"we both win"...at the expense of the car manufacturer. Maybe... maybe not. You're assuming that the "thief" would've bought his own car if he couldn't copy mine, but as we both know, cars cost a lot of money, and not everyone can just go buy one.
So it's more likely that there are two possible outcomes: (1) I keep my car, the copier gets a car, and the manufacturer only gets paid for one, or (2) I keep my car, the copier doesn't get a car, and the manufacturer only gets paid for one. The first outcome is obviously better for the copier and neutral for everyone else, and thus preferable overall.
When people make the "copyright enforcement is theft" argument they are not stating that it is theft from the torrent seeder, but the holder of the copyright. It still isn't theft, because no one, not the seeder nor the copyright holder, is deprived of the thing that you download. After you download a song, everyone involved still has everything they did before you downloaded it.
You're not analogous to the copyright holder; the car manufacturer is. When the day comes that people can BT each other's cars, the auto industry will be right properly fucked. Not really, they'll just have to change their business model from manufacturing to providing a service - just like musicians are going to have to do.
But the fine article was speaking of fighting plagiarism. True. Attribution is indeed something that you can be deprived of when someone else takes it.
The comment I was responding to, however, was speaking of piracy.
Nice to see the pedulum might be swinging back away from the selfish "I want it so I have a right to copy it" crowd. And back towards the selfish "I'm lazy so you have to keep paying me for work I did years ago" crowd?
However, the students should also be taught to respect IP. Respecting IP means to not steal another person's IP. Oh, I don't know about that. Maybe before we teach them to "not steal another person's IP", we should teach them the fundamental reason stealing is wrong: when you steal something, you deprive the rightful owner of that thing.
You can teach this with a simple thought experiment, simply by asking, "If someone stole your car, would you be upset because he got a car without paying for it, or because you didn't have it anymore? If he could make a copy of your car, leaving the original intact and untouched, would you even care?"
Once that lesson has been taught, any clever student will be able to conclude on his own that it's impossible to "steal another person's IP".
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights. I agree with the goal but not this justification. I don't think there's any "natural", "moral" right to have your name associated with anything.
Associating your name with someone else's work, or vice versa, is still wrong - not because the real author owns the work in any sense, but because misrepresenting the authorship is fraud. If I take your comment and repost it as my own work, then I'm lying to everyone who reads it.
Not just legally, but also morally speaking, copyright infringement is nothing like theft. The very reason theft is wrong is that it deprives the victim of the stolen item, but that aspect is missing from copyright infringement.
If someone steals my car, I'm going to be upset because I don't have a car anymore. On the other hand, if he could "steal" a copy of my car, leaving the original untouched in my driveway, then why should I care? I have a car, he has a car too; we both win.
Seriously, if that was really the reason then you'd have to ask why planes have reclining seats and music via headphones. Each of those is equally capable of being annoying. And you'd have to ask why they allow small children on planes. An infant on a plane is almost guaranteed to scream during the entire takeoff and landing - it's a hell of a lot louder and more shrill than any cell phone conversation. If the airlines were really worried about passengers annoying each other, they'd tell parents with small children to take the bus.
I only had a few issues... first, graphics acceleration works with my Radeon 9600XT, but the cursor would leave little mouse poops behind whenever the window below it scrolled. This was resolved by installing one of those programs that puts a big image behind your cursor (for hard-to-read laptop screens) and just giving it a transparent PNG. Now the cursor is a little flickery, but doesn't leave any artifacts.
Second, the onboard audio works, but sound comes out of a different jack than it does under Windows. I've heard this can be fixed by messing with the speaker settings, but I haven't bothered. For single-boot systems this wouldn't really matter.
Finally, I had to try three different wifi cards before I found one that OS X would recognize.
If you really want to hide the stuff, use steganography, not a hidden volume. Hidden volumes are steganography, and there is no "missing space". From Wikipedia's article:
Concealing data within encrypted data. The data to be concealed is first encrypted before being used to overwrite part of a much larger block of encrypted data. This technique works most effectively where the decrypted version of data being overwritten has no special meaning or use: some cryptosystems, especially those designed for filesystems, add random looking padding bytes at the end of a ciphertext so that its size can't be used to figure out what size the plaintext was. Examples of software that use this technique include FreeOTFE and TrueCrypt. AFAIK there are only three ways to detect the presence of a hidden volume:
Covertly make a copy of the encrypted drive, then come back after a few days, force the owner to give up the main key, and check whether the contents of the free space have changed during that time. If some part was filled with random bytes before, and it's different now but still random, you can conclude that there's a hidden partition in that space. However, this only works if the hidden volume has been modified during that time, and this attack can be defeated by patching TrueCrypt to periodically fill randomly selected parts of every mounted volume's free space with new random data.
