By your comments I would guess that you are in the age group affected. IM or for that matter updating myspace while in school is the equivalent of passing notes which as long as I've been in school wasn't allowed, being a "new technology or tool" has nothing to do with it. I find it hillarious when kids think their rights are being impinged because they can't do whatever they want while at school. Is it so hard to wait until your home to chat with your "friends"?
When I was in high school, we were allowed to use the computer lab before school and during lunch break for personal use. (BTW, we were also allowed to "pass notes" during those times, although we did it verbally and called it "talking".) Do you disable your filters during those times?
Let me correct you AGAIN. Ideas are ideas. Specific works, whether a song, a book, or a track on the latest album of choice, are specific works. Failure to distinguish between IDEAS, which present a general framework for a specific work, and specific works, which are specific, quantifiable bits of creation, is a failure to understand copyright law.
This distinction between "ideas" and "specific works" is nothing but semantic bullshit from copyright advocates. Copyrighted works are information; ideas are information. A song is just as much of an idea as the speed of light or pi. There's no real difference between (1) the idea of singing "hit me baby one more time" while playing certain notes, (2) the sound that results from doing so, and (3) the idea that if you feed a certain sequence of bytes into your MP3 player, you'll hear that same sound again.
And in any case, Jefferson's arguments against the ownership of ideas apply just as well to copyrighted works as they do to ideas in general. You can light your candle from mine without darkening me; you can learn my ideas without taking them away from me; and you can copy or perform my song without taking it away from me.
My using your identity does not prevent you from using it, right? You may suffer an inconvenience or a loss of income if I use your identity to get credit, but that's not MY problem. I'm just taking an action that does not infringe on your property or your contracts..
That action is fraud, and I think we can all agree that preventing fraud is a legitimate use of government power: you're lying in order to obtain something of value under false pretenses.
Until you acknowledge that abstract property does have value, both monetary and societal (you do value your bank account and your money, right?), you're basing your arguments on an anarchist ideal that will never come to pass because it makes absolutely no sense to those who create and those who support creation.
You seem to be forgetting those of us who create, support creation, and still don't support the use of government power to prevent people from copying information. What makes absolutely no sense to me is the idea that one person should be able to suppress my freedom of speech (the ability to share certain information) just because limiting my speech makes it easier for him to make money.
Just about every button is pressure-sensitive: X, circle, square, triangle, L1, L2, R1, R2, and the four D-pad directions. So in Gran Turismo 3, you can control your speed by how hard you press the gas button, and you can use analog steering without having to touch the analog stick.
According to their last ruling, for a software like this to be considered OK there must be overwhelming legal use of the software. That is, like most products, it should be used legally like 60% of the time (I'm pulling numbers out of a hat).
That is a misinterpretation of the Grokster ruling and others. Look at the VCR, for example; as long as there's significant noninfringing use, the amount of infringing use doesn't matter.
["According to your logic everytime I make my own hamburger instead of buying one from McDonalds I am depriving some snot nosed kid of a living...but if you can do it better, faster, cheaper, etc too bad for them."]
Your analogy is flawed. Nobody is preventing you from making your own movie, paying for the videotape, the equipment, and the labor. If you can produce a better product than Hollywood for less, good for you.
Ah, but now your analogy is flawed. A DVD is a physical product created according to a set of instructions, let's call it a "recipe", which tells your DVD burner how to arrange the bits on the disc. Making your own hamburger using a well-known recipe is analogous to burning your own DVD using well-known data. Writing and filming your own movie would be more like inventing your own hamburger recipe, and while I'd certainly have more respect for someone who invents his own kind of hamburger just to spite McDonald's, I don't think it's necessary for everyone who wants a hamburger to come up with a new way to do it.
By your logic, however, you could buy a master print from the first movie theater to release the cool movie of the moment and undersell the distributor. The creators of the movie get nothing, and you make pure profit for doing nothing. I'm sure you'd like that a lot, but honestly, how long do you think that would last before movies stopped getting made?
Stopped getting made? Never. But they would start getting made under a different funding model, one where people made arrangements for payment before they started working. You know, the same funding model used by barbers, mechanics, and pretty much everyone else who provides a service: you don't start working until you have a customer who you know is going to pay you for your work. In the case of movies, you'd need to find a lot of people who could pool their money to fund production, but if political candidates can do it, surely Hollywood can too. If you've already been paid for your work, you don't need to worry about people making their own copies, because they're not competing with you - you're in the business of making movies, not making copies.
