I think that in the time between 2027 and 2036 we could have some decent recovery of our satellite communications.
However, it's all moot. If Apophios knocks out a bunch of satellites in 2027, the collective force of half the world's population jumping and screaming because they didn't get to see the last two minutes of American Idol will cause the earth to shift orbit just enough to not get hit in 2036.
Very true. OK, there is a minor cost to distribute, bandwidth isn't free, but it's pretty cheap especially when bit torrent is used.
I was in Home Depot the other day. I wanted to buy some gardening tools as I am going to start work on a vegetable garden. As I walk in I see lots of books, many about how to make a really good garden. Unfortunately for the authors and publishers of those books, I had already learned all I needed to from neighbors, online, and people at the local nursery. So what you are saying is that I shouldn't have learned that from other people for free? Should I be forced to pay for that knowledge from somebody who decided to put it into a book?
Last night I was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I read about Bill and Fleur's wedding. Let me ask you, who owns that idea? Rowling came up with it, but who owns it? Does Rowling? Yes, she is in possession of it legally. Do I own it? Yes, I am also in possession of that knowledge. Can I give it back to Rowling? Nope. I could forget it eventually, but that won't give anything back to Rowling.
Why do I bring this up? Because copyrights are just that, the right to copy. Or in other words, the right to distribute. There is nothing about copyrights that ensures the author of a work to recoup the costs incurred to create the work. Only that the government would enforce their rights of distribution. Unfortunately for those authors, the cost of distribution is practically nil. Their works are infinite. Simple economics tells us that infinite goods end up as free. It's really hard to make a profit on something that is free. So I guess now that distribution is not a money maker, copyright holders will have to find some other way to make money, or they can continue hoping that governments will enforce their distribution rights.
I'm not going to give a definition of terrorism. I only wanted to comment on this:
And remember not to use intent! Governments do not have feelings, and the slain do not care about the motivations of their killers
Intent is very important in any society. Sure, the dead don't care what your intent may have been since that won't bring them back, but it's still important for how the living treat the perpetrator(s). If a company is hired to demolish a building, and in so doing accidentally kill some people that they were unaware were still inside it, that is completely different than Timothy McVeigh even though the end result is the same.
In fact, I would think anyone would find it difficult to define terrorism without using intent. I can't imagine terrorism not involving terror. And while unexpected deaths can certainly cause terror in a populace, good intentions gone awry as a valid and truthful excuse can subdue that terror much more easily than an unknown group causing death(s) at a whim.
If the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had only done so because of faulty navigational systems, would you still consider that an act of terrorism? Or was intent important in that event? I would say intent was very important. Sure, the faulty nav systems would cause an uproar, fear and tragedy, but 7 years later would not be what it is now.
So maybe there is a definition of terrorism that makes the US military not a terrorist organization, maybe there isn't, but I fail to see how one could define terrorism without including intent.
Also
Governments do not have feelings
While this is a true statement, governments are made up of people, people have intentions, and those same people make decisions. So while "government" has no feelings, the people that make the decisions do, and the decision makers can be considered as demonstrating the "intent" of the government.
You seem to be arguing this point a lot and finally this post of yours answers most of your comments. You say
A yellow light means you should stop
but then go on to say
The purpose of it is to give a 'grace period' for drivers who do not have enough stopping distance to stop before they reach the intersection
In other words, the purpose of a yellow light means the light is about to turn red, so stop if you can do so safely, or go through if you can do so safely. Half of your options are to stop and half are to go. Both are totally legal and both are dependent only on your vehicles stopping distance. Therefore, like everyone is telling you, like you finally figured out in this post, the purpose of a yellow light is not to stop, but to inform drivers that the light is about to turn red.
You also said
not try to gun it through the intersection.
Stopping and "gunning through the intersection" are not the only options here. There are lots of times I drive through yellow lights, but I don't do so while accelerating. I just keep driving at my current speed because I know it would be unsafe (perhaps impossible) for me to stop.
In either case, you are either arguing semantics of what the purpose of a yellow light is for ("stop" or "grace period"), or you are laboring under the illusion that the only options conceivable by natural or man-made law are to stop or accelerate.
Will video game companies make their money off of t-shirts and merchandise sales in the future?
I know Valve has a store with shirts and stuff. I've bought from them before simply because I like their games so much. In fact, if I hadn't spent $50 on their game, I would have spent that $50 at their store. So if they gave their game away for free, they wouldn't have lost a dime from me. Yes, it's possible for them to make money off of t-shirts and merchandise.
As for Microsoft, they could take the example of Red Hat. Every line of code that Red Hat makes is absolutely free for the taking. No one has to pay for it. In fact, you could compete with them directly with their own code. But people still pay Red Hat for the support they offer, which is better than you could do as their competitor if all you did was use their code. You might be a great Linux guru, but you probably don't have the clout and resources to get as many kernel changes as they do if a customer needed it.
