You and your GNUtard friends (and keep in mind, I write open-source code) plainly don't give two shits about the rights of those who are actually making things.
That's funny, because I am one of those people who are "actually making things".
I write software, both open-source and closed-source. I make a living by writing code: not by duplicating code I've already written and selling it in discrete little packages like it's coming off an assembly line, but by exchanging my code-writing labor for money. I don't need to worry about whether people copy the code I write, and neither does my employer, because we're not in the business of selling copies of files.
You don't need to be in the business of selling copies either. People can make their own copies. What they can't do is write the software in the first place: that's something there will always be demand for, copyright or no copyright, P2P or no P2P, so if you can provide it, you have nothing to worry about as long as you're willing to adapt.
Because the people in other industries are producing physical objects.
Look a little harder. Open the yellow pages and you'll find hundreds of businesses that don't produce physical objects - they perform services.
Writing software is a service too, and you can get paid for performing it, just like a barber gets paid for cutting hair and an accountant gets paid for balancing books. Just because copyright encourages you to think of a program as a thing that you create and sell doesn't mean that's the natural way to treat it, and certainly doesn't mean that's the only way to treat it.
And you're utterly, factually wrong about businesses "doing the work once those customers have agreed to pay them for it." Never fucking heard of retail, dipshit?
Why yes, I have. But it seems you haven't heard of services, so I'll give you a few minutes to look them up on Wikipedia.
Ready? OK.
Now, is there a reason you think retail is a better model than services for software development? Or are you just going to swear and insult me some more to distract from the lack of substance in your argument?
Why should we force everyone down one path, when clearly there is a place for both options?
Because copyright laws affect everyone, not just the people who choose to use a copyright-based business model. Web hosts have to police their users' content. Electronics manufacturers have to restrict what their equipment can do. Average folks have to restrict what they say to each other because some pieces of information are off-limits.
A copyright-based business model would be fine if it were opt-in for everyone, not just the copyright holders, but of course then copyright would be toothless.
But anything large-scale that isn't infrastructural (meaning recreational software) is going to essentially die in your sick little fantasyland.
No, it'll just need to be paid for differently: by charging for the programmers' labor instead of charging for copies of the files they produce.
How dare those people expect to make a living out of their work. It should all be free for you to use, and god [i]damn[/i] the whole "making enough money to eat" thing.
More like god damn the people who are too blind, or too attached to a broken business model, to realize that you don't need copyright to get paid for working. People in most other industries manage to get paid for their work without any special monopoly protections like copyright.
You tell those "fucking GNUtards" to "get a job in the real world", but maybe you should follow that advice yourself. You'll find that in the real world (i.e. industries that haven't become addicted to copyright), people don't do the work first, for free, and then spend months or years trying to get people to pay them for the work they've already done. They find customers first, and do the work once those customers have agreed to pay them for it.
Or is it just that now they've [i]already[/i] made the games, it's okay in your entitlement-based mind to say "oh, fuck you, we're going to take it and make it free for everyone, and too bad for you if you relied on it for income"?
If your income depends on people not being allowed to share information with each other, then you're doing it wrong.
Look, I'm not a huge fan of the MPAA/RIAA tactics. But I AM someone who makes their living making software. Good software. Software I'm proud of. And while I get some satisfaction from my work, I need to make a living here. I work for a company that charges for software.
Making a living by writing software doesn't mean you have to charge for copies of that software. If copyright didn't exist, you could still make a living as a programmer (or an artist, etc.) by charging for your labor.
Er, there's nothing ungrammatical about "speak good Chinese". "Good" is an adjective there, modifying the noun "Chinese"; "good Chinese" is what comes out of your mouth when you correctly apply the rules of the Chinese language.
If there is a problem with that name, it's semantic, not syntactic: one might argue that a person who speaks "bad Chinese" isn't really speaking Chinese at all, but their own language that sounds similar to Chinese.
