Verizon was the #1 carrier in the US, in terms of number of customers, until Cingular and AT&T Wireless took a slight lead by merging. It appears that Verizon will be #1 again pretty soon - Cingular and ATTW were hemorrhaging customers before the merger, and they haven't really stopped.
If you're just comparing the technologies, CDMA still has around 50% more customers in the US than GSM, and CDMA is where the real 3G rollout is taking place here. 1xRTT is available nationwide at up to 144 kbps; 1xEV-DO is available in major cities at up to 2.4 Mbps.
In the end laptops win, because they do everything desktops do and more.
Except play games.
Even if you're lucky enough to get a laptop with enough onboard graphics horsepower to play two-year-old 3D games, what are you going to do when you want to play the next crop of games? Buy a whole new laptop, that's what, because you sure aren't going to be able to upgrade it with a new video card.
If she could invest that $2000 and get a 15% annual return (pretty high, but let's say she gets lucky), she'd have over $8000 by the time she turned 18. That's not too bad for college tuition.
And frankly, $2000 is cheap for a HDTV that big, especially if it was bought a year ago.
If there is no economy of scale and no Brand benefit in a presence on the US market the investment only makes sense if they get a higher return on the US investment than what they pay in interest on all the money they have borrowed to build the rest of their network.
Seems to me that the investment makes sense if they get a better return on it than they could've gotten from some other investment. Investing in VZW certainly must've worked out better than investing in any other US cellular company would have at the time, since Verizon was the #1 carrier until the Cingular-AT&T merger.
Also, although Verizon Wireless doesn't use the name Vodafone in the US, I believe they do still drive some business to Vodafone in the form of international roaming/rentals when VZW customers travel overseas.
They know GSM isn't going to replace CDMA in the United States. The American GSM market is separate from the rest of the world's anyway, with different frequency bands and different price structures.
People who claim I cannot use the word theft to describe copyright infringement are doing they same thing govt. officials did in 1984. They changed the language so that I can't even express my idea because no word exists to describe it.
Nonsense. You can express your idea using words like this: "copyright infringement". See? Easy. You don't need to use the word "theft" or "stealing", just like you don't need the words "speeding" or "parole violation" or "tax evasion". Those words describe different acts.
If you'd like to express an opinion, like the idea that copyright infringement is bad, try this: "copyright infringement is bad". Let me know if you need any more tips.;)
I don't care if you agree with me or not whether copyright infringement is theft, but don't tell me it's not correct English, because that is how you start creating newspeak.
Um, no. It isn't Orwellian to believe that words have meanings. I'm not going to tell you that you can't say "copyright infringement is theft".. only that you're wrong if you say so, just as if you said "arson is rape" or "jaywalking is perjury" or "dogs have fifty legs". It's correct English in the sense that it's syntactically valid, but it's still a false statement.
Smart people -- that includes you, me, and everybody reading this -- know exactly what Apple means when they state "don't steal music."
Yes, they know that Apple really means "follow copyright laws". They know this because of a constant campaign by Big Content over the past several years; people have come to realize that when corporate spokesmen talk about "stealing", they really mean copying.
But smart people, like you and me, have also known since 1985 that copyright infringement isn't theft. We also know that the average person's idea of stealing means taking something away from someone else: if I told you your car had been stolen and the thief was driving away right this second, but you looked out the window and saw your car parked in the driveway, right where it always was, you'd think I was crazy. If I then explained that the thief had actually made a copy of your car and driven off with it, I doubt you'd care - as long as you still have your car, who cares what he has?
So, since smart people like us know "don't steal music" is a misleading phrase, why does Apple use it? (Certainly not because they run a music store themselves, or because they have to make concessions to record companies. Heavens, no!)
There is no real connection between copyright infringement and stealing, any more than there is between chicken and tuna. The only connection is metaphorical: chicken meat is light and mildly flavored, and so is albacore. Stealing involves getting something without paying for it, and so does copyright infringement. But in neither case is the metaphorical connection actually important! If someone asks for chicken, they won't expect a different meat that just happened to remind some old fishermen of chicken; if you say that something of yours has been stolen, no one will expect you to still have it (unless you're a corporate spokesman, in which case they'll expect you to be spinning).