Come up with a way to distinguish the output of TrueCrypt's RNG from the ciphertext produced by the various encryption algorithms it uses. Good luck! Even if you manage to do that, this attack can still be defeated by patching TrueCrypt to encrypt the random data it uses to initialize new volumes (if it doesn't already).
Brute force the hidden volume's key. This is your best bet.
I bought a Dell Dimension 4600 from a pawn shop for $20, "as is" because someone said it wouldn't boot. When I brought it home, I discovered there was nothing wrong with it. I slapped an old Radeon inside, installed OS X, and that's what I call the cheapest Mac ever.
Sure, anybody can make a recording and distribute it now, but only a very small percentage of people have the talent to actually create music that is worth listening to. These people should be compensated for what they do. If you like a tune, it has VALUE. I agree completely that people deserve to be compensated for their work, but that doesn't mean charging for copies is the way to do it. Even ignoring the philosophical objections to copyright, the unavoidable fact is that charging for copies is not a sensible, sustainable way to make money when anyone can make their own copies for free.
It's not like selling a physical product, where you can easily maintain control of the product until it's sold (keep it in a case, and call the police if you see someone take it without paying). You can't stop information from being copied and shared, or even detect when that's happening. Charging for your labor, however, is quite sustainable: all you have to do is avoid being kidnapped and enslaved, which is pretty easy to do in a civilized country.
As long as there's demand for new music, there will be demand for the musical talent and effort that goes into making it, and that's where musicians will have to make their money as it becomes harder and harder to sell copies. After all, that effort is where the VALUE in a tune comes from! See my comment below for a description of how that might work, or see sellaband.com for a concrete example.
Problem with this model is if you can wait to be in the second wave, after the early adopter, you get everything for free. Sure, but the more people who wait, the less likely it is that the song will get recorded at all; everyone involved knows that, and if there's a graph on the artist's web site indicating how close he is to his goal, everyone also knows exactly how much impact their contribution will have.
If you decide to wait and see if others will provide the funding, what that really means is you place zero value on ensuring that you'll be able to listen to the song eventually - you don't care if it never gets released. The "early adopters" are the people who do care enough about new music to pay for it. I think there are plenty of those people, don't you?
The early adopter who just has to have everything new right now might make for an interesting way to run a business but today companies that cater to the early adopter only die really early. This is essentially what the dot-com boom was all about - they found ways to finance a company based on early adopters and when that dried up there was nothing. As long as they're making a profit, who cares if only a fraction of the listeners pay? The problem with dot-bombs was their business models had no real substance; many were little more than pyramid schemes based on the idea that someday, somehow, there would be a profit, so you'd better get in on the ground floor if you want to reap the rewards later.
But here, the profit is built in: if you figure that your expenses will be $50,000 during the time it takes to record the song, then you can set your price at $60,000, and not do a lick of work on the song until you know you're getting $60,000. If you never reach that goal, you can return the money, resign yourself to the fact that your talent isn't in high enough demand for you to be a professional musician, and make a living some other way. OTOH, if you do reach it, then it doesn't matter what happens later: you've been paid a fair price for your work.
Yes, there will always be music. And there will be live performances, but nobody is going to get rich or even support themselves beyond the most modest of ways through this. You will have the three or four guys that go to a bar to play after work and they get drinks for free. But the idea of a concert where 70,000 people show up and pay $100 each is pretty much over. Why would that be? There are still plenty of bands popular enough to fill venues, and they didn't all get that way by going through the channels that are becoming obsolete.
What is going to happen to our economy if we get to the point where you can build devices and even vehicles using some sort of nano replicator? Will we just tell the companies that make the designs to go fuck themselves, if they thing they should get any return on the design of a new ferrari, space ship, media player, etc.? No, what we'll do is switch to the kind of business model we should've been using all along: paying the designers directly for the time and effort they put into designing stuff.