Even progressive taxation is slavery - you are taking the few people in society that are good at creating value and forcing them at gunpoint to labor harder to support those that are not. Whoa, slow down there, Ayn Rand! No one's forcing you to stay in a country that provides infrastructure, law enforcement, and social services. If you want to be a rugged individualist, beholden to no one, you're free to move out to an uninhabited island and keep 100% of the value you create there.
Of course, you might find that it's difficult to create much value at all in such a situation, in which case it seems like society has a pretty fair claim on some fraction of the value they're helping you create when they provide you with things like courts and roads.
One constant across human existence - eventually the slaves rebel. Mm-hmm. How's that revolution working out so far?
So how about you don't switch until you can afford to pay? Excellent idea. But it's rather incompatible with your admonishment that people should only use insurance for catastrophic, unforeseeable events, and pay for routine visits out of pocket. An awful lot of people will never be able to afford that.
Saying that HSAs are useless for people with no money is true but not a very interesting statement to make. Well, I'd say it's interesting if we're going to be making pronouncements about how health care Should Be Done. The system has to work for people with no money too.
They can either exercise a lot more (work) or just work more hours to pay the tax (work). I'm guessing they don't want to (it's against their will). Read the parent posts (or the subject line): they were talking about a tax on certain foods, not a tax on fat people. If you don't want to pay the junk food tax, you can just stop buying junk food.
If you're in a position where a sudden $1000 charge will sink you financially then you really need to attain a better financial position. I know a lot of people are actually in that position, but that doesn't make this any less true. Well, that kinda goes without saying: if you have no money, you really need to get some. But it's easier said than done. There will always be people in that position, due to the realities of wages and living expenses.
If your employer is buying it for you then they can pay you the savings they get from using the cheaper health plan which should allow you to survive in the event that you need to pay the deductible. Maybe, if time weren't a factor.
Suppose I get a HSA and tell my employer to put me on a high-deductible insurance plan instead of the one I'm on now. Let's say this saves them $200 a month, which they pass on to me. Now suppose one month passes, I put $200 in my account, and then I get injured and have to pay up to $5600 out of pocket. Whoops!
The fundamental problem here is that to switch from insurance to HSA, you have to either set aside significant cash reserves or accept a lapse in coverage.
Not quite. Actually, slavery is what it's called when people get to literally own other people and force them to work against their will.
When the majority passes a tax that only applies to a small group of people, it's sometimes called a luxury tax, or a sin tax, depending on the thing being taxed, but usually it's just a tax. There are plenty of taxes that only a minority of people pay, and it'd be lunacy (or trollery) to call those all forms of "slavery".
It is not the size [of the tax] that matters. Forcibly taking away someone's productivity (in the form of money) is no different from theft.
In that case, your life must be pretty hard, getting robbed every time you buy goods or services and every time you receive a paycheck.
Perhaps you could move to an uninhabited island, where there's no government to steal your hard-earned money. Or perhaps you could adopt the same view as most of your fellow citizens, i.e. that taxes are the price you pay for living in a society with infrastructure, law enforcement, emergency response, and a basic safety net. After all, people aren't very productive if they're dead or too sick to work.
Please explain how HSAs are a realistic solution for people who (1) don't have a big pile of spare cash to fill up the account immediately and (2) have a nonzero chance of getting sick or injured before the account is full.
When something really expensive happens, the pre-tax money can't cover your super-high deductible if there is no pre-tax money yet.
The effects of second-hand smoke are often overstated, especially now that in many places, you can't even legally smoke indoors except in a private residence. The guy who walks past you on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette is not killing you.
This is why we have high deductible policies and Health Savings Accounts available now. [...] Of course there are sometimes emergencies that would cost a fortune, which is where the insurance comes in.
The problem, of course, is that if one of those emergencies occurs before your HSA is filled up, you might find yourself suddenly facing a bill between $1000 and $10,000.