The fundamental essence of chicken--the thing that makes a customer order it--is that it comes from a certain type of bird and has a certain taste and texture. Tuna doesn't fit the bill. And the fundamental essence of stealing--the reason everyone can agree stealing is wrong--is that something is being taken away from its rightful owner. Copyright infringement doesn't fit the bill.
Are slashdotters smart enough to understand metaphors and the complexities of language? Sure. But the fundamental goal is to sanitize the act of copyright infringement.
Compare that to the fundamental goal of those who use words like "stealing" here, which is to demonize the act of copyright infringement. Is that any better? Can't we just call it copyright infringement--a neutral legal term--and then discuss whether copyright infringement is good or bad, whether copyright's restrictions on free speech are justified by the chance to consume new works, whether copyright terms are too long, whether fair use rights need to be expanded, etc.... rather than distract from the issue with loaded terms?
Of course, nobody likes the notion of a struggling songwriter losing money due to copyright infringement
Especially the people who understand that you can't "lose" something you never had and were never promised.
This is propaganda 101. [...] In the 19th century it gave us tautologies like "manifest destiny."
Oh, please. You're trying to compare the copying of bits to the slaughter of native Americans? You can't possibly expect to be taken seriously.
... we'll cite the most narrow definition of the term theft and show it doesn't apply to copyright infringement. We'll ignore common epressions in the English language such as "You stole my idea", "cable theft", and "identity theft"...
Gosh, you're right! You seem to have a firm grasp of the nuances of language.
Maybe you could help me explain to the customers at my restaurant why they get tuna when they order chicken. You and I both know tuna is the "chicken of the sea", but these customers just don't seem to get it! They keep citing the most narrow definition of the term "chicken", even though I'd rather use the vague, metaphorical definition implied by a common English phrase because it supports my business model (1. buy surplus cat food, 2. sell to humans, 3. profit!).
In a lot of ways, the PS3 is looking VERY similar to the Saturn. Complex hardware with several individual processing units. Lots of potential, but also very risky.
Of course, you could say the same about the PS2. It has several individual processing units, none of which are all that spectacular on their own, but they're connected with massive pipes. Taking advantage of all the PS2's hardware means using all of those units to their fullest and moving data through them as fast as you can.
Programming for the PS3 will likely be harder than programming for the PS2, but my understanding is that the separate units of the PS3 will be more similar to each other--like writing a program for a cluster of Linux boxes, rather than the PS2's cluster where one machine runs Linux, another runs Windows, another runs BeOS, etc.
What pisses me off about the Halo button layouts is that you have to take your thumb off the direction controls in order to jump or melee. How lame is that?
You know, I never thought about that. My friend the Halo master gives me shit for playing with a keyboard, and one of his weaker gripes is that my melee key (F) uses the same finger as strafing right (D). But come to think of it, having melee *and* jump use the same thumb as looking around seems pretty cumbersome.
It *is* annoying that you can only play the tracks on 'authorized' systems, and the other contrastrants, but people know this. By your arguement then people that bought games for Nintendo 64 were 'suckers' because they bought a game that was 'locked in' to a certain platform and wouldn't play on the Gamecube.
Er, not really. See, there are legitimate technical reasons why the Gamecube can't play N64 games, the least of which is that it doesn't have a cartridge slot!
The restrictions on tracks you buy from iTunes, however, are artificial. There's no technical reason that iTunes can't save purchased tracks as, at the very least, unencrypted AAC files. Since it has an MP3 encoder, there's no technical reason for its inability to convert purchased tracks to MP3s either. The only reason for these limitations is Apple's company policy.
If you want to make a video game analogy, a better comparison is region lockout schemes. Japanese and European games won't play on an American consoles, even when the hardware is exactly the same; the only reason they don't work is a corporate policy that says Americans have to buy games made for Americans. And guess what, Sony's video game lockout is just as bad as Apple's music lockin.
And guess what? It worked. Take the "live performance" and "rich patron" out of the equation and the amount of content producers exploded.
Luckily, it's the 21st century and we now have another option: "thousands, if not millions, of not-so-rich patrons". It works for political campaigns; it can work for artists too.
Which means at the moment the "fruits of his labor" belong to no one but him and those he chooses to license it to.