It's nice that we have all this wonderful medical equipment and drugs to keep you alive, but who will pay the researchers if somebody else can easily come along and trivially steal the knowledge that was accumulated through substantial financial investments?
You mean all those researchers are just working for free in the hopes that someone will come along and pay them later?
I believe that having the GUI design and the coding happen in separate applications is better because it pushes the developer to see a separation between the GUI and the application.
The GUI is not the application. A developer with a well designed program should be able to bolt on a GUI, or HTML Forms, or AJAX, or a command line, and have the application's core code not change.
Yes, there is something to be said for separating core functionality from the GUI. But the thing is, XCode forces you to do it, even if you're just writing some one-shot utility. With other IDEs, you can do it easily enough - put your core functionality in a class that doesn't touch any of the GUI, and have your separate GUI simply use the methods and properties exposed by that class in response to events - but you can also keep them together if you'd rather do that.
And frankly, for most applications, you don't need all that separation. There are very few programs which have GUI versions, command line versions, and web versions. The most common use for that kind of separation is probably cross-platform GUI work, where you'd need to rewrite the GUI to port your app to another platform, but these days there are plenty of cross-platform GUI libraries to solve that problem.
Since I spend very, very little actual time using Interface Builder, who cares that it is a separate program?
Anyone who has to design an interface and hook code up to it. In most modern IDEs, you lay out your interface, then write handlers for each event exposed by a control that you want to handle: a button's Click event, an edit box's TextChanged event, etc. Each control has a list of properties you can change and a list of events you can handle. The IDE writes the appropriate glue code to make your event handlers run when those events occur.
In Interface Builder, you basically just draw the interface, then pop back over to XCode and write all the code yourself.
Furthermore, you can write your own controls in most IDEs, either simple combinations of existing controls or a brand new one written from scratch. They appear in the designer just like built in controls, drawing themselves and responding to property changes, and you can change their properties and event handlers just as if you were working with an edit box or a list box. I don't know if you can do the same in XCode... can you?
There are some things that could be better, but it is very nice, especially for a free product.
Well, there are a lot of good free IDEs that don't use the "design interface over here, write code over there without any help" paradigm.
Flash forward to 2006. I believe the tables have largely turned. OSX is a great environment to be productive, Apple includes their fantastic XCode development environment and developer documentation with every new Mac, etc.
I gotta say, I'm not impressed with XCode. The whole "one program for designing dialogs, another for writing code" paradigm is so 1990. It's better than classic Mac development and pre-VB Windows development, but it's still stuck at the Visual C++ 1.x level, while the world has largely moved on to the Delphi/VB/VS.NET model of controls with various event handlers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft now charges a LOT of $$ for Visual Studio Enterprise Extreme Radical 2008.Net (and yes, I am aware it is technically possible to develop.net apps from the command line just as it's technically possible to build your own house using nothing more than an axe and a drill)
Actually, you can use the Express versions, which are free to download and contain just about everything most people need. The biggest difference between VC#/VB/VC++ 2005 Express and Visual Studio 2005 Standard is that VS puts all the compilers together in one IDE, while the Express versions split each compiler off into its own (identical) IDE.
and unless you wanna get screwed and pay full price next year when there's an update you'll pay to join their developer club.
They have discounts for upgrading even if you're not an MSDN subscriber. And if you're in the right place at the right time... I got free copies of VS 2005 Professional and SQL Server 2005 (and free popcorn!) just for going to a 3-hour presentation when they were released. Even got to hear the Microsoft presenter make a few jokes at MS's expense.
If a reviewer likes the movie but intentionally drives people away, that's just as unethical as record companies pushing crappy music through payola. How does that reviewer benefit from doing this more than by giving an ethical and accurate review? Unless he's an investor in a competing studio, he doesn't, and your argument falls flat on its face.
Now hold on. Who said anything about liking the movie? The question is simply whether depriving someone of a potential sale is immoral in itself. If a bad review causes tickets to go unsold, then it has deprived the theater owner and the studio of potential sales, whether the review was honest or not.