I toss a disc in my PC and install it for 20+ minutes, depending on my disk speed, etc.
If it takes you 20+ minutes to install a game, then perhaps you need a new drive made some time after 1994.
I make sure my OS is fully patched and updated, probably with a reboot in there.
If you have a PC, you should be doing that anyway. If you have to do that every time before you play, you probably only play once a year.
I make sure my video drivers are up to date (which could involve game-specific versions of the drivers), with a reboot
Again, you should be doing that with your PC whether you play games or not. In either case, if you need game specific drivers then you ought to consider buying games that are made by companies who aren't total idiots. Also again, if you are doing this every time you play a game on your PC, then you must only be playing once or twice a year if that.
Then I download the inevitable zero-day patches required to get something close to the gaming experience advertised on the back of the box
See the above comment about buying from competent developers. If a game has a 0 day exploit, they did something seriously wrong. On occasion I will update my games, but it's only for balance issues. The patch may say it's for a rare crash but I've never seen one.
I just hope they keep the game patching to a minimum. There have already been way too many PS3 and 360 games that required release-day patches, and the Wii version of Guitar Hero 3 is going to eat into Activision's profits this quarter while they send out fixed discs to everyone...
This just totally invalidated everything you said about patching games on a PC.
In the last 10 years of gaming I have had only a few problems with PC games. Updating your OS is not a problem with the game. You should be doing that anyway, and the same with your drivers. If you need to do some game specific hack (like game specific drivers) then you're buying from idiot companies, and I don't care if that was for a game from id. No game should ever need their own video drivers.
There is a place for consoles, and there is a place for PC games. I'm not trying to say that consoles are going to die off. But it'll be after they all support keyboards and mice from day one, out of the box, AND all games support them as well, that they will win over the PC gaming crowd. In other words, it'll be after they become PCs before they can hope to kill off PCs.
And before the argument comes up about cost, I bought my computer nearly two years ago for slightly more than $500 (everything but the monitor, but you don't get a TV with your console, so it evens out) and it plays everything I've thrown at it so far, plus it does everything a PC does. If you want a console, you pay for that and still pay for a PC anyway.
The spirit and feel of a piece of music is the true value.
And that is why I commented about value. We all value music, and we value it a lot more than we pay for it. But we do that because value and price are different beasts. To take a different example, we value the news, but how much are we willing to pay for it. Maybe we'll sit through some commercials be it radio or TV, maybe we will tolerate some ads on a website, maybe we'll even pay a dollar for a newspaper. Do we value the news only that much? Of course not. The news (at least some) is much more valuable than the dollar we pay for it, but it's just that there is so much of it that a news supplier can't charge more than they do. If CNN.com became a paid subscription service at $500/month tomorrow, no one would visit their site anymore. Not because we don't value the news that they might bring, but because we can get it elsewhere. And that elsewhere probably has the same information that CNN.com would have, so we've lost nothing. In music, there is a lot of value, but if you start charging a ridiculous amount, then nobody wants your music, because there is more music out there that we value and isn't costing a ridiculous amount. But that is looking at music as a whole. Each individual song, however, can be copied infinitely at negligible costs. That makes each song an infinite good. It is very difficult to make money off of infinite goods. I'm not saying that music should be free, but the market decides the price and people see that the price could come down, and they want it that way. If you don't lower your prices, but someone else does, then people will go to that someone else because they can find just as much value out of that song as they can for yours, so they take the one with the better price/value.
I see nothing wrong with making money on your music. You stated a way that you made money. You did commission work. Someone paid you to create a piece of music. That is how a lot of the old composers made money. Someone came to them and paid them explicitly to make some music. It's not a matter of what value the music has. Humans very much value music and that hasn't changed for millenia and won't change for the foreseeable future. It's just that there is so much of it that business models have to change. People would think it ridiculous to hand out the Mona Lisa to everyone if it was on some physical medium. If you had some one hand paint every copy, or if you photocopied it onto 8.5x11 inch paper. But if you put it on a website and allowed anyone in the world to right click and select "save as" then it suddenly doesn't become so ridiculous, because now it's essentially become an infinite good and Da Vinci would have to use that as an advertisement to do commissioned work or something.
To be honest, the oldest Shirley Temple should have been when her copyrights expired was 6 + 28 = 34 years old. Still not a 6 year old singing, tap dancing girl, but you would think that after 28 years she should have been able to think of something to make money with.
I think I can understand why it bothers you. Are you the type of person who thinks price is related only to cost? Are you the type of person who thinks price and value are the same? If you are, then that is why you have such a hard time with it.