Yeah, I guess you could say that. Of course, if you were living in America 150 years ago, you could also say that a slave belongs to his master or whoever his master chooses to sell him to. You'd be right, legally speaking, but that type of "ownership" has no moral justification whatsoever.
That's an interesting possibility I had not considered. I do wonder, though, if it could work. I mean, there's nothing stopping artists from doing that today, and I've never heard of anyone doing it. I imagine it's because if someone, I don't care how famous they are, announced, "Everyone send me a dollar and I'll write a new album!", most people would laugh.
I'd say that's largely because there's already another more common model that both artists and consumers are used to. It's easier for the artist to just sign a contract, do his thing, and then hope that money comes in, rather than actually finding customers up front in order to make the money a sure thing.
Who's going to pay sight unseen for something of unknown value, especially when you could just wait and get it for free anyway?
Well, most theater patrons don't seem to mind paying $8.50 for a movie of unknown value, based on nothing but a 60 second trailer.
Yes, they could wait to get it for free, but at the cost of less assurance that they ever will get it. The question they must ask themselves is, "How much is it worth to me to see this work finished and released?"... keeping in mind that they only have to pay if it really does get released. As the amount of money collected gets closer to the goal, collecting the rest will get easier - never underestimate the motivating power of a simple thermometer graph.
By any previous standard you want to compare it to, we're obscenely wealthy in this regard - and we have access to books, music, and movies we'd otherwise *never* have seen, because the writers, musicians, and crews who make this content would otherwise be working a real job, to make real money, to put real food on the table.
How valuable is such "access" when it comes at the whim of whoever owns the copyright? Sure, you can listen to this song, if you agree to pay $X for it. You can watch this movie, if you agree to get it in a DRM-encumbered format and sit through unskippable commercials. You can read this e-book, if you use a DRM-encumbered player, pay more than the paperback costs, and feel like buying a second copy of the same bits if your original gets lost.
The purpose of any government assistance to artists, IMO, shouldn't just be get more works on the market, but to get more works into the public domain where they can be remixed, built upon, incorporated into other works, and enjoyed without having to get permission from the heirs of someone who died 25 years ago. You know, improving our shared culture, not just coming up with more products to sell.
Just because someone produces something that you might label as 'culture' doesnt give you the inherent right to that production for anything less than the asking price. Its as simple as that, and that is something you dont seem to get.
And just because someone would like you to pay him for a copy of a file doesn't give him the right to stop you from making your own copy for free. No one can own a number. It's as simple as that, and that is something you don't seem to get.
Well that's the crux, isn't it? "his conditions have been met". Today, the conditions are that he make some millions of dollars for his song.
Today, he can meet his condition by spreading those millions over a few million copies of his song.
Well, he can *try* to meet his conditions. There's no guarantee, and that's a problem. On the other hand, if he just says up front "I'm not writing a single note until I see a million dollars in an escrow account", then either he's guaranteed to get paid for his work, or he won't have to do the work at all.
Will he be able to do it tomorrow when that is no longer possible?
Who says it'll be impossible? Just because you can't make money selling copies doesn't mean you can't make money. And just because you can't make a million dollars by selling one copy each to a million fans doesn't mean you can't still make a million dollars - it just means you have to tell your million fans up front, "Give me a dollar if you want me to write another song".
The "rich patron" model is one possibility, but not the only one. We've seen political candidates raise millions of dollars from small individual contributions through their web sites. Now consider that more people vote for American Idol than vote for President! If a political candidate can fund his campaign by getting a lot of people to send in a little money, even when they know that the money will be wasted if their guy loses, just think how much easier it'd be for a popular musician to fund his next album the same way.
If a rich patron does come along and commission a new song for some millions, do you think the patron is going to share what he bought with all of humanity to use? Or will he keep his expensive commission for his own personal use?
If he keeps it to himself, that's fine with me, because no one but him and the artist will know about it in the first place. He has the right to try to keep it secret, although the rest of us have the right to make copies if we ever have the chance.
If those business models that are 'founded on restricting free speech' stop paying for production of the content that goes to make up the main core of all these torrent sites, what will the sites offer?
If that happens, I imagine the sites will offer content created under other business models, content that was produced in the past, and content from the public domain. Or maybe they'll dry up. Who knows, but more importantly, who cares?
