developers and another 33% were part-rime independent game developers.
The survey was based on people who answered the survey. The person compiling the data says that explicitly in his article with a note "Disclaimer: I make no claims as to the statistical validity of this data. There is a good chance that the sample population is not representative of all game developers on the App Store." I'd suggest that app-store developers who went bankrupt are less likely to answer the survey than developers who are still actively working (i.e. successful), so the results will be biased towards people who are successful.
I also noticed that if you break-out revenue by the number of developers, companies with only one developer are well below the average in terms of revenue. The median lifetime revenue for a game company with one developer was $519.
I'd like to see things broken out by the number of hours developers spent on a project versus the amount of revenue they received. If someone spends an hour making an app and receives $1000 is a lot different than someone spending 500 hours making an app and receiving $1000.
Actual quote the article: "You could send the robot to navigate autonomously looking for victims".
;)
Gah! It's coming to kill us all!
* Okay, I quote-mined it.
There is no such thing as "natural law". Get over it and start treating people fairly. It's the only rational basis for morality, not some pie-in-the-sky "natural law".
"We won't get away with basing our entire economy on licensing payments, Hollywood fantasies, and financial products. The sooner people just accept that the sooner we can start fixing shit."
The United States is still a manufacturing powerhouse - though you certainly wouldn't know it from reading slashdot. It was only last year that China surpassed the United States in manufacturing. Don't believe me? Here you go:
I know that intellectual property is (for some bizarre reason I can't fathom) panned on Slashdot, but it takes real work to make digital media. Based on your comment, it seems that even "for profit" piracy is condoned. I suppose the ultimate result of your argument is devaluing intellectual work in favor of physical products, even when IP-based products are more important. I mean, the whole reason the US manufacturing sector is so large (despite having far fewer workers in manufacturing than China) is because of computers and software. But, no, no, go ahead and take a swing at intellectual property in favor of "real" manufactured products. And feel free to bitch about tractor based farming and fertilizer in favor of "good old muscle with a shovel and hoe".
The real problem with the minimum wage is that it drives up the cost of labor
That's true if and only if the company was trying to pay someone less than the minimum wage and those people were willing to work for that amount. Minimum wage is $7.25. So, yes, it will drive up the cost of labor if you were planning on paying workers $5 or $6 an hour or less.
encourages people and companies to develop these kinds of inventions.
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with encouraging people and companies to develop these kinds of inventions. If we can push-off all the $5 jobs to machines and expect our citizens to have a decent education, that's good in my book.
It's not a coincidence that McDonald's has started introducing more automation as well-intentioned, but economics-challenged, legislators have raised the minimum wage nationwide.
FYI: earning $6 an hour x 40 hours x 50 weeks = $12,000 per year. You're going to need to work a lot more hours to make ends meet at $6 / hour. The only way a sub-minimum wage paycheck makes sense is if you're a teenager living at home with your parents.
.. or for that matter, if we look at a chart of per capita GDP growth from 1790 to 2010, we see that 1875-1913 shows no larger growth than the rest of the graph. To see this, go here ( http://www.measuringworth.com/usgdp/ ) select "Real GDP per capita" and type in 1790 and 2010. Then select "Plot log of series".
> Yes, like the last time it was applied, from 1875-1913 in the USA. You know, the time where the US went from being a colonial backwater to an industrial superpower.
Yeah, I'm sure that had nothing to do with the fact that the US population multiplied by 2.4x over that period of time - from 38 million people in 1870 to 92 million in 1910.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
Even further: you should ban all loans for everything - car loans drive up the cost of cars, home loans drive up the cost of homes, etc, etc. We should ban all loans for everything because they drive up the price. (Nevermind that the "cure" is worse than the disease.)
Are you suggesting we ban all loans (even those from financial institutions)? Because I can't see your point in saying that unless you're going to ban all loans.
> "Healthcare totals about $1,600 billion in the federal budget. Get tort reform and mal-practice sorted out, reign in the absurd salaries that hospital executives can make and you can cut 30% out of healthcare as well for another $480 billion in savings."
The US spends more money on healthcare than any other country in the world. If US healthcare costs (per capita) what the second-highest spending nation spends on healthcare per capita (i.e. Norway), it would save $750 billion dollars. (In actual numbers: the US spends $2500 more per capita than Norway. $2500 x 300 million = $750 billion.)
> "I imagine the States that are threatened by those things are more than capable of paying for the warning systems out of their own budgets."
So, you're advocating the usual "pay for it out of State tax dollars not Federal tax dollars", and then pretend this is any better for taxpayers?
> "Just because Uncle Sam isn't doing something doesn't mean that is can't/won't be done.... Some of the people here remind me of my children when they were very little."