First, price and cost are two unrelated things. As an example, diamonds cost a whole lot more than they cost to extract from the earth. And there are some things that are priced only slightly more than they cost to produce, otherwise nobody could sell it at a profit (ignoring loss leaders here). So yes, it is hard to create music (cost), but the market doesn't price it that high. Part of the reason the market doesn't price it much is because recording costs are practically nil. That might seem a contradiction, but what I'm really saying is that copies are so easy to make, that they become an infinite good. You cannot create a business around infinite goods alone. You have to sell something other than the copy, because copies are so easy to come by.
Second, price and value are totally separate beasts. As an example, air is invaluable to humans, but a business would have a hard time making money by selling it because it is so abundant. Again, because copies of music are infinite goods, prices come down. The value is still the same. That is, no one values music less just because it's easy to copy, they just get it free.
That is why the only way to make money off of albums is to try to control it with the threat of law and DRM. The problem though is DRM doesn't stop piracy, but instead annoys paying customers[1]. And copyright law is becoming so ludicrous (including what some copyright holders are doing to enforce it) that people no longer have respect for that law.
Artists have to realize that. This is really a business model issue. Somebody above asked what happens if the musician didn't want to tour or the live performance didn't fit their music. They have several options. They can decide not to make their music, they can make their music and release it to the world for free, they can try to control it with DRM or threat of law (as mentioned above, this isn't looking all that good), or they can find other ways to make a profit from it (perhaps commissioned work, or have performances where they introduce each prerecorded piece). The first option doesn't get anywhere, the second option might not make any money but may get them recognition for a job making music (say for movies or operas or something), the third option is what a lot are doing now, but the fourth option can make them money.
[1]I watched Spider-Man 3 the other day and I swear there were at least three copyright notices before I started to watch the movie. That is just stupid. Copyright infringers (which are the people making copies to sell or give away) aren't going to pay attention to it, and are probably going to not copy that part anyway.
Had Google and Yahoo! not been in China in the first place, this guy wouldn't be able to sue anyone, and thus you and I wouldn't have ever heard about him. You may call them evil for being there, but I guess it was their evilness that allows this guy an opportunity to make his voice heard.
Go ahead, find me one original piece of art, something that has never, ever been done before, and which is not influenced by anything which went before.
I understand your point, and that is a very sad story. However, just to be clear, are you saying that this type of stuff only happens when people are drug induced? Yes it does happen, and when it does it is sad. But we have laws that deal with this atrocity whether drugs were involved or not, and the reason we have those laws is because it can happen while no party involved is on drugs.
Again, I am 100% against the use of drugs, and yes I consider alcohol to be a drug as well. However, I don't like the idea that just because something has the potential to harm we should make it illegal. The story you linked to is sad and an atrocity and I don't mean to make light of it in anyway. There are countless stories of people being killed by drunk people (mostly drunk driving). We make driving under the influence illegal, but anybody can go legally sit in their basement and get themselves drunk out of their mind. As long as they stay there and don't cause any problems then we let them be. But if they go out and cause problems then we sic the police on them for the problems they caused.
Now I do realize that some things do pose a greater threat than others. That is why I am not against laws targeting driving under the influence. One could take my statements too far and say that people should be allowed to do that so long as they don't hurt anyone. But I'm not trying to say it should be black and white. There is a balance to be found, and I think alcohol is a good example. We let people get drunk but then say they can't drive cars. I'm fine with that. If someone wants to lock themself in their basement and snort crack until they don't know the difference between up and the pink elephants so be it. In that same vain however, I don't think anyone should be let off a crime under the guise of "But I was high and didn't know what I was doing." Quite the contrary, I think if someone wants to take the risk of knowingly putting themselves into a state where they might not be able to control themselves, they should get the maximum penalties associated with whatever crime they committed.
If you don't like what people are doing, then try to convert them to your ideology personally. I don't like the idea of the government doing it. I'll share my thoughts on drug use with anyone and tell them they shouldn't do it and why. In fact, I've done so a few times and I try to be very polite about it. I don't know how much of an effect I've ever had on changing minds wrt to drug use, but then again, I'm not sure the government has had a much better rate with laws. When you throw a dope smoking guy in prison, are you really changing his mind? Perhaps. But you might also have now ruined an otherwise nice guys life and the only life he will ever have now is a life of crime because he can't get a job until his felony is expunged, even though he might have been a societally beneficial person before.
You have just demonstrated that you haven't any idea why copyright was created in the first place. People are by nature creative. We do stuff all the time that is new. Not all of it (or even a majority of it) is interesting or useful to other people, but a lot of stuff is. As a society we only grow when everybody's creative ideas are out on the table. We take the best ones and build upon that.