If depriving someone of a potential sale is not inherently immoral, as I believe, then we can't conclude that file sharing is bad just because it deprives record companies of potential sales. The immoral part of your dishonest-reviewer scenario is the reviewer's dishonesty, but there is no dishonesty in the act of file sharing, apart from a handful of people who intentionally mislabel files.
As for competition resulting in fewer sales being a relevant comparison... good gosh man, you've got your Cory Doctorow impersonation down pat! "Help me, I'm bein' repressed... they won't let me have everything my heart desires for free."
And I see you're quite skilled at constructing strawmen. That's good, because unlike information, straw can't be sent over the internet, so you won't have to worry about those hippies stealing your God-given right to charge people for what they could do themselves for free.
"(Of course, I don't think there's anything immoral about depriving someone of a potential sale...)"
This sentence states the difference between our positions more clearly than anything else.
I suppose you think movie reviewers are acting immorally if their reviews convince anyone not to see a particular movie, thus depriving the studio and theater owner of potential ticket sales... and competing companies are acting immorally if they produce a better (or, more relevant to file sharing, cheaper) alternative, thus depriving their competitors of potential sales... and so on. If not, then you must agree that depriving someone of potential sales isn't immoral.
Return to the question of a PDF of my book. No doubt, you would look at downloading that across a P2P network exactly the same way, regardless of whether or not you were going to read it once, or read it daily. Is a Bible different because many people crack it open every day? Using your argument, any fixed document that's read and re-read regularly would be purchased exactly once.
Yes, I believe it is different in terms of the impact on sales. If downloading weren't an option, the Bible is more likely to be purchased than other books, precisely because people use it so often that borrowing a copy is unlikely to provide the benefit they want. Therefore, someone downloading a Bible is more likely to be depriving someone of a potential sale than someone downloading another book. (Of course, I don't think there's anything immoral about depriving someone of a potential sale, so morally I'd say downloading a Bible is equivalent to downloading anything else.)
Unfortunately, most people don't stop him at that point, because he's always carrying the banner of "information wants to be free," and pretending to be Thomas Jefferson.
If sharing the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson means he's pretending to be Jefferson, then who are you pretending to be?
Ultimately, Cory wants to "possess" music (and other electronic data that is similarly protected) without paying the content creator for their work and he wants to get away with it. Whether you call it stealing or something altruistic, he wants the benefit without cost, and without renumeration to the artist or legitimate owner of publication/distribution rights. It's as simple as that.
Again, library patrons also want the benefit without cost; it's just that the benefit a book provides isn't as closely tied to ownership. Someone who borrows a book from the library when he wants to read it, instead of buying his own copy, is acting just as selfishly (if you call it that) as someone who downloads an album.
Your argument also suggests that there is no value in owning books. I own them specifically so I can go back and re-read them when I choose to, and not when they're available at the public library. I buy music (principally CD's) for the same purpose.
Certainly, some people do that for some books, but you can't ignore the impact that libraries have on the sale of books.
Handing a book to a friend and copying a file are two different things. Cory (and others) need to "wake up" to this fact.
Ah, but you're ignoring the different ways books and music are used.
You don't typically just listen to a song once, and then consider yourself done with it until months or years later when you decide to revisit it. However, that is a common way to use books (and movies). Which means libraries fill basically the same market role for books that P2P sharing does for music: one person buys one copy, which is then passed around to various other people, eliminating all those others' need to buy their own copies. Library patrons don't need to buy their own copy of a book because they've already read it for free, and they won't want to read it again for quite some time; music downloaders don't need to buy their own copy of a CD because they just downloaded one. In one case a copy is made, and in the other it isn't, but they have the same effect on sales (except that each library branch serves fewer patrons than a P2P network).
Why would you need 2.0 pixel shaders on a GPU that doesn't support T&L? What are you going to do with them, fill your Excel spreadsheets with procedural textures?
The presenter said that you can ditch your $75/month supply of vitamins, and pick up a box of dog biscuits. "If you don't believe me, check the ingredients list. It's all there."
What the hell? I don't think I could go through $75 worth of vitamins in a month if my life depended on it. A bottle of 100 multi vitamins costs what, $8?