That is, the model under which a designer spends a year coming up with a new model of Ferrari, and later hopes to get paid for it by taking a cut of every Ferrari sold, will be superseded by one in which the designer advertises his services to Ferrari enthusiasts, collects a few bucks each (held in escrow) from thousands of individuals, and then releases his new design once he's collected enough money.
A business model like that one cannot be undercut by new technology. Information can be copied, but labor and talent cannot. The artists' human effort is where the value in music ultimately comes from, and as long as there's demand for new music, there will be demand for musical talent. All they have to do is break themselves of the habit of thinking their job is to sell plastic discs, and realize that if they have talent, people will be willing to pay them directly for the time they spend writing and recording.
It sounds like a big change, but really it's just bringing the music industry up to parity with, well, pretty much every other industry in the world, where if you want to make twice as much money, you either find someone to agree to pay you twice as much (before you do the work), or you do twice as much work. People in the music industry have gotten used to the idea that they can perform a finite amount of work, but keep extracting more and more money from it indefinitely - which is cushy, but not sustainable.
There is no argument for it being a "human right" except in the most perverse, materialistic, greedy sort of way. Well, I suppose that's one way to look at it. But if you're looking at it that way, there's also no argument for any "human right" to use calculus, or the speed of light, or to include the word "perverse" in your post. You didn't invent that word, did you? Someone else did, and doesn't he deserve to get paid if you're deriving benefit from it? Quick, go find the heirs of the guy who first uttered that word, and cut him a fat royalty check!
Get real. We as sentient beings do have the right to share information with each other, to use our minds, and to use technology to do what our minds cannot do alone. If you sing a song for me, I have the right to remember it, write it down, and sing it for someone else. You don't own those sound waves once they leave your mouth and enter my ears. You can't own a song any more than you can own a number. If you don't like the fact that people can share your songs once you sing them, then don't go around singing songs for free before anyone has agreed to pay you.
People in the Tacoma area that read this (and those here on/. especially) should be donating everything they can to help this woman out. Um.. isn't that her insurance company's job?
So all you've done is pushed all their duties onto one person's shoulders. Not quite. You can completely eliminate many of the tasks that have no purpose in the virtual world (CGI actors don't need medics, assistants, makeup artists, or craft services), and many of the other tasks can be performed by fewer people in less time.
Virtual set or real set, someone still has to create it. Same with props. Part of the reason we have "division of labour" is that there is only so many hours in a day, and one person can't be an expert in everything. Correct. To make something good, you'll still need a team of artists and modelers. But that doesn't mean you aren't saving a ton of time and money!
One or two people can build a virtual set in a matter of hours. They don't need building materials, paint, ladders, tools, or a stage to store it - all they need is a PC, maybe a scanner, and some electricity. I don't believe it's possible to build a physical set with as little labor or cost as a virtual one.
And even with all that "raytracing" is just another tool. Not a magic bullet that will somehow make movies easier to make. More likely the other way around. Just ask the people creating todays games if realism has made their life easier. You seem to be completely missing the point. Of course a more realistic game takes more work than a less realistic one - just as a more realistic movie, filmed on an actual set with real live people, takes more work than one that can be "filmed" inside a computer.
All these people are being paid real money to do real work. Now some of them are doing paper pushing due to the shear size of the crew, but these are not in the majority. [...] They need all these warm bodies because MOVIES ARE COMPLEX AND HARD TO MAKE. They're a lot more complex (at least in terms of number of people required) when you're dealing with physical sets and actors.
Look at how many of those names are gaffers, grips, wranglers, medics, coaches, assistants, stunt men, stand-ins... you don't need people to keep track of props when your props are all digital. You don't need to ensure actors' safety when all the actors do is speak into a microphone. You don't need trained, unionized electricians hooking up your lights when you can add new light sources with a couple clicks. You don't need the ASPCA on site monitoring your animal scenes when the animal doesn't really exist.
Statistically speaking, for each of your players, there are 7-8 players out there that do support AAC. You're in a minority. I don't know if I believe that. I can believe it for new players being sold, but the existing installed base?