The question you posed contains a huge "if", and as such it only pertains to a fantasy world where everyone stops making music, movies, and other works that people enjoy. But in the real world, people have been making music, writing, and painting for thousands of years, copyright or not. They aren't going to stop just because it becomes hard to make money by selling copies of information; they'll just switch to a model where they get paid more directly for the work they do.
The content isnt free, you just arent paying the asking price for it. [...] You have no inherent entitlement to the content.
That's one way to look at it, but not a very accurate way. The string of bits that makes up a movie or song file is free once it's been created in the first place, and while I don't think I'd use the word "entitlement", I would definitely say that we have the moral right to share those strings of bits with one another, just as we have the right to share sports scores or our thoughts on the weather.
It's a plain and simple fact that the string of bits I've attached to this message(*) will make "Hit Me Baby One More Time" come out of your MP3 player, just like it's a fact that it was 23 degrees outside today. Some people think it should be illegal to share one of those facts, not because it would lead to fraud, loss of life, or a breach of national security (some legitimate reasons for restricting information flow), but simply because it would mean a few large businesses had to be restructured. I, on the other hand, think the freedom to speak and write freely, as well as to share one's cherished experiences with friends and strangers, is important enough that we should demand a damn good reason for limiting it - and putting a buck in Sony's pocket doesn't exactly qualify.
Now, the effort that went into producing that string of bits for the first time is what isn't free, and that effort is what no one has an entitlement to. An artist is free to charge whatever he wants for recording a song, writing a book, etc., and to refuse to do any of it until his conditions have been met. But once he has agreed to do it, the fruits of his labor are free for all of humanity to use, just like any other numbers.
As illustrated in the above example, having some legitimate uses is not enough to avoid a ban, nor is having some illegitimate uses enough to justify one. Instead, we must weigh the legitimate and illegitimate uses against one another.
Of course, we must also consider what "illegitimate" means in context. A nuclear bomb has the potential to cause thousands, if not millions, of deaths, as well as render the land uninhabitable for decades to come. A BitTorrent site, on the other hand, merely has the potential to give thousands or millions of people access to free movies, music, TV shows, software, and porn, and the only threat it poses is to the business models that are founded on restricting free speech. Which one is the real threat?
T-Mobile does use the same frequencies as in Europe (makes sense, cause in Europe T-Mobile is known as good old Deutsche Telekom)
No, they don't. The European mobile phone frequencies are used for other things here - for example, 900 MHz is an unlicensed band used for cordless phones, baby monitors, walkie talkies, etc.
However, you can get quad-band GSM phones that work on the American frequencies *and* the European ones. I'm sure T-Mobile sells those, but remember, they're still working on the American frequencies when you use them in America.
I've never seen anyone who calls themself a gamer have any trouble with Halo/Halo 2, and I've played with hundreds of people.
I have.
I've been playing FPSes on the computer since the days of ROTT, but trying to control Halo with an Xbox controller is just humiliating, and I've given up on playing it with anything but a SmartJoy FRAG. My right thumb is used to pushing buttons and the space bar, and it just doesn't seem to have the dexterity to move that analog stick. With a mouse, I can instantly point my crosshair at anything I want, but with the Xbox gamepad, I just stand there like a fool while my view zooms right past whatever I wanted to shoot.
the US is is still the country with the worst GSM coverage I've encountered.
Griping that we have poor GSM coverage is like griping that Europe has poor CDMA coverage - worse, actually, because at least we have some GSM coverage, such as it is.
If we Americans want to go overseas, we have to rent or buy a phone at our destinations (except for the relatively few customers who already have a quad-band phone from a GSM provider). You can do the same when you come here, and then you can laugh at our ugly phones with external antennae just like we get to laugh at your toy-looking phones with weird little removable chips. It's fun!
Ummm, the point is, neither one of them violated any wiretapping laws. As much as I may dislike warrantless wiretapping, they are allowed to the POTUS under certain circumstances.
Those circumstances are described in FISA (which, I remind you, was changed during Clinton's term), and they don't apply to this administration's wiretapping. POTUS is not above the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Verizon was the #1 carrier in the US, in terms of number of customers, until Cingular and AT&T Wireless took a slight lead by merging. It appears that Verizon will be #1 again pretty soon - Cingular and ATTW were hemorrhaging customers before the merger, and they haven't really stopped.