I don't see what's so wrong with this. As long as the kids live at home, the parents should have a say in what the kids eat, what they wear and so on.
That's fine as long as you're giving them the option to stop living at home and avoid such restrictions. But in our society, kids don't have that option for a number of reasons: they'd need permission which their parents probably won't give (and may even be considered neglectful for giving), they can't rent or buy property because minors can't really sign contracts, they couldn't afford it anyway because minors can't work at many jobs and they have to spend the day at school... etc.
So no, parents shouldn't be able to micromanage every minute of their kids' lives. The fact that they live at home is meaningless, because they have no alternative.
your example of one scientist making one copy is a little questionable if you really want to say something like "not at your expense" and still have this story have any relation to the state of copyright in the world today. More people making copies or perhaps a mad scientist making alot more than one copy? Might make you rethink your expense when it comes time to trade in your car or just use your car in what now is a highway thick with copied cars and virtually no value associated with them.
No economic value, perhaps, but there is still utility value associated with them.
Frankly, not being able to get anything in exchange for trading in a car, and having to endure longer waits in traffic, would be a small price to pay for living in a world where it's possible. That would be a friggin' utopia! No hunger, because anyone can copy whatever food they want; no deaths during heat waves, because anyone can get an air conditioner, a generator, and all the fuel they need to run it, just by pressing a button; and so on. Of course, we'd have to deal with all that pollution, heat, etc.. but as soon as someone finds a solution to those or any other problems, it can spread across the globe in an instant.
Similarly, I believe that making it a little harder for certain folks to earn a living by rearranging bits is a small price to pay for living in a world where those bits are freely accessible to anyone with the right tools. (I said harder, not impossible: you'd just have to charge directly for your labor, and expend some effort to find an audience who can pool their money together to pay you. If a political candidate can raise millions of dollars from lots of small individual donations, just by putting a thermometer graph and DONATE NOW button on his site, then it should be easy for artists to do the same.)
Pirating and theft are very close to each other on the "classification wheel" even if not the same thing, most would agree.
Erm, not really. The key element of theft, the very thing that makes theft wrong, is the fact that the owner is deprived of his property. That vital element is missing from copyright infringement.
Think about it: let's say you heard that someone "stole" your car, but when you looked out into the parking lot, you saw that it was still there, exactly how you left it. What actually happened was that some mad scientist pointed a replicator beam at your car and drove off in a brand new copy, leaving your original car undisturbed. Would you be upset? Probably not at all. Certainly not as much as if it had really been stolen--because the whole reason you're afraid of having your car stolen is that it leaves you without a car. If you still have it, you've lost nothing; the "thief" has gained something, but not at your expense.
Well, since we're talking about BitTorrent, it's your problem too - a downloader is also an uploader during the normal operation of BT.
In any case, owning a copy of the movie doesn't give you any additional rights to download it. Either it's legal to download a movie from someone who can't legally upload it to you, or it isn't, regardless of whether you also own your own copy. Perhaps a court would consider downloading fair use in such a case, but AFAIK the issue has never been tested in court.
The person you're downloading it from doesn't have the legal right to send you parts of the file, whether or not you own a copy. And with BitTorrent, you're uploading at the same time as you're downloading, which means you are also distributing it illegally.
Guess you're out of the loop, guy, the feebs of the FBI aren't responsible to the American public, only to Terror Czar Gonzales of the DOJ and the neocons (and perhaps Bill Crystal and Richard Perle).
That guy's in on this too? Man. I loved him in City Slickers, but he's just lost a fan forever.
One last point...If guns didn't serve their purpose anymore because "The Man" is armed with artillery, helicopters, machine gunes, etc...uhm...you might want to check the news again...that whole Iraq thing we are in right now...these folks aren't exactly heavily armed.
They're fighting with improvised bombs and machine guns, not handguns and rifles.
I was in the midwest (one of those mostly rural states that usually has more sense)
Oh. I don't know why you brought that up as an example of how gun laws don't work, because in the midwest, guns are legal. Of course they're easy to get. My point remains that in parts of the world where gun ownership is severely restricted, guns are harder to get.