Remember, iPods are only part of the digital audio player market. Even if we assume that every portable player supports AAC, where does that leave the millions of non-portable players that have been sold? I don't know about you, but my car stereo has been working fine for 5 years, and I don't see a need to replace it anytime soon. It only plays MP3s (well, besides CDs). My DVD player plays MP3s.
I think a lot of posters are really underestimating the number of MP3-only devices out there.
The question becomes is the fetus a human life? If so then its right to life cannot be trumped by the mothers wishes. It's important to distinguish between "the right to life" and "the right to whatever is needed to sustain life". I have a right not to be killed, but I don't have the right to force someone to give me food when I'm starving; if someone refuses to feed me, we don't consider that a violation of my right not to be killed. Why should we ignore that distinction just because a fetus is involved?
To go back to the violinist argument - if only you can sustain the life of the violinist - for a limited amount of time, and you are responsible for his current condition, then yes you would be obligated to be inconvenienced. Well, I suggest you write your representatives and propose a new law: if you stab someone in the kidney, you should be forced to give him one of yours. It's a logical extension of your position, so I'm sure it'll go over well.
Its a difficult question... I really dont know what I would do are the babies lsated to be destroyed or researched on? or are they due for implantation? Since it's a fertility clinic, you can assume that some of them would be implanted and others would be destroyed. (You can also assume they're all average people - the adult is not the next Einstein, and the embryos are not destined to be an army of Hitlers.) Not that it should matter, though - if you really think an embryo is equal to a living person, this should be a no-brainer. Saving 100 people is better than saving one person, right? Even if they're microscopic "people" with no bones or organs, frozen inside test tubes? After all, they're precious human beings, and they all have a right to life!
But be honest... doesn't it feel just a little bit crazy to even consider saving a rack of test tubes instead of a thinking, breathing person with dreams, feelings, memories, and a circle of friends and family who've known her for years?
But I can tell you that my decision would not be based on what makes more comfortable and I would not attempt to strip someone of their humanity just to makeself feel and appear better. Of course. Neither would I. My beliefs about which actions are OK follow from my understanding of what it means to be human, not vice versa.
You're right, so long as you ignore the families that now no longer can pay the mortgage because their mother gambled all the money away, the kids who no longer have a father because he ODed on coke, etc. I guess you're ignoring the families that can no longer pay the mortgage because they spent their money on cars and dining out, the kids who no longer have a father because he died in a skiing accident, etc. Would you blame luxury cars and ski resorts for those tragedies?
As someone with a father who died from a drug OD, fuck you for saying it has never harmed anyone else. You and all your "drugs aren't so bad, okay!" people make me sick, and are selfish assholes who can't see that they DO ruin the lives of innocents. Sorry, you're wrong (and an asshole). The substances themselves aren't bad; the pursuit of them at the expense of everything else is what's bad. Most people who use them don't fall into that trap. Sorry to hear about your dad, but the problem was in his head: he could've gotten treatment but presumably chose not to, and if it hadn't been drugs, he most likely would've found himself addicted to some other dangerous thrill.
This is only true in jurisdictions which require it. Otherwise you usually see one or two signs, near the cashier's cage or player's club. Sometimes other signs are sprinkled around, but they are usually small and specifically designed to be visually unstimulating, in opposition to everything else in the building which is engineered (sometimes literally!) to draw the eye. Fair enough. I've only gambled in Las Vegas and Washington, so I don't know how it is elsewhere. Still, I don't believe there's anyone who doesn't realize that compulsive gambling is dangerous or wouldn't be able to find help if they cared to, even where the signs aren't as prominent as they are elsewhere.
Unless you have evidence to back that up, it's just a baseless smear. And I find it amusing, yet completely predictable, that you refused to answer my question.
Even with my CDMA phone, I can hear noise when it's about to ring... when it's a foot away from my speakers. But when someone else's phone rings in the next room, there's no interference at all. I'm not convinced that a passenger's phone back in coach is going to cause any interference in the cockpit.
You keep using the word "parasite". Why ? Is it an attempt to appeal to emotion: "OK, we can't say if it's a human or not, but that doesn't matter since it's a parasite, and we all know that parasites are nasty things with no right to live" ? Because how it's perceived by many of the women who want it out of them. A parasite sustains itself by taking nutrients directly out of another organism's body, often causing pain to that other individual in the process, and that's exactly what a fetus does.