If you're just comparing the technologies, CDMA still has around 50% more customers in the US than GSM, and CDMA is where the real 3G rollout is taking place here. 1xRTT is available nationwide at up to 144 kbps; 1xEV-DO is available in major cities at up to 2.4 Mbps.
In the end laptops win, because they do everything desktops do and more.
Except play games.
Even if you're lucky enough to get a laptop with enough onboard graphics horsepower to play two-year-old 3D games, what are you going to do when you want to play the next crop of games? Buy a whole new laptop, that's what, because you sure aren't going to be able to upgrade it with a new video card.
If she could invest that $2000 and get a 15% annual return (pretty high, but let's say she gets lucky), she'd have over $8000 by the time she turned 18. That's not too bad for college tuition.
And frankly, $2000 is cheap for a HDTV that big, especially if it was bought a year ago.
If there is no economy of scale and no Brand benefit in a presence on the US market the investment only makes sense if they get a higher return on the US investment than what they pay in interest on all the money they have borrowed to build the rest of their network.
Seems to me that the investment makes sense if they get a better return on it than they could've gotten from some other investment. Investing in VZW certainly must've worked out better than investing in any other US cellular company would have at the time, since Verizon was the #1 carrier until the Cingular-AT&T merger.
Also, although Verizon Wireless doesn't use the name Vodafone in the US, I believe they do still drive some business to Vodafone in the form of international roaming/rentals when VZW customers travel overseas.
They know GSM isn't going to replace CDMA in the United States. The American GSM market is separate from the rest of the world's anyway, with different frequency bands and different price structures.
Oh, are you the one who added that paragraph after I posted the link?
People who claim I cannot use the word theft to describe copyright infringement are doing they same thing govt. officials did in 1984. They changed the language so that I can't even express my idea because no word exists to describe it.
;)
Nonsense. You can express your idea using words like this: "copyright infringement". See? Easy. You don't need to use the word "theft" or "stealing", just like you don't need the words "speeding" or "parole violation" or "tax evasion". Those words describe different acts.
If you'd like to express an opinion, like the idea that copyright infringement is bad, try this: "copyright infringement is bad". Let me know if you need any more tips.
I don't care if you agree with me or not whether copyright infringement is theft, but don't tell me it's not correct English, because that is how you start creating newspeak.
Um, no. It isn't Orwellian to believe that words have meanings. I'm not going to tell you that you can't say "copyright infringement is theft".. only that you're wrong if you say so, just as if you said "arson is rape" or "jaywalking is perjury" or "dogs have fifty legs". It's correct English in the sense that it's syntactically valid, but it's still a false statement.
Smart people -- that includes you, me, and everybody reading this -- know exactly what Apple means when they state "don't steal music."
Yes, they know that Apple really means "follow copyright laws". They know this because of a constant campaign by Big Content over the past several years; people have come to realize that when corporate spokesmen talk about "stealing", they really mean copying.
But smart people, like you and me, have also known since 1985 that copyright infringement isn't theft. We also know that the average person's idea of stealing means taking something away from someone else: if I told you your car had been stolen and the thief was driving away right this second, but you looked out the window and saw your car parked in the driveway, right where it always was, you'd think I was crazy. If I then explained that the thief had actually made a copy of your car and driven off with it, I doubt you'd care - as long as you still have your car, who cares what he has?
So, since smart people like us know "don't steal music" is a misleading phrase, why does Apple use it? (Certainly not because they run a music store themselves, or because they have to make concessions to record companies. Heavens, no!)
There is no real connection between copyright infringement and stealing, any more than there is between chicken and tuna. The only connection is metaphorical: chicken meat is light and mildly flavored, and so is albacore. Stealing involves getting something without paying for it, and so does copyright infringement. But in neither case is the metaphorical connection actually important! If someone asks for chicken, they won't expect a different meat that just happened to remind some old fishermen of chicken; if you say that something of yours has been stolen, no one will expect you to still have it (unless you're a corporate spokesman, in which case they'll expect you to be spinning).