But you are often dealing with stolen guns...which have serial numbers...which need to be moved frequently else tracked. If I sell you a $500 gun (retail) for $200 when I paid 0 I still come out way ahead. I also now have $200 cash instead of a hot item with a serial number likely to be trackable
But the only reason those stolen guns are so easy to come by is that there are plenty of legally purchased guns to steal.
Now...automatic weapons...not exactly easy to come by...handguns and rifles...dirt cheap.
Exactly. You realize which ones are legal to own and which are outlawed, right?
Coarse as previously stated..."right to bear arms" has little to do with being able to protect yourself from your fellow citizens..."right to bear arms" is about being able to protect yourself from the government
Unfortunately, guns don't serve that purpose anymore. You aren't going to be able to fight The Man off with a few handguns and rifles when The Man is armed with artillery, helicopters, machine guns, grenades, bombs, the freedom fryer, etc. Your private arsenal isn't going to protect you from the government. The only thing that will protect you is soldiers' unwillingness to kill their own countrymen.
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When I was in high school, we were allowed to use the computer lab before school and during lunch break for personal use. (BTW, we were also allowed to "pass notes" during those times, although we did it verbally and called it "talking".) Do you disable your filters during those times?
This distinction between "ideas" and "specific works" is nothing but semantic bullshit from copyright advocates. Copyrighted works are information; ideas are information. A song is just as much of an idea as the speed of light or pi. There's no real difference between (1) the idea of singing "hit me baby one more time" while playing certain notes, (2) the sound that results from doing so, and (3) the idea that if you feed a certain sequence of bytes into your MP3 player, you'll hear that same sound again.
And in any case, Jefferson's arguments against the ownership of ideas apply just as well to copyrighted works as they do to ideas in general. You can light your candle from mine without darkening me; you can learn my ideas without taking them away from me; and you can copy or perform my song without taking it away from me.
That action is fraud, and I think we can all agree that preventing fraud is a legitimate use of government power: you're lying in order to obtain something of value under false pretenses.
You seem to be forgetting those of us who create, support creation, and still don't support the use of government power to prevent people from copying information. What makes absolutely no sense to me is the idea that one person should be able to suppress my freedom of speech (the ability to share certain information) just because limiting my speech makes it easier for him to make money.
Just about every button is pressure-sensitive: X, circle, square, triangle, L1, L2, R1, R2, and the four D-pad directions. So in Gran Turismo 3, you can control your speed by how hard you press the gas button, and you can use analog steering without having to touch the analog stick.
Guess you've never bought a car before, huh? It's kinda like with magazines, the September issue comes out in August.
Hey, he didn't say it was Republicans calling him...
That is a misinterpretation of the Grokster ruling and others. Look at the VCR, for example; as long as there's significant noninfringing use, the amount of infringing use doesn't matter.
Ah, but now your analogy is flawed. A DVD is a physical product created according to a set of instructions, let's call it a "recipe", which tells your DVD burner how to arrange the bits on the disc. Making your own hamburger using a well-known recipe is analogous to burning your own DVD using well-known data. Writing and filming your own movie would be more like inventing your own hamburger recipe, and while I'd certainly have more respect for someone who invents his own kind of hamburger just to spite McDonald's, I don't think it's necessary for everyone who wants a hamburger to come up with a new way to do it.
Stopped getting made? Never. But they would start getting made under a different funding model, one where people made arrangements for payment before they started working. You know, the same funding model used by barbers, mechanics, and pretty much everyone else who provides a service: you don't start working until you have a customer who you know is going to pay you for your work. In the case of movies, you'd need to find a lot of people who could pool their money to fund production, but if political candidates can do it, surely Hollywood can too. If you've already been paid for your work, you don't need to worry about people making their own copies, because they're not competing with you - you're in the business of making movies, not making copies.
You mean all those researchers are just working for free in the hopes that someone will come along and pay them later?
Yes, there is something to be said for separating core functionality from the GUI. But the thing is, XCode forces you to do it, even if you're just writing some one-shot utility. With other IDEs, you can do it easily enough - put your core functionality in a class that doesn't touch any of the GUI, and have your separate GUI simply use the methods and properties exposed by that class in response to events - but you can also keep them together if you'd rather do that.