HSAs are fine for people who either (1) have lots of spare cash or (2) are 100% sure they won't get sick within however many months or years it takes to save up for those huge deductibles. The rest of us need traditional insurance.
The article. Let me quote it once again, this time with emphasis:
Ms. Fortin said, however, that the case ended in court after a long, escalating dispute between the girl and her father and stepmother, which ended with the daughter being expelled from her father's house and living with her biological mother since May.
"Expelled" means kicked out. Who else would have the power to kick this girl out of her father's house, other than her father himself?
What, were you so eager to reply to my comment that you skipped everything after the first sentence?
The father can't send his daughter anywhere because she doesn't live with him anymore. He already kicked her out of his house. If he wanted to make decisions for her as her parent, the time to do that was when she was still living with him.
Whoa. there is a big difference here. copyright law says nothing about restricting what you can do with your own equipment or your freedom of speech. Sure it does.
I own an album, a CD burner, and a pile of blank CDs. I can give those blank CDs away to my friends. If I use my CD burner to put copies of the album on those CDs, however, I can no longer give them away. Copyright has restricted what I can do with my own property.
I can call my friend up on the phone and tell him what I did today. "I went to the store. I saw a box of cereal. The box had a picture of a tiger on it. The tiger was orange, looking to the left, and his smile revealed 12 teeth." But copyright restricts how much detail I can provide: if I happen to have a photographic memory (or a camera), I'm forbidden from telling him everything I know about that tiger (e.g. the colors of individual pixels), because I would be giving him the means to make his own copy of the picture.
Fundamentally, what copyright does is make certain communications subject to a third party's approval. If I hold the copyright on a certain work, that means there's a certain set of facts which you aren't allowed to share without my permission. I haven't seen a convincing reason why we should grant anyone such power, especially when the only thing at stake is the smooth operation of one particular business model, not public safety or national security.
I understand the rhetorical value of starting by condemning the tangible restrictions that everyone is opposed to (the DMCA prevents you from doing X with your DVDs, etc.) and then moving to abstract, principled criticisms such as those above. But in the context of this thread, I was directly addressing a factual claim about support for copyright law itself; I wasn't trying to gently convince anyone to come to my side.
BDS = Bush Derangement Syndrome: An Irrational fear of anything related to the George W. Bush presidency, and a tendency to blame everything wrong with the US Government, America, the World, and one's own personal life solely on G.W. Bush.) Fascinating. What do you call the related syndrome where people dismiss all criticism of George W. Bush's presidency as "irrational" and paint everyone who criticizes GWB's actions and policies as "deranged"?
Why not allow people to control what they create? Because in practice, that means allowing them to control what other people are allowed to do in their own homes with their own equipment. Giving a few people veto power over everyone else's speech and actions is a drastic course of action, and there's no real need for it. I've seen no convincing argument that I should give up my own freedom so that someone else can have an easier time making a buck.
They were free to not create it in the first place, which is just as bad as if they created it and didn't give anyone a license to use it. Yes, they were free not to create it, and they chose to do it anyway, knowing full well that it could be copied. But so what? What does that choice they made in the past have to do with whether they should be allowed to limit other people's speech and actions in the present?
I don't feel like copyleft is subverting copyright in any particular way, copyright law lets you do what you want with your own creations, including copyleft. Copyleft doesn't subvert copyright law as applied to the author; it subverts copyright law as applied to everyone else. When you release a program under a copyleft license, you give me back some of the rights that copyright law took away.
Don't get me wrong, being against copyright altogether is certainly a valid position to take, but it is by no means implied by being a fan of copyleft and free licenses. You're right, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I was merely trying to rebut the parent's claim that all free software fans "believe zealously in copyright"; the truth is, some do and some don't.
Sorry, but just because you procreated -- which, as Bill Maher says, is something a dog can do -- doesn't give you the "moral authority" to order other people around. Especially when they're not even living under your roof, as TFA explains:
Ms. Fortin [the girl's lawyer] said, however, that the case ended in court after a long, escalating dispute between the girl and her father and stepmother, which ended with the daughter being expelled from her father's house and living with her biological mother since May.