Says the man who wants "Uncle Florida", "Uncle Georgia", "Uncle Carolinas", and "Uncle Louisiana" do something instead of "Uncle Sam". That's an *awesome* argument when you're advocating a different level of government do the work.
> "Is the aggregate effect of piracy lost profits? There has been no evidence to suggest this."
On that point, it's worth pointing out that you can make a distinction between "piracy rates as they exist" and "piracy rates as they could exist". If piracy rates are low and a game is not well-known, then one could make the argument that the extra visibility the game gets from piracy offsets the lost sales. However, if a game is already popular (i.e. it doesn't need the extra exposure) or if piracy rates in society are high (the extra visibility from piracy will just lead to more people pirating it, instead of sales) then the effects can quickly become negative. This means that piracy should be fought against, if for no other reason than to prevent it from becoming common which would cause the effects of piracy to become very negative.
And yet games in the smartphone app store get pirated.
Case in point: Remember that Slashdot post a while back involving the creator of "Tap Fu" complaining about his game getting pirated? Here's a link to the article: http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274
He was selling for $4, and the price (now) is only $2. Do you think he still gets pirated? Of course he does. From the article: "If you look at the total numbers, the percentage of of pirated copies of the game submitting high scores is 71.2%."
> "Piracy has not reduced the profitability of games one bit. There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them."
Oh, really? I doubt that.
While the games industry has expanded a lot in the past 15 years, almost all the growth has been in console games (Microsoft cracks down on piracy, PS3 was impossible to pirate until recently) and online games (can't pirate). The PC market (which is the absolute easiest platform for pirating) has been stagnant for the same period.
I also find it suggestive that Modern Warfare 2 had roughly the same number of players on the PC and XBox360, but because the piracy rate of PCs was so much higher, the vast majority of revenue came from the XBox 360 version. 86% of the people playing Modern Warfare 2 on the PC had pirated it, while that number was 6% on the XBox 360. Of course, Microsoft really put the fear of god into a lot of pirates by banning 1 million XBox accounts before the game's release, and it seems to have had an effect. I have a hard time believing the explanation that 94% of MW2 players on the XBox thought MW2 was "worth the money" but only 14% of MW2 PC gamers thought the same. My explanation is much more obvious: people pirate it if they can because whether or not the game is good, it saves them the cost of having to pay for it.
You make the claim that "There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.", but ignore the fact that I could say the exact opposite "There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would NOT have paid for them if piracy was unavailable." My own opinion is sometimes people would pay for software if piracy was unavailable and sometimes people wouldn't pay for it. How do I know that? Conversations with people who are pirates. I know people who are big nerds who play lots of games but never ever pay for anything. They would most certainly be buying stuff if they couldn't pirate because they have money and they're big gamers. I also know pirates who say things like "why are you paying for something you can get online for free?" That always galls me because they're saying "it doesn't matter if the game is worth the money or not, because it's always better to not pay than to pay." If the game is great, they get to play a great game AND keep their money.
We've even got some examples of a developer having his game pirated, then he puts out an update telling pirates that they should pay for his software or he complains on Slashdot (like the guy who made Tap-Fu, got it pirated, and had a post on Slashdot) and a few of the pirates feel guilty and they pay. What this says is that some pirates felt the game was worth the money (which is why they paid up), they were just being lazy about paying for it until they were guilted into it.
My problem is in giving blank checks out like happened with the recent half billion dollars green energy scam.
Why do people keep using the word "blank check" and then following it with a dollar amount?
As far as Solyndra: haven't you ever made a bad investment with your money? I've bought stocks that I've lost money on. While I've never had a company go bankrupt while I was invested, I'm certain that those investors exist. Solyndra was only a small fraction of the money being put into alternative energy.
Watch Potholer54's YouTube series on Climate Science.
http://www.youtube.com/Potholer54#p/c/0/52KLGqDSAjo
CO2 is a gas vital to all life on earth.
This doesn't mean that it doesn't have warming effects.
The concentration is very minute
Yes, it is. However, light interacts differently with greenhouse gases than it does other gases. Light passes through most gases without having any effect. Greenhouse gases absorb it and heat up. (On the topic of "concentration is very minute" the same thing could be said for chlorofluorocarbons which acted as catalysts for the breakdown of ozone - the same ozone that protected us from radiation. One molecule of chlorofluorocarbons helps catalyze the breakdown of 50,000 molecules of O3 within it's lifespan.)
Speaking of "very minute" concentrations of CO2: It's also worth pointing out that CO2 concentrations before 1850 AD were around 280 ppm. During the past ice ages, CO2 levels were around 180 ppm, and currently, they're at 390 ppm. If a "very minute" drop from 280 ppm to 180 ppm can be the difference between a normal global temperature and an ice age, then why can't a "very minute" increase from 280 ppm to 390 ppm (or more) cause global warming?
and its effects on global temperature are totally dwarfed by the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor.