And frankly, for most applications, you don't need all that separation. There are very few programs which have GUI versions, command line versions, and web versions. The most common use for that kind of separation is probably cross-platform GUI work, where you'd need to rewrite the GUI to port your app to another platform, but these days there are plenty of cross-platform GUI libraries to solve that problem.
Anyone who has to design an interface and hook code up to it. In most modern IDEs, you lay out your interface, then write handlers for each event exposed by a control that you want to handle: a button's Click event, an edit box's TextChanged event, etc. Each control has a list of properties you can change and a list of events you can handle. The IDE writes the appropriate glue code to make your event handlers run when those events occur.
In Interface Builder, you basically just draw the interface, then pop back over to XCode and write all the code yourself.
Furthermore, you can write your own controls in most IDEs, either simple combinations of existing controls or a brand new one written from scratch. They appear in the designer just like built in controls, drawing themselves and responding to property changes, and you can change their properties and event handlers just as if you were working with an edit box or a list box. I don't know if you can do the same in XCode... can you?
Well, there are a lot of good free IDEs that don't use the "design interface over here, write code over there without any help" paradigm.
I gotta say, I'm not impressed with XCode. The whole "one program for designing dialogs, another for writing code" paradigm is so 1990. It's better than classic Mac development and pre-VB Windows development, but it's still stuck at the Visual C++ 1.x level, while the world has largely moved on to the Delphi/VB/VS.NET model of controls with various event handlers.
Actually, you can use the Express versions, which are free to download and contain just about everything most people need. The biggest difference between VC#/VB/VC++ 2005 Express and Visual Studio 2005 Standard is that VS puts all the compilers together in one IDE, while the Express versions split each compiler off into its own (identical) IDE.
They have discounts for upgrading even if you're not an MSDN subscriber. And if you're in the right place at the right time... I got free copies of VS 2005 Professional and SQL Server 2005 (and free popcorn!) just for going to a 3-hour presentation when they were released. Even got to hear the Microsoft presenter make a few jokes at MS's expense.
Now hold on. Who said anything about liking the movie? The question is simply whether depriving someone of a potential sale is immoral in itself. If a bad review causes tickets to go unsold, then it has deprived the theater owner and the studio of potential sales, whether the review was honest or not.
If depriving someone of a potential sale is not inherently immoral, as I believe, then we can't conclude that file sharing is bad just because it deprives record companies of potential sales. The immoral part of your dishonest-reviewer scenario is the reviewer's dishonesty, but there is no dishonesty in the act of file sharing, apart from a handful of people who intentionally mislabel files.
And I see you're quite skilled at constructing strawmen. That's good, because unlike information, straw can't be sent over the internet, so you won't have to worry about those hippies stealing your God-given right to charge people for what they could do themselves for free.
I suppose you think movie reviewers are acting immorally if their reviews convince anyone not to see a particular movie, thus depriving the studio and theater owner of potential ticket sales... and competing companies are acting immorally if they produce a better (or, more relevant to file sharing, cheaper) alternative, thus depriving their competitors of potential sales... and so on. If not, then you must agree that depriving someone of potential sales isn't immoral.
Yes, I believe it is different in terms of the impact on sales. If downloading weren't an option, the Bible is more likely to be purchased than other books, precisely because people use it so often that borrowing a copy is unlikely to provide the benefit they want. Therefore, someone downloading a Bible is more likely to be depriving someone of a potential sale than someone downloading another book. (Of course, I don't think there's anything immoral about depriving someone of a potential sale, so morally I'd say downloading a Bible is equivalent to downloading anything else.)
If sharing the same opinion as Thomas Jefferson means he's pretending to be Jefferson, then who are you pretending to be?
Again, library patrons also want the benefit without cost; it's just that the benefit a book provides isn't as closely tied to ownership. Someone who borrows a book from the library when he wants to read it, instead of buying his own copy, is acting just as selfishly (if you call it that) as someone who downloads an album.
Certainly, some people do that for some books, but you can't ignore the impact that libraries have on the sale of books.
Ah, but you're ignoring the different ways books and music are used.