The problem comes in with things like cable-delivered services, where a number of customers are essentially sharing a "party line". If one customer is using the 10MBPS fully, others don't get much at all. Why is that a "problem"? Situations like that are exactly why the connection is described as up to 10 Mbps.
The question is, is the ISP (cable company) justified in cutting back on what each customer can use in order to be certain that the limited bandwidth is distributed "fairly" among all the people that the cable company chooses to put on the same circuit. Yes, as long as they do it honestly and without discriminating against any application or protocol.
That is, if offering customers "up to 10 Mbps" results in too much bandwidth usage, then they should offer "up to 6 Mbps" or "up to 2 Mbps" instead. They can even use something like Comcast's PowerBoost to raise the cap for quick bursts, so web surfing and email won't be affected.
Or does the cable company really have an obligation to make more bandwidth available by cutting down on the number of subscribers per "line"? Their only obligation is to deliver what they promise.
If the only way to offer "up to 10 Mbps" while ensuring that the service will still be usable is to cut down the number of customers per segment, then that's what they'll have to do. But they don't have to keep offering "up to 10 Mbps" if they don't have the network capacity for it; they could just admit that their network can't handle the level of service they've been promising, and go back to promising something less.
If they're selling him "up to 10 Mbps", then that means he should get to use "up to 10 Mbps" whenever he likes, via any application or protocol, as long as he's paying his bill.
"Up to 10 Mbps" only means "we don't guarantee there will be 10 Mbps available for you to use", not "you have to limit yourself to under 10 Mbps" or "we will artificially limit you to under 10 Mbps". If there's 10 Mbps or more available, then you get to use the full 10; if there's less, then you get to use whatever bandwidth is available.
Yeah I'm not comfortable paying $80 to the scumbags who pass for local cable around here just to get quality which is actually WORSE than broadcast due to the ridiculous compression they use. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend digital cable to anyone, but I have analog cable (which isn't going away anytime soon). No compression, no messing around with decoder boxes or CableCards.
At the end of the night I've got less eyestrain than working with a smaller or dimmer monitor, which matters when you spend an average of 18-24 hours of coding a week. Gotta say, I spend a lot more than 24 hours a week looking at text on a monitor, and eyestrain has never been a problem. If it affects you that much, I guess I can see how spending an extra $1200 on a monitor might not be such a waste.
A decent 22" LCD with the same resolution capabilities costs at minimum about $250 with worse contrast. I don't know about contrast -- I've certainly never had a problem with it on my monitor -- but you realize that price tag is an argument in favor of the 22" LCD, not against it, right? You could get a nice big SDTV and that LCD monitor for less than half the price of the HDTV. And you won't be supporting DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, by the way...
You and your GNUtard friends (and keep in mind, I write open-source code) plainly don't give two shits about the rights of those who are actually making things.
That's funny, because I am one of those people who are "actually making things".
I write software, both open-source and closed-source. I make a living by writing code: not by duplicating code I've already written and selling it in discrete little packages like it's coming off an assembly line, but by exchanging my code-writing labor for money. I don't need to worry about whether people copy the code I write, and neither does my employer, because we're not in the business of selling copies of files.
You don't need to be in the business of selling copies either. People can make their own copies. What they can't do is write the software in the first place: that's something there will always be demand for, copyright or no copyright, P2P or no P2P, so if you can provide it, you have nothing to worry about as long as you're willing to adapt.
Because the people in other industries are producing physical objects.
Look a little harder. Open the yellow pages and you'll find hundreds of businesses that don't produce physical objects - they perform services.
Writing software is a service too, and you can get paid for performing it, just like a barber gets paid for cutting hair and an accountant gets paid for balancing books. Just because copyright encourages you to think of a program as a thing that you create and sell doesn't mean that's the natural way to treat it, and certainly doesn't mean that's the only way to treat it.