However, ideas are an infinite good. Some people don't want to share their creative ideas unless they have some way to profit from it. Because ideas can't be controlled like a physical thing can, some people a long time ago designed copyright to give incentive to those people. In brief, copyright is the government granting a temporary monopoly on your idea (so that you can profit from it) to you in exchange for you to share that idea with society. During that copyright period, you are free to charge however much you want for the use of that copyrighted material (free use excepting). After that copyrighted period though, the public and society as a whole is now free to build upon that idea however they see fit. If you want to have another monopoly that allows you to create money off an idea, then you have to come up with something new and creative again. Thus, copyrights give incentive to create more copyrighted work from even the original author.
However, with a copyright term that is guaranteed for life, what incentive do you have to create something new more than once? Sure you can create more works to make even more money, but if you are content with what you have, you have no reason to create new works. Let's take an example. If the copyright for Star Wars ran out in 1993 (14 years after 1979) then George Lucas would have been forced to come up with something new to make money. He couldn't just continue riding the Star Wars wave the rest of his life. (For those of you who didn't like the prequels, this means that after 1993 anybody could have made them). As it is, he just sits around and makes money off of a few properties he's made.
I will only be for lifetime+ copyrights once my work as a plumber guarantees me and my posterity money for all individual jobs I do. If I make a toilet and install it somewhere, then guarantee me that I can get a decent income from that work for the rest of my life and my childrens' lives as well. If I happen to want more money, then I will install a second toilet and then you have to guarantee me profits from two toilets. But it doesn't work like that in real life and it shouldn't be that way for anything else. To make a more appropriate analogy: Say you are a marketing guy and you come up with a neat way to advertise a product. Should you be guaranteed an income for you and your posterity for that one idea? No, that would be silly. You get paid a salary and if you stop coming up with ideas then you're fired and the next idea-man gets hired in your place. Same with individual authors of creative works. They should have to keep coming up with ideas if that is how they want to make a living. If they don't, then they can go work as a salaried employee somewhere.
In either case, if you want to leave your children some inheritance, that is your deal. People who don't make money off of copyrighted things have to save up and invest in order to provide for their families. Why should a person who came up with some idea before anyone else be treated any differently in that regard? We, as a society, gave them an opportunity to market their creative work and make money, now it is our turn to build on it.
I have kind of gone astray. Anyway, the purpose of copyright is to grant a temporary monopoly to give incentive for you to release your work of art into society. Society grants that (through the government) and in return we get your creative work and get to build upon it. Copyright gives incentive to people who have creative works to release it upon society for the express reason of society being able to use that
Toby: Didn't you lose a lot of money on that other investment, the one from the email? Michael: You know what, Toby, when the son of the deposed king of Nigeria emails you directly, asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country, okay?
My wife and I heard about that from my brother so we decided to try it. It turns out that one of my wife's friends was also trying it with her kid so we borrowed some of the Signing Time DVDs from her. My daughter was signing milk, apple, candy, dirty, bath, drink, eat, and a whole bunch of other words before she was a year old. As far as we could tell, most of the time she actually meant what she was signing.
Personally I'm against the use of drugs. However, I like C++ for the express reason that it gives enough freedom to shoot myself in the foot if I'm not careful. In other words, I disagree on the idea of illegal drugs, even though I wouldn't ever take them.
That having been said, drugs can hurt people other than the user. It hurts your loved ones (assuming they don't approve). It can hurt the family you are providing for if you lose your job because of it (whether it was because of a no-drugs policy or just because you stopped showing up and/or stopped doing work), etc. However, I will agree that those same people can be hurt by you making other choices in your life that aren't (and also shouldn't be) illegal, such as you choosing to be lazy and then losing your job because of it, etc.
So it does hurt others and can have the potential to do even more hurt/damage (such as going into a drug induced rage), but just because of a potential, I don't think it should be illegal. Otherwise we should make alcohol illegal (that worked out well in the 20s) or make laziness illegal and all other things that can cause hurt or damage.
On those mornings that I fill up before heading to work and the temperature is below freezing, I would be willing to pay an additional few cents per gallon for this feature. I fill up only 10-11 gallons usually so even at a 5 cent increase that's only 55 cents for not having to leave my warm car.
Obviously the price of this would come down if it started to get used a lot, but I'd still like to see it become impractical due to cars going to electric motors or something. Maybe then you could have a robot that will plug it in the outlet for you. Then again, with how long it would take to charge an electric engine, you'd probably be getting out of the car to eat at some restaurant anyway.
Oddly enough, I'm a much better/safer driver when the cop isn't around. When one is around I'm constantly watching my speedometer rather than the road, even though I rarely go faster than the flow of traffic.