Yes, water vapor is a larger greenhouse gas than CO2 (see chart):
Gas Contribution(%)
Water vapor (H2O) 36 – 72%
Carbon dioxide (CO2) 9 – 26%
Methane (CH4) 4 – 9%
Ozone (O3) 3 – 7%
However: it's impossible to regulate water vapor going into the atmosphere, water vapor concentration is relatively static over time (unless something is causing it to increase; see below), water vapor has a short term effect on climate change (as opposed to CO2 and CH4, which affect climate change for hundreds of years), and it's known that greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 cause warming which increases the water vapor. So, the increase in water vapor is partially the result of CO2.
The "climatologists" are politically and economically driven, not scientifically.
Then I'm actually amazed that there aren't more climate scientists on the oil companies side, since the oil companies have billions of dollars to throw around to protect their industry. There are still over a trillion barrels of known oil reserves in the world. At a price of $100 per barrel, this means oil companies stand to earn $100 trillion in revenue from oil that's still buried in the ground. If climatologists are economically motivated, they should be jumping on the oil industry bandwagon.
And, again, to reiterate: watch potholer54's videos on Climate Science.
http://www.youtube.com/Potholer54#p/c/0/52KLGqDSAjo
"dumped onto the masses"? How about: "pop culture is about making stuff that a large number of people are willing to *pay money for*"? Suggesting that it is "dumped onto the masses" suggests that it is something that people don't want and have no choice in, when the reality is that they are buying it (showing that they want it).
So you're admitting that it's a move from a democratic-type system (where the author attempts to please the masses) to a aristocratic system (where the wealthy get the books they want, and reflect their worldview and biases)
I heard a statistic recently on a podcast. It said that in the year 1450 A.D. (i.e. before copyright), there were a total of 100 new books published. Only 100 books. Yeah, the patronage system works great.
>>Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea.
>5-7 years is the period in which a profitable creative work typically makes the overwhelming majority of its profit.
While I generally agree that a profitable work will typically see the majority of it's profit in the first 7 years. When he says, "was considered" it raises the obvious question "by whom"? By society? Society reached a well-known consensus on that question? I doubt he has any kind of source to backup the assertion that this is true.
cheekyjohnson was being sarcastic. He's a well-known anti-copyright troll.
Before digital distribution, 5-7 years was considered an adequate amount of time to monopolize an idea.
Do you have a source? Because copyright lengths were getting longer a long time before digital distribution. And, as I recall, the very first time someone asked for copyright (he was an author in Venice asking the government for exclusive rights to print his book as that he could get adequately compensated for his hard work), he was granted a term of 10 years. I've *never* heard of 5-7 years as being "considered adequate".
No, my argument is why copyright can't work anymore, unless we break or illegalize nearly every computer. The disappearence of producers in a market where production capacity is ubiquitous and production cost is infitessmal is just a side effect.
And we should legalize child pornography (it's on computers!) and legalize money counterfeiting, too because you can't make every copy machine illegal. I just love how people who use this argument are really just rewording the old "might makes right" argument - you can't stop us, therefore we're right.
Correction: the article states "It must be made absolutely clear that the copyright monopoly does not extend to what an ordinary person can do with ordinary equipment in their home and spare time; it regulates commercial, intent-to-profit activity only. Specifically, file sharing is always legal."
So, file sharing would be legal and the 20-year copyright doesn't apply to it? That's some bullshit crazy talk. Why even have a copyright at all? If we ditched copyright entirely and allowed people to sell copyrighted work, they'd quickly get undermined by people giving it away for free. So, the 20-year copyright is worthless .
Wow, the Pirate Party must be pissed that they can't take everything they want. Twenty years is way too long to wait for copyright to expire - based on many of the pirate comments I read about how "information wants to be free" and how the top pirated movies are always one that were released within the last year. Personally, I'm fine with a 20 year copyright, but I can't imagine why any pirate would be.
Piracy, in reality, is simply the free market at work, balancing out prices that are higher than the actual value of the art being sold.
Your assumption here is that all piracy involves people who aren't willing to pay for it, and no piracy ever occurs when people are willing (in the absence of the piracy option) to pay for it. I know pirates who have said things like "Why are you paying for something that you can get for free on the internet". With that statement, they're admitting that it has nothing to do with price. It has to do with the fact that it's always better to pay nothing than pay something. In other words, even if you are willing to pay $20 for movie that only costs $5, you should always pirate it because piracy costs $0.