But tell me: since post-birth children are also leaching from their parents, and are therefore parasites, should it be OK to kill them ? No:
1. Children are not physically parasites at all. They are not inside a person's body, sucking out nutrients and leaving behind waste. (I suppose you could argue that a breastfeeding infant is sucking nutrients, but see #2 below.)
2. A child is not dependent on any particular other person. He needs food, shelter, etc. but he can get those from anyone, and if his parents are hit by a bus, he'll likely be adopted and have his needs met by a new family instead.
3. There are other ways to sever the relationship once it's born. The goal of abortion is not to kill the fetus, but to get it out of a woman's body immediately, and the fact that it can't survive outside is an unfortunate limitation of nature and today's medical technology. (As I've said before, if you can come up with a way to accomplish that goal without harming the fetus, I'll support you all the way.) On the other hand, a child can be put up for adoption - you can easily end his dependence on you without injuring him.
"Only true scotsman" is a logical fallacy. And the capital of Nebraska is Lincoln. Neither of those facts are relevant to anything I wrote.
And in fact there are quite a few cases of the one causing an accident - and more so when deliberately harming someone - having to pay for any and all resulting medical treatment of that person. Yes, pay with money. Not with their own blood and organs. If you stab someone in the kidney, you don't have to give him one of yours.
Having to "sustain him from your own flesh" does seem quite reasonable extension to me. Well, that says a lot about you, but my point is that hardly anyone considers it reasonable. You are in the tiny, tiny minority on that one, and most people would consider you.. maybe not a lunatic, but certainly not someone they'd want making decisions about their flesh.
And I'm trying to point out that making such a conclusion requires categorically placing the mothers rights above the fetus's, which, if the fetus is indeed equal to a human being, is illogical. Making the opposite conclusion requires placing the fetus's rights above the mother's, which is no more logical unless you consider the fetus more human than a thinking, breathing, grown person. Do you?
When there is a conflict between two parties' rights, one of them has to win out. I contend that when one of the parties is a grown person with thoughts, feelings, memories, friends, property, etc. and the other is an undeveloped blob of cells with none of the above, then the grown person should win out, even if the blob is--by some technicality--considered a human being.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's more likely that there are two possible outcomes: (1) I keep my car, the copier gets a car, and the manufacturer only gets paid for one, or (2) I keep my car, the copier doesn't get a car, and the manufacturer only gets paid for one. The first outcome is obviously better for the copier and neutral for everyone else, and thus preferable overall.
The comment I was responding to, however, was speaking of piracy.
You can teach this with a simple thought experiment, simply by asking, "If someone stole your car, would you be upset because he got a car without paying for it, or because you didn't have it anymore? If he could make a copy of your car, leaving the original intact and untouched, would you even care?"
Once that lesson has been taught, any clever student will be able to conclude on his own that it's impossible to "steal another person's IP".
Associating your name with someone else's work, or vice versa, is still wrong - not because the real author owns the work in any sense, but because misrepresenting the authorship is fraud. If I take your comment and repost it as my own work, then I'm lying to everyone who reads it.
Not just legally, but also morally speaking, copyright infringement is nothing like theft. The very reason theft is wrong is that it deprives the victim of the stolen item, but that aspect is missing from copyright infringement.
If someone steals my car, I'm going to be upset because I don't have a car anymore. On the other hand, if he could "steal" a copy of my car, leaving the original untouched in my driveway, then why should I care? I have a car, he has a car too; we both win.
I only had a few issues... first, graphics acceleration works with my Radeon 9600XT, but the cursor would leave little mouse poops behind whenever the window below it scrolled. This was resolved by installing one of those programs that puts a big image behind your cursor (for hard-to-read laptop screens) and just giving it a transparent PNG. Now the cursor is a little flickery, but doesn't leave any artifacts.
Second, the onboard audio works, but sound comes out of a different jack than it does under Windows. I've heard this can be fixed by messing with the speaker settings, but I haven't bothered. For single-boot systems this wouldn't really matter.
Finally, I had to try three different wifi cards before I found one that OS X would recognize.