Why anyone celebrates a birthday is a pretty strange thing when you think about it. Why are we so caught up on having lived x number of revolutions around the sun? We use birthdays to judge things like when you can go to school, drive a car, drink alcohol, vote, etc., but the number of times a random mass of rock has gone around a random star seems to be a pretty silly indicator of a person's abilities. But we do have averages and know that the average person is capable of x at age y, so we run with it. For that reason we pick $RANDOM_STARTING_POINT and say you are age y when $RANDOM_AMOUNT_OF_TIME has passed y times since $RANDOM_STARTING_POINT. So what do we pick? Well, it seems that most everyone agrees on using one revolution around the sun to be $RANDOM_AMOUNT_OF_TIME, and it's really easy to pick the day you were born to be $RANDOM_STARTING_POINT since it's really easy to know (for the mother at least) what day someone was born. On the other hand, figuring out when someone was conceived is a much harder task, unless you only have sex once per menstrual cycle.
To paraphrase the above: Since we're going to pick a day to celebrate us turning one year older, it makes sense to pick a day that is easily known over one that is not so easily known. Especially considering that the day of birth was chosen long before much was known about conception.
I hope I haven't ruined your very well thought-out counter argument to foil all those Christian fiends that haunt you.
I don't know what the latest default behavior is, but if you had to dig into gconf to change it, you were doing it wrong. It's in the preferences for Nautilus itself.
So gamers aren't part of the market for movies or what is your argument here? That the PS3 was bundled with Blu-ray? Are you upset at that? MS is a backer of HD-DVD, so why didn't they push so hard for the 360 to have it? Probably it was because adding it was a big risk and they didn't really have faith in it. Sony took the risk and are happy they did. That's how business goes. You take risks, and sometimes you win, and other times you lose. So really, what is your argument here?
I agree, insofar as the solution to that problem was HD-DVD winning.
So now that your done with your pouting, please just take your ball and go home.
I agree with your sentiments here. However, I honestly couldn't tell, so I'm going to have to ask.
There were battles in the civil war that were started by farmers deciding to start lobbing cannonballs at the british
Did you make a mistake in saying "civil war" or are you British? Do the British even call the American Revolution a "civil war"? Or am I mistaken in thinking that you are even referring to the American Revolution? I'm not trying to nitpick about your post, I really honestly don't know what you are referring to.
A lot of people have already mentioned that game and movie ratings are voluntary already. I'd just like to point out that so are the TV ratings. Granted, the FCC keeps the extreme stuff of the TV (for the most part), but there isn't any law keeping children from watching TV-MA rated shows.
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I think that in the time between 2027 and 2036 we could have some decent recovery of our satellite communications.
However, it's all moot. If Apophios knocks out a bunch of satellites in 2027, the collective force of half the world's population jumping and screaming because they didn't get to see the last two minutes of American Idol will cause the earth to shift orbit just enough to not get hit in 2036.
I was in Home Depot the other day. I wanted to buy some gardening tools as I am going to start work on a vegetable garden. As I walk in I see lots of books, many about how to make a really good garden. Unfortunately for the authors and publishers of those books, I had already learned all I needed to from neighbors, online, and people at the local nursery. So what you are saying is that I shouldn't have learned that from other people for free? Should I be forced to pay for that knowledge from somebody who decided to put it into a book?
Last night I was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I read about Bill and Fleur's wedding. Let me ask you, who owns that idea? Rowling came up with it, but who owns it? Does Rowling? Yes, she is in possession of it legally. Do I own it? Yes, I am also in possession of that knowledge. Can I give it back to Rowling? Nope. I could forget it eventually, but that won't give anything back to Rowling.
Why do I bring this up? Because copyrights are just that, the right to copy. Or in other words, the right to distribute. There is nothing about copyrights that ensures the author of a work to recoup the costs incurred to create the work. Only that the government would enforce their rights of distribution. Unfortunately for those authors, the cost of distribution is practically nil. Their works are infinite. Simple economics tells us that infinite goods end up as free. It's really hard to make a profit on something that is free. So I guess now that distribution is not a money maker, copyright holders will have to find some other way to make money, or they can continue hoping that governments will enforce their distribution rights.
In fact, I would think anyone would find it difficult to define terrorism without using intent. I can't imagine terrorism not involving terror. And while unexpected deaths can certainly cause terror in a populace, good intentions gone awry as a valid and truthful excuse can subdue that terror much more easily than an unknown group causing death(s) at a whim.
If the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had only done so because of faulty navigational systems, would you still consider that an act of terrorism? Or was intent important in that event? I would say intent was very important. Sure, the faulty nav systems would cause an uproar, fear and tragedy, but 7 years later would not be what it is now.
So maybe there is a definition of terrorism that makes the US military not a terrorist organization, maybe there isn't, but I fail to see how one could define terrorism without including intent.
Also While this is a true statement, governments are made up of people, people have intentions, and those same people make decisions. So while "government" has no feelings, the people that make the decisions do, and the decision makers can be considered as demonstrating the "intent" of the government.
You also said Stopping and "gunning through the intersection" are not the only options here. There are lots of times I drive through yellow lights, but I don't do so while accelerating. I just keep driving at my current speed because I know it would be unsafe (perhaps impossible) for me to stop.