And you're utterly, factually wrong about businesses "doing the work once those customers have agreed to pay them for it." Never fucking heard of retail, dipshit?
Why yes, I have. But it seems you haven't heard of services, so I'll give you a few minutes to look them up on Wikipedia.
Ready? OK.
Now, is there a reason you think retail is a better model than services for software development? Or are you just going to swear and insult me some more to distract from the lack of substance in your argument?
Why should we force everyone down one path, when clearly there is a place for both options?
Because copyright laws affect everyone, not just the people who choose to use a copyright-based business model. Web hosts have to police their users' content. Electronics manufacturers have to restrict what their equipment can do. Average folks have to restrict what they say to each other because some pieces of information are off-limits.
A copyright-based business model would be fine if it were opt-in for everyone, not just the copyright holders, but of course then copyright would be toothless.
But anything large-scale that isn't infrastructural (meaning recreational software) is going to essentially die in your sick little fantasyland.
No, it'll just need to be paid for differently: by charging for the programmers' labor instead of charging for copies of the files they produce.
How dare those people expect to make a living out of their work. It should all be free for you to use, and god [i]damn[/i] the whole "making enough money to eat" thing.
More like god damn the people who are too blind, or too attached to a broken business model, to realize that you don't need copyright to get paid for working. People in most other industries manage to get paid for their work without any special monopoly protections like copyright.
You tell those "fucking GNUtards" to "get a job in the real world", but maybe you should follow that advice yourself. You'll find that in the real world (i.e. industries that haven't become addicted to copyright), people don't do the work first, for free, and then spend months or years trying to get people to pay them for the work they've already done. They find customers first, and do the work once those customers have agreed to pay them for it.
Or is it just that now they've [i]already[/i] made the games, it's okay in your entitlement-based mind to say "oh, fuck you, we're going to take it and make it free for everyone, and too bad for you if you relied on it for income"?
If your income depends on people not being allowed to share information with each other, then you're doing it wrong.
Look, I'm not a huge fan of the MPAA/RIAA tactics. But I AM someone who makes their living making software. Good software. Software I'm proud of. And while I get some satisfaction from my work, I need to make a living here. I work for a company that charges for software.
Making a living by writing software doesn't mean you have to charge for copies of that software. If copyright didn't exist, you could still make a living as a programmer (or an artist, etc.) by charging for your labor.
-40 is the point of equivalence for the two scales. Any number lower than that is colder in Celsius than in Fahrenheit.
Er, there's nothing ungrammatical about "speak good Chinese". "Good" is an adjective there, modifying the noun "Chinese"; "good Chinese" is what comes out of your mouth when you correctly apply the rules of the Chinese language.
If there is a problem with that name, it's semantic, not syntactic: one might argue that a person who speaks "bad Chinese" isn't really speaking Chinese at all, but their own language that sounds similar to Chinese.
Of course, you might find that it's difficult to create much value at all in such a situation, in which case it seems like society has a pretty fair claim on some fraction of the value they're helping you create when they provide you with things like courts and roads.
One constant across human existence - eventually the slaves rebel. Mm-hmm. How's that revolution working out so far?Suppose I get a HSA and tell my employer to put me on a high-deductible insurance plan instead of the one I'm on now. Let's say this saves them $200 a month, which they pass on to me. Now suppose one month passes, I put $200 in my account, and then I get injured and have to pay up to $5600 out of pocket. Whoops!
The fundamental problem here is that to switch from insurance to HSA, you have to either set aside significant cash reserves or accept a lapse in coverage.
Not quite. Actually, slavery is what it's called when people get to literally own other people and force them to work against their will.
When the majority passes a tax that only applies to a small group of people, it's sometimes called a luxury tax, or a sin tax, depending on the thing being taxed, but usually it's just a tax. There are plenty of taxes that only a minority of people pay, and it'd be lunacy (or trollery) to call those all forms of "slavery".
In