I bought a Dell Dimension 4600 from a pawn shop for $20, "as is" because someone said it wouldn't boot. When I brought it home, I discovered there was nothing wrong with it. I slapped an old Radeon inside, installed OS X, and that's what I call the cheapest Mac ever.
It's not like selling a physical product, where you can easily maintain control of the product until it's sold (keep it in a case, and call the police if you see someone take it without paying). You can't stop information from being copied and shared, or even detect when that's happening. Charging for your labor, however, is quite sustainable: all you have to do is avoid being kidnapped and enslaved, which is pretty easy to do in a civilized country.
As long as there's demand for new music, there will be demand for the musical talent and effort that goes into making it, and that's where musicians will have to make their money as it becomes harder and harder to sell copies. After all, that effort is where the VALUE in a tune comes from! See my comment below for a description of how that might work, or see sellaband.com for a concrete example.
If you decide to wait and see if others will provide the funding, what that really means is you place zero value on ensuring that you'll be able to listen to the song eventually - you don't care if it never gets released. The "early adopters" are the people who do care enough about new music to pay for it. I think there are plenty of those people, don't you? The early adopter who just has to have everything new right now might make for an interesting way to run a business but today companies that cater to the early adopter only die really early. This is essentially what the dot-com boom was all about - they found ways to finance a company based on early adopters and when that dried up there was nothing. As long as they're making a profit, who cares if only a fraction of the listeners pay? The problem with dot-bombs was their business models had no real substance; many were little more than pyramid schemes based on the idea that someday, somehow, there would be a profit, so you'd better get in on the ground floor if you want to reap the rewards later.
But here, the profit is built in: if you figure that your expenses will be $50,000 during the time it takes to record the song, then you can set your price at $60,000, and not do a lick of work on the song until you know you're getting $60,000. If you never reach that goal, you can return the money, resign yourself to the fact that your talent isn't in high enough demand for you to be a professional musician, and make a living some other way. OTOH, if you do reach it, then it doesn't matter what happens later: you've been paid a fair price for your work. Yes, there will always be music. And there will be live performances, but nobody is going to get rich or even support themselves beyond the most modest of ways through this. You will have the three or four guys that go to a bar to play after work and they get drinks for free. But the idea of a concert where 70,000 people show up and pay $100 each is pretty much over. Why would that be? There are still plenty of bands popular enough to fill venues, and they didn't all get that way by going through the channels that are becoming obsolete.
That is, the model under which a designer spends a year coming up with a new model of Ferrari, and later hopes to get paid for it by taking a cut of every Ferrari sold, will be superseded by one in which the designer advertises his services to Ferrari enthusiasts, collects a few bucks each (held in escrow) from thousands of individuals, and then releases his new design once he's collected enough money.
A business model like that one cannot be undercut by new technology. Information can be copied, but labor and talent cannot. The artists' human effort is where the value in music ultimately comes from, and as long as there's demand for new music, there will be demand for musical talent. All they have to do is break themselves of the habit of thinking their job is to sell plastic discs, and realize that if they have talent, people will be willing to pay them directly for the time they spend writing and recording.
It sounds like a big change, but really it's just bringing the music industry up to parity with, well, pretty much every other industry in the world, where if you want to make twice as much money, you either find someone to agree to pay you twice as much (before you do the work), or you do twice as much work. People in the music industry have gotten used to the idea that they can perform a finite amount of work, but keep extracting more and more money from it indefinitely - which is cushy, but not sustainable. There is no argument for it being a "human right" except in the most perverse, materialistic, greedy sort of way. Well, I suppose that's one way to look at it. But if you're looking at it that way, there's also no argument for any "human right" to use calculus, or the speed of light, or to include the word "perverse" in your post. You didn't invent that word, did you? Someone else did, and doesn't he deserve to get paid if you're deriving benefit from it? Quick, go find the heirs of the guy who first uttered that word, and cut him a fat royalty check!
Get real. We as sentient beings do have the right to share information with each other, to use our minds, and to use technology to do what our minds cannot do alone. If you sing a song for me, I have the right to remember it, write it down, and sing it for someone else. You don't own those sound waves once they leave your mouth and enter my ears. You can't own a song any more than you can own a number. If you don't like the fact that people can share your songs once you sing them, then don't go around singing songs for free before anyone has agreed to pay you.