In either case, you are either arguing semantics of what the purpose of a yellow light is for ("stop" or "grace period"), or you are laboring under the illusion that the only options conceivable by natural or man-made law are to stop or accelerate.
As for Microsoft, they could take the example of Red Hat. Every line of code that Red Hat makes is absolutely free for the taking. No one has to pay for it. In fact, you could compete with them directly with their own code. But people still pay Red Hat for the support they offer, which is better than you could do as their competitor if all you did was use their code. You might be a great Linux guru, but you probably don't have the clout and resources to get as many kernel changes as they do if a customer needed it.
If it takes you 20+ minutes to install a game, then perhaps you need a new drive made some time after 1994. If you have a PC, you should be doing that anyway. If you have to do that every time before you play, you probably only play once a year. Again, you should be doing that with your PC whether you play games or not. In either case, if you need game specific drivers then you ought to consider buying games that are made by companies who aren't total idiots. Also again, if you are doing this every time you play a game on your PC, then you must only be playing once or twice a year if that. See the above comment about buying from competent developers. If a game has a 0 day exploit, they did something seriously wrong. On occasion I will update my games, but it's only for balance issues. The patch may say it's for a rare crash but I've never seen one. This just totally invalidated everything you said about patching games on a PC.
In the last 10 years of gaming I have had only a few problems with PC games. Updating your OS is not a problem with the game. You should be doing that anyway, and the same with your drivers. If you need to do some game specific hack (like game specific drivers) then you're buying from idiot companies, and I don't care if that was for a game from id. No game should ever need their own video drivers.
There is a place for consoles, and there is a place for PC games. I'm not trying to say that consoles are going to die off. But it'll be after they all support keyboards and mice from day one, out of the box, AND all games support them as well, that they will win over the PC gaming crowd. In other words, it'll be after they become PCs before they can hope to kill off PCs.
And before the argument comes up about cost, I bought my computer nearly two years ago for slightly more than $500 (everything but the monitor, but you don't get a TV with your console, so it evens out) and it plays everything I've thrown at it so far, plus it does everything a PC does. If you want a console, you pay for that and still pay for a PC anyway.
That being said, I still want a Wii.
I see nothing wrong with making money on your music. You stated a way that you made money. You did commission work. Someone paid you to create a piece of music. That is how a lot of the old composers made money. Someone came to them and paid them explicitly to make some music. It's not a matter of what value the music has. Humans very much value music and that hasn't changed for millenia and won't change for the foreseeable future. It's just that there is so much of it that business models have to change. People would think it ridiculous to hand out the Mona Lisa to everyone if it was on some physical medium. If you had some one hand paint every copy, or if you photocopied it onto 8.5x11 inch paper. But if you put it on a website and allowed anyone in the world to right click and select "save as" then it suddenly doesn't become so ridiculous, because now it's essentially become an infinite good and Da Vinci would have to use that as an advertisement to do commissioned work or something.
To be honest, the oldest Shirley Temple should have been when her copyrights expired was 6 + 28 = 34 years old. Still not a 6 year old singing, tap dancing girl, but you would think that after 28 years she should have been able to think of something to make money with.
I think I can understand why it bothers you. Are you the type of person who thinks price is related only to cost? Are you the type of person who thinks price and value are the same? If you are, then that is why you have such a hard time with it.
First, price and cost are two unrelated things. As an example, diamonds cost a whole lot more than they cost to extract from the earth. And there are some things that are priced only slightly more than they cost to produce, otherwise nobody could sell it at a profit (ignoring loss leaders here). So yes, it is hard to create music (cost), but the market doesn't price it that high. Part of the reason the market doesn't price it much is because recording costs are practically nil. That might seem a contradiction, but what I'm really saying is that copies are so easy to make, that they become an infinite good. You cannot create a business around infinite goods alone. You have to sell something other than the copy, because copies are so easy to come by.
Second, price and value are totally separate beasts. As an example, air is invaluable to humans, but a business would have a hard time making money by selling it because it is so abundant. Again, because copies of music are infinite goods, prices come down. The value is still the same. That is, no one values music less just because it's easy to copy, they just get it free.
That is why the only way to make money off of albums is to try to control it with the threat of law and DRM. The problem though is DRM doesn't stop piracy, but instead annoys paying customers[1]. And copyright law is becoming so ludicrous (including what some copyright holders are doing to enforce it) that people no longer have respect for that law.
Artists have to realize that. This is really a business model issue. Somebody above asked what happens if the musician didn't want to tour or the live performance didn't fit their music. They have several options. They can decide not to make their music, they can make their music and release it to the world for free, they can try to control it with DRM or threat of law (as mentioned above, this isn't looking all that good), or they can find other ways to make a profit from it (perhaps commissioned work, or have performances where they introduce each prerecorded piece). The first option doesn't get anywhere, the second option might not make any money but may get them recognition for a job making music (say for movies or operas or something), the third option is what a lot are doing now, but the fourth option can make them money.