The fundamental essence of chicken--the thing that makes a customer order it--is that it comes from a certain type of bird and has a certain taste and texture. Tuna doesn't fit the bill. And the fundamental essence of stealing--the reason everyone can agree stealing is wrong--is that something is being taken away from its rightful owner. Copyright infringement doesn't fit the bill.
Are slashdotters smart enough to understand metaphors and the complexities of language? Sure. But the fundamental goal is to sanitize the act of copyright infringement.
Compare that to the fundamental goal of those who use words like "stealing" here, which is to demonize the act of copyright infringement. Is that any better? Can't we just call it copyright infringement--a neutral legal term--and then discuss whether copyright infringement is good or bad, whether copyright's restrictions on free speech are justified by the chance to consume new works, whether copyright terms are too long, whether fair use rights need to be expanded, etc.... rather than distract from the issue with loaded terms?
Of course, nobody likes the notion of a struggling songwriter losing money due to copyright infringement
Especially the people who understand that you can't "lose" something you never had and were never promised.
This is propaganda 101. [...] In the 19th century it gave us tautologies like "manifest destiny."
Oh, please. You're trying to compare the copying of bits to the slaughter of native Americans? You can't possibly expect to be taken seriously.
... we'll cite the most narrow definition of the term theft and show it doesn't apply to copyright infringement. We'll ignore common epressions in the English language such as "You stole my idea", "cable theft", and "identity theft"...
Gosh, you're right! You seem to have a firm grasp of the nuances of language.
Maybe you could help me explain to the customers at my restaurant why they get tuna when they order chicken. You and I both know tuna is the "chicken of the sea", but these customers just don't seem to get it! They keep citing the most narrow definition of the term "chicken", even though I'd rather use the vague, metaphorical definition implied by a common English phrase because it supports my business model (1. buy surplus cat food, 2. sell to humans, 3. profit!).
In a lot of ways, the PS3 is looking VERY similar to the Saturn. Complex hardware with several individual processing units. Lots of potential, but also very risky.
Of course, you could say the same about the PS2. It has several individual processing units, none of which are all that spectacular on their own, but they're connected with massive pipes. Taking advantage of all the PS2's hardware means using all of those units to their fullest and moving data through them as fast as you can.
Programming for the PS3 will likely be harder than programming for the PS2, but my understanding is that the separate units of the PS3 will be more similar to each other--like writing a program for a cluster of Linux boxes, rather than the PS2's cluster where one machine runs Linux, another runs Windows, another runs BeOS, etc.
Oh, now you've done it. Some poor guy in a library in Kansas isn't going to be able to load this page now, because it contains the word "joint".
What pisses me off about the Halo button layouts is that you have to take your thumb off the direction controls in order to jump or melee. How lame is that?
You know, I never thought about that. My friend the Halo master gives me shit for playing with a keyboard, and one of his weaker gripes is that my melee key (F) uses the same finger as strafing right (D). But come to think of it, having melee *and* jump use the same thumb as looking around seems pretty cumbersome.
It *is* annoying that you can only play the tracks on 'authorized' systems, and the other contrastrants, but people know this. By your arguement then people that bought games for Nintendo 64 were 'suckers' because they bought a game that was 'locked in' to a certain platform and wouldn't play on the Gamecube.
Er, not really. See, there are legitimate technical reasons why the Gamecube can't play N64 games, the least of which is that it doesn't have a cartridge slot!
The restrictions on tracks you buy from iTunes, however, are artificial. There's no technical reason that iTunes can't save purchased tracks as, at the very least, unencrypted AAC files. Since it has an MP3 encoder, there's no technical reason for its inability to convert purchased tracks to MP3s either. The only reason for these limitations is Apple's company policy.
If you want to make a video game analogy, a better comparison is region lockout schemes. Japanese and European games won't play on an American consoles, even when the hardware is exactly the same; the only reason they don't work is a corporate policy that says Americans have to buy games made for Americans. And guess what, Sony's video game lockout is just as bad as Apple's music lockin.
And guess what? It worked. Take the "live performance" and "rich patron" out of the equation and the amount of content producers exploded.
Luckily, it's the 21st century and we now have another option: "thousands, if not millions, of not-so-rich patrons". It works for political campaigns; it can work for artists too.