One or two people can build a virtual set in a matter of hours. They don't need building materials, paint, ladders, tools, or a stage to store it - all they need is a PC, maybe a scanner, and some electricity. I don't believe it's possible to build a physical set with as little labor or cost as a virtual one. And even with all that "raytracing" is just another tool. Not a magic bullet that will somehow make movies easier to make. More likely the other way around. Just ask the people creating todays games if realism has made their life easier. You seem to be completely missing the point. Of course a more realistic game takes more work than a less realistic one - just as a more realistic movie, filmed on an actual set with real live people, takes more work than one that can be "filmed" inside a computer.
Look at how many of those names are gaffers, grips, wranglers, medics, coaches, assistants, stunt men, stand-ins... you don't need people to keep track of props when your props are all digital. You don't need to ensure actors' safety when all the actors do is speak into a microphone. You don't need trained, unionized electricians hooking up your lights when you can add new light sources with a couple clicks. You don't need the ASPCA on site monitoring your animal scenes when the animal doesn't really exist.
Remember, iPods are only part of the digital audio player market. Even if we assume that every portable player supports AAC, where does that leave the millions of non-portable players that have been sold? I don't know about you, but my car stereo has been working fine for 5 years, and I don't see a need to replace it anytime soon. It only plays MP3s (well, besides CDs). My DVD player plays MP3s.
I think a lot of posters are really underestimating the number of MP3-only devices out there.
But be honest... doesn't it feel just a little bit crazy to even consider saving a rack of test tubes instead of a thinking, breathing person with dreams, feelings, memories, and a circle of friends and family who've known her for years? But I can tell you that my decision would not be based on what makes more comfortable and I would not attempt to strip someone of their humanity just to makeself feel and appear better. Of course. Neither would I. My beliefs about which actions are OK follow from my understanding of what it means to be human, not vice versa.
Unless you have evidence to back that up, it's just a baseless smear. And I find it amusing, yet completely predictable, that you refused to answer my question.
But how far was the phone from the equipment?
Even with my CDMA phone, I can hear noise when it's about to ring... when it's a foot away from my speakers. But when someone else's phone rings in the next room, there's no interference at all. I'm not convinced that a passenger's phone back in coach is going to cause any interference in the cockpit.
1. Children are not physically parasites at all. They are not inside a person's body, sucking out nutrients and leaving behind waste. (I suppose you could argue that a breastfeeding infant is sucking nutrients, but see #2 below.)
2. A child is not dependent on any particular other person. He needs food, shelter, etc. but he can get those from anyone, and if his parents are hit by a bus, he'll likely be adopted and have his needs met by a new family instead.
3. There are other ways to sever the relationship once it's born. The goal of abortion is not to kill the fetus, but to get it out of a woman's body immediately, and the fact that it can't survive outside is an unfortunate limitation of nature and today's medical technology. (As I've said before, if you can come up with a way to accomplish that goal without harming the fetus, I'll support you all the way.) On the other hand, a child can be put up for adoption - you can easily end his dependence on you without injuring him. "Only true scotsman" is a logical fallacy. And the capital of Nebraska is Lincoln. Neither of those facts are relevant to anything I wrote. And in fact there are quite a few cases of the one causing an accident - and more so when deliberately harming someone - having to pay for any and all resulting medical treatment of that person. Yes, pay with money. Not with their own blood and organs. If you stab someone in the kidney, you don't have to give him one of yours. Having to "sustain him from your own flesh" does seem quite reasonable extension to me. Well, that says a lot about you, but my point is that hardly anyone considers it reasonable. You are in the tiny, tiny minority on that one, and most people would consider you.. maybe not a lunatic, but certainly not someone they'd want making decisions about their flesh. And I'm trying to point out that making such a conclusion requires categorically placing the mothers rights above the fetus's, which, if the fetus is indeed equal to a human being, is illogical. Making the opposite conclusion requires placing the fetus's rights above the mother's, which is no more logical unless you consider the fetus more human than a thinking, breathing, grown person. Do you?
When there is a conflict between two parties' rights, one of them has to win out. I contend that when one of the parties is a grown person with thoughts, feelings, memories, friends, property, etc. and the other is an undeveloped blob of cells with none of the above, then the grown person should win out, even if the blob is--by some technicality--considered a human being.