[1]I watched Spider-Man 3 the other day and I swear there were at least three copyright notices before I started to watch the movie. That is just stupid. Copyright infringers (which are the people making copies to sell or give away) aren't going to pay attention to it, and are probably going to not copy that part anyway.
Had Google and Yahoo! not been in China in the first place, this guy wouldn't be able to sue anyone, and thus you and I wouldn't have ever heard about him. You may call them evil for being there, but I guess it was their evilness that allows this guy an opportunity to make his voice heard.
I kid. I kid. I actually agree with you.
I understand your point, and that is a very sad story. However, just to be clear, are you saying that this type of stuff only happens when people are drug induced? Yes it does happen, and when it does it is sad. But we have laws that deal with this atrocity whether drugs were involved or not, and the reason we have those laws is because it can happen while no party involved is on drugs.
Again, I am 100% against the use of drugs, and yes I consider alcohol to be a drug as well. However, I don't like the idea that just because something has the potential to harm we should make it illegal. The story you linked to is sad and an atrocity and I don't mean to make light of it in anyway. There are countless stories of people being killed by drunk people (mostly drunk driving). We make driving under the influence illegal, but anybody can go legally sit in their basement and get themselves drunk out of their mind. As long as they stay there and don't cause any problems then we let them be. But if they go out and cause problems then we sic the police on them for the problems they caused.
Now I do realize that some things do pose a greater threat than others. That is why I am not against laws targeting driving under the influence. One could take my statements too far and say that people should be allowed to do that so long as they don't hurt anyone. But I'm not trying to say it should be black and white. There is a balance to be found, and I think alcohol is a good example. We let people get drunk but then say they can't drive cars. I'm fine with that. If someone wants to lock themself in their basement and snort crack until they don't know the difference between up and the pink elephants so be it. In that same vain however, I don't think anyone should be let off a crime under the guise of "But I was high and didn't know what I was doing." Quite the contrary, I think if someone wants to take the risk of knowingly putting themselves into a state where they might not be able to control themselves, they should get the maximum penalties associated with whatever crime they committed.
If you don't like what people are doing, then try to convert them to your ideology personally. I don't like the idea of the government doing it. I'll share my thoughts on drug use with anyone and tell them they shouldn't do it and why. In fact, I've done so a few times and I try to be very polite about it. I don't know how much of an effect I've ever had on changing minds wrt to drug use, but then again, I'm not sure the government has had a much better rate with laws. When you throw a dope smoking guy in prison, are you really changing his mind? Perhaps. But you might also have now ruined an otherwise nice guys life and the only life he will ever have now is a life of crime because he can't get a job until his felony is expunged, even though he might have been a societally beneficial person before.
You have just demonstrated that you haven't any idea why copyright was created in the first place. People are by nature creative. We do stuff all the time that is new. Not all of it (or even a majority of it) is interesting or useful to other people, but a lot of stuff is. As a society we only grow when everybody's creative ideas are out on the table. We take the best ones and build upon that.
However, ideas are an infinite good. Some people don't want to share their creative ideas unless they have some way to profit from it. Because ideas can't be controlled like a physical thing can, some people a long time ago designed copyright to give incentive to those people. In brief, copyright is the government granting a temporary monopoly on your idea (so that you can profit from it) to you in exchange for you to share that idea with society. During that copyright period, you are free to charge however much you want for the use of that copyrighted material (free use excepting). After that copyrighted period though, the public and society as a whole is now free to build upon that idea however they see fit. If you want to have another monopoly that allows you to create money off an idea, then you have to come up with something new and creative again. Thus, copyrights give incentive to create more copyrighted work from even the original author. However, with a copyright term that is guaranteed for life, what incentive do you have to create something new more than once? Sure you can create more works to make even more money, but if you are content with what you have, you have no reason to create new works. Let's take an example. If the copyright for Star Wars ran out in 1993 (14 years after 1979) then George Lucas would have been forced to come up with something new to make money. He couldn't just continue riding the Star Wars wave the rest of his life. (For those of you who didn't like the prequels, this means that after 1993 anybody could have made them). As it is, he just sits around and makes money off of a few properties he's made.
I will only be for lifetime+ copyrights once my work as a plumber guarantees me and my posterity money for all individual jobs I do. If I make a toilet and install it somewhere, then guarantee me that I can get a decent income from that work for the rest of my life and my childrens' lives as well. If I happen to want more money, then I will install a second toilet and then you have to guarantee me profits from two toilets. But it doesn't work like that in real life and it shouldn't be that way for anything else. To make a more appropriate analogy: Say you are a marketing guy and you come up with a neat way to advertise a product. Should you be guaranteed an income for you and your posterity for that one idea? No, that would be silly. You get paid a salary and if you stop coming up with ideas then you're fired and the next idea-man gets hired in your place. Same with individual authors of creative works. They should have to keep coming up with ideas if that is how they want to make a living. If they don't, then they can go work as a salaried employee somewhere.