Which means at the moment the "fruits of his labor" belong to no one but him and those he chooses to license it to.
Yeah, I guess you could say that. Of course, if you were living in America 150 years ago, you could also say that a slave belongs to his master or whoever his master chooses to sell him to. You'd be right, legally speaking, but that type of "ownership" has no moral justification whatsoever.
That's an interesting possibility I had not considered. I do wonder, though, if it could work. I mean, there's nothing stopping artists from doing that today, and I've never heard of anyone doing it. I imagine it's because if someone, I don't care how famous they are, announced, "Everyone send me a dollar and I'll write a new album!", most people would laugh.
I'd say that's largely because there's already another more common model that both artists and consumers are used to. It's easier for the artist to just sign a contract, do his thing, and then hope that money comes in, rather than actually finding customers up front in order to make the money a sure thing.
Who's going to pay sight unseen for something of unknown value, especially when you could just wait and get it for free anyway?
Well, most theater patrons don't seem to mind paying $8.50 for a movie of unknown value, based on nothing but a 60 second trailer.
Yes, they could wait to get it for free, but at the cost of less assurance that they ever will get it. The question they must ask themselves is, "How much is it worth to me to see this work finished and released?"... keeping in mind that they only have to pay if it really does get released. As the amount of money collected gets closer to the goal, collecting the rest will get easier - never underestimate the motivating power of a simple thermometer graph.
By any previous standard you want to compare it to, we're obscenely wealthy in this regard - and we have access to books, music, and movies we'd otherwise *never* have seen, because the writers, musicians, and crews who make this content would otherwise be working a real job, to make real money, to put real food on the table.
How valuable is such "access" when it comes at the whim of whoever owns the copyright? Sure, you can listen to this song, if you agree to pay $X for it. You can watch this movie, if you agree to get it in a DRM-encumbered format and sit through unskippable commercials. You can read this e-book, if you use a DRM-encumbered player, pay more than the paperback costs, and feel like buying a second copy of the same bits if your original gets lost.
The purpose of any government assistance to artists, IMO, shouldn't just be get more works on the market, but to get more works into the public domain where they can be remixed, built upon, incorporated into other works, and enjoyed without having to get permission from the heirs of someone who died 25 years ago. You know, improving our shared culture, not just coming up with more products to sell.
Just because someone produces something that you might label as 'culture' doesnt give you the inherent right to that production for anything less than the asking price. Its as simple as that, and that is something you dont seem to get.
And just because someone would like you to pay him for a copy of a file doesn't give him the right to stop you from making your own copy for free. No one can own a number. It's as simple as that, and that is something you don't seem to get.
Well that's the crux, isn't it? "his conditions have been met". Today, the conditions are that he make some millions of dollars for his song.
Today, he can meet his condition by spreading those millions over a few million copies of his song.
Well, he can *try* to meet his conditions. There's no guarantee, and that's a problem. On the other hand, if he just says up front "I'm not writing a single note until I see a million dollars in an escrow account", then either he's guaranteed to get paid for his work, or he won't have to do the work at all.
Will he be able to do it tomorrow when that is no longer possible?
Who says it'll be impossible? Just because you can't make money selling copies doesn't mean you can't make money. And just because you can't make a million dollars by selling one copy each to a million fans doesn't mean you can't still make a million dollars - it just means you have to tell your million fans up front, "Give me a dollar if you want me to write another song".
The "rich patron" model is one possibility, but not the only one. We've seen political candidates raise millions of dollars from small individual contributions through their web sites. Now consider that more people vote for American Idol than vote for President! If a political candidate can fund his campaign by getting a lot of people to send in a little money, even when they know that the money will be wasted if their guy loses, just think how much easier it'd be for a popular musician to fund his next album the same way.
If a rich patron does come along and commission a new song for some millions, do you think the patron is going to share what he bought with all of humanity to use? Or will he keep his expensive commission for his own personal use?
If he keeps it to himself, that's fine with me, because no one but him and the artist will know about it in the first place. He has the right to try to keep it secret, although the rest of us have the right to make copies if we ever have the chance.
If those business models that are 'founded on restricting free speech' stop paying for production of the content that goes to make up the main core of all these torrent sites, what will the sites offer?