You don't typically just listen to a song once, and then consider yourself done with it until months or years later when you decide to revisit it. However, that is a common way to use books (and movies). Which means libraries fill basically the same market role for books that P2P sharing does for music: one person buys one copy, which is then passed around to various other people, eliminating all those others' need to buy their own copies. Library patrons don't need to buy their own copy of a book because they've already read it for free, and they won't want to read it again for quite some time; music downloaders don't need to buy their own copy of a CD because they just downloaded one. In one case a copy is made, and in the other it isn't, but they have the same effect on sales (except that each library branch serves fewer patrons than a P2P network).
Why would you need 2.0 pixel shaders on a GPU that doesn't support T&L? What are you going to do with them, fill your Excel spreadsheets with procedural textures?
What the hell? I don't think I could go through $75 worth of vitamins in a month if my life depended on it. A bottle of 100 multi vitamins costs what, $8?
That's fine as long as you're giving them the option to stop living at home and avoid such restrictions. But in our society, kids don't have that option for a number of reasons: they'd need permission which their parents probably won't give (and may even be considered neglectful for giving), they can't rent or buy property because minors can't really sign contracts, they couldn't afford it anyway because minors can't work at many jobs and they have to spend the day at school... etc.
So no, parents shouldn't be able to micromanage every minute of their kids' lives. The fact that they live at home is meaningless, because they have no alternative.
No economic value, perhaps, but there is still utility value associated with them.
Frankly, not being able to get anything in exchange for trading in a car, and having to endure longer waits in traffic, would be a small price to pay for living in a world where it's possible. That would be a friggin' utopia! No hunger, because anyone can copy whatever food they want; no deaths during heat waves, because anyone can get an air conditioner, a generator, and all the fuel they need to run it, just by pressing a button; and so on. Of course, we'd have to deal with all that pollution, heat, etc.. but as soon as someone finds a solution to those or any other problems, it can spread across the globe in an instant.
Similarly, I believe that making it a little harder for certain folks to earn a living by rearranging bits is a small price to pay for living in a world where those bits are freely accessible to anyone with the right tools. (I said harder, not impossible: you'd just have to charge directly for your labor, and expend some effort to find an audience who can pool their money together to pay you. If a political candidate can raise millions of dollars from lots of small individual donations, just by putting a thermometer graph and DONATE NOW button on his site, then it should be easy for artists to do the same.)
Erm, not really. The key element of theft, the very thing that makes theft wrong, is the fact that the owner is deprived of his property. That vital element is missing from copyright infringement.
Think about it: let's say you heard that someone "stole" your car, but when you looked out into the parking lot, you saw that it was still there, exactly how you left it. What actually happened was that some mad scientist pointed a replicator beam at your car and drove off in a brand new copy, leaving your original car undisturbed. Would you be upset? Probably not at all. Certainly not as much as if it had really been stolen--because the whole reason you're afraid of having your car stolen is that it leaves you without a car. If you still have it, you've lost nothing; the "thief" has gained something, but not at your expense.
Actually, the official unit of stink is hobo power.
Well, since we're talking about BitTorrent, it's your problem too - a downloader is also an uploader during the normal operation of BT.
In any case, owning a copy of the movie doesn't give you any additional rights to download it. Either it's legal to download a movie from someone who can't legally upload it to you, or it isn't, regardless of whether you also own your own copy. Perhaps a court would consider downloading fair use in such a case, but AFAIK the issue has never been tested in court.
The person you're downloading it from doesn't have the legal right to send you parts of the file, whether or not you own a copy. And with BitTorrent, you're uploading at the same time as you're downloading, which means you are also distributing it illegally.
That guy's in on this too? Man. I loved him in City Slickers, but he's just lost a fan forever.
They're fighting with improvised bombs and machine guns, not handguns and rifles.
Oh. I don't know why you brought that up as an example of how gun laws don't work, because in the midwest, guns are legal. Of course they're easy to get. My point remains that in parts of the world where gun ownership is severely restricted, guns are harder to get.
But the only reason those stolen guns are so easy to come by is that there are plenty of legally purchased guns to steal.
Exactly. You realize which ones are legal to own and which are outlawed, right?
Unfortunately, guns don't serve that purpose anymore. You aren't going to be able to fight The Man off with a few handguns and rifles when The Man is armed with artillery, helicopters, machine guns, grenades, bombs, the freedom fryer, etc. Your private arsenal isn't going to protect you from the government. The only thing that will protect you is soldiers' unwillingness to kill their own countrymen.