In either case, if you want to leave your children some inheritance, that is your deal. People who don't make money off of copyrighted things have to save up and invest in order to provide for their families. Why should a person who came up with some idea before anyone else be treated any differently in that regard? We, as a society, gave them an opportunity to market their creative work and make money, now it is our turn to build on it.
I have kind of gone astray. Anyway, the purpose of copyright is to grant a temporary monopoly to give incentive for you to release your work of art into society. Society grants that (through the government) and in return we get your creative work and get to build upon it. Copyright gives incentive to people who have creative works to release it upon society for the express reason of society being able to use that
Toby: Didn't you lose a lot of money on that other investment, the one from the email?
Michael: You know what, Toby, when the son of the deposed king of Nigeria emails you directly, asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country, okay?
My wife and I heard about that from my brother so we decided to try it. It turns out that one of my wife's friends was also trying it with her kid so we borrowed some of the Signing Time DVDs from her. My daughter was signing milk, apple, candy, dirty, bath, drink, eat, and a whole bunch of other words before she was a year old. As far as we could tell, most of the time she actually meant what she was signing.
Personally I'm against the use of drugs. However, I like C++ for the express reason that it gives enough freedom to shoot myself in the foot if I'm not careful. In other words, I disagree on the idea of illegal drugs, even though I wouldn't ever take them.
That having been said, drugs can hurt people other than the user. It hurts your loved ones (assuming they don't approve). It can hurt the family you are providing for if you lose your job because of it (whether it was because of a no-drugs policy or just because you stopped showing up and/or stopped doing work), etc. However, I will agree that those same people can be hurt by you making other choices in your life that aren't (and also shouldn't be) illegal, such as you choosing to be lazy and then losing your job because of it, etc.
So it does hurt others and can have the potential to do even more hurt/damage (such as going into a drug induced rage), but just because of a potential, I don't think it should be illegal. Otherwise we should make alcohol illegal (that worked out well in the 20s) or make laziness illegal and all other things that can cause hurt or damage.
On those mornings that I fill up before heading to work and the temperature is below freezing, I would be willing to pay an additional few cents per gallon for this feature. I fill up only 10-11 gallons usually so even at a 5 cent increase that's only 55 cents for not having to leave my warm car.
Obviously the price of this would come down if it started to get used a lot, but I'd still like to see it become impractical due to cars going to electric motors or something. Maybe then you could have a robot that will plug it in the outlet for you. Then again, with how long it would take to charge an electric engine, you'd probably be getting out of the car to eat at some restaurant anyway.
Oh the humanity. And I'm here without any mod points. That was hilarious.
Oddly enough, I'm a much better/safer driver when the cop isn't around. When one is around I'm constantly watching my speedometer rather than the road, even though I rarely go faster than the flow of traffic.
Why anyone celebrates a birthday is a pretty strange thing when you think about it. Why are we so caught up on having lived x number of revolutions around the sun? We use birthdays to judge things like when you can go to school, drive a car, drink alcohol, vote, etc., but the number of times a random mass of rock has gone around a random star seems to be a pretty silly indicator of a person's abilities. But we do have averages and know that the average person is capable of x at age y, so we run with it. For that reason we pick $RANDOM_STARTING_POINT and say you are age y when $RANDOM_AMOUNT_OF_TIME has passed y times since $RANDOM_STARTING_POINT. So what do we pick? Well, it seems that most everyone agrees on using one revolution around the sun to be $RANDOM_AMOUNT_OF_TIME, and it's really easy to pick the day you were born to be $RANDOM_STARTING_POINT since it's really easy to know (for the mother at least) what day someone was born. On the other hand, figuring out when someone was conceived is a much harder task, unless you only have sex once per menstrual cycle.
To paraphrase the above: Since we're going to pick a day to celebrate us turning one year older, it makes sense to pick a day that is easily known over one that is not so easily known. Especially considering that the day of birth was chosen long before much was known about conception.
I hope I haven't ruined your very well thought-out counter argument to foil all those Christian fiends that haunt you.
I don't know what the latest default behavior is, but if you had to dig into gconf to change it, you were doing it wrong. It's in the preferences for Nautilus itself.
A lot of people have already mentioned that game and movie ratings are voluntary already. I'd just like to point out that so are the TV ratings. Granted, the FCC keeps the extreme stuff of the TV (for the most part), but there isn't any law keeping children from watching TV-MA rated shows.