If that happens, I imagine the sites will offer content created under other business models, content that was produced in the past, and content from the public domain. Or maybe they'll dry up. Who knows, but more importantly, who cares?
The question you posed contains a huge "if", and as such it only pertains to a fantasy world where everyone stops making music, movies, and other works that people enjoy. But in the real world, people have been making music, writing, and painting for thousands of years, copyright or not. They aren't going to stop just because it becomes hard to make money by selling copies of information; they'll just switch to a model where they get paid more directly for the work they do.
The content isnt free, you just arent paying the asking price for it. [...] You have no inherent entitlement to the content.
That's one way to look at it, but not a very accurate way. The string of bits that makes up a movie or song file is free once it's been created in the first place, and while I don't think I'd use the word "entitlement", I would definitely say that we have the moral right to share those strings of bits with one another, just as we have the right to share sports scores or our thoughts on the weather.
It's a plain and simple fact that the string of bits I've attached to this message(*) will make "Hit Me Baby One More Time" come out of your MP3 player, just like it's a fact that it was 23 degrees outside today. Some people think it should be illegal to share one of those facts, not because it would lead to fraud, loss of life, or a breach of national security (some legitimate reasons for restricting information flow), but simply because it would mean a few large businesses had to be restructured. I, on the other hand, think the freedom to speak and write freely, as well as to share one's cherished experiences with friends and strangers, is important enough that we should demand a damn good reason for limiting it - and putting a buck in Sony's pocket doesn't exactly qualify.
Now, the effort that went into producing that string of bits for the first time is what isn't free, and that effort is what no one has an entitlement to. An artist is free to charge whatever he wants for recording a song, writing a book, etc., and to refuse to do any of it until his conditions have been met. But once he has agreed to do it, the fruits of his labor are free for all of humanity to use, just like any other numbers.
(* not really attached)
As illustrated in the above example, having some legitimate uses is not enough to avoid a ban, nor is having some illegitimate uses enough to justify one. Instead, we must weigh the legitimate and illegitimate uses against one another.
Of course, we must also consider what "illegitimate" means in context. A nuclear bomb has the potential to cause thousands, if not millions, of deaths, as well as render the land uninhabitable for decades to come. A BitTorrent site, on the other hand, merely has the potential to give thousands or millions of people access to free movies, music, TV shows, software, and porn, and the only threat it poses is to the business models that are founded on restricting free speech. Which one is the real threat?
T-Mobile does use the same frequencies as in Europe (makes sense, cause in Europe T-Mobile is known as good old Deutsche Telekom)
No, they don't. The European mobile phone frequencies are used for other things here - for example, 900 MHz is an unlicensed band used for cordless phones, baby monitors, walkie talkies, etc.
However, you can get quad-band GSM phones that work on the American frequencies *and* the European ones. I'm sure T-Mobile sells those, but remember, they're still working on the American frequencies when you use them in America.
I've never seen anyone who calls themself a gamer have any trouble with Halo/Halo 2, and I've played with hundreds of people.
I have.
I've been playing FPSes on the computer since the days of ROTT, but trying to control Halo with an Xbox controller is just humiliating, and I've given up on playing it with anything but a SmartJoy FRAG. My right thumb is used to pushing buttons and the space bar, and it just doesn't seem to have the dexterity to move that analog stick. With a mouse, I can instantly point my crosshair at anything I want, but with the Xbox gamepad, I just stand there like a fool while my view zooms right past whatever I wanted to shoot.
the US is is still the country with the worst GSM coverage I've encountered.
Griping that we have poor GSM coverage is like griping that Europe has poor CDMA coverage - worse, actually, because at least we have some GSM coverage, such as it is.
If we Americans want to go overseas, we have to rent or buy a phone at our destinations (except for the relatively few customers who already have a quad-band phone from a GSM provider). You can do the same when you come here, and then you can laugh at our ugly phones with external antennae just like we get to laugh at your toy-looking phones with weird little removable chips. It's fun!
Ummm, the point is, neither one of them violated any wiretapping laws. As much as I may dislike warrantless wiretapping, they are allowed to the POTUS under certain circumstances.
Those circumstances are described in FISA (which, I remind you, was changed during Clinton's term), and they don't apply to this administration's wiretapping. POTUS is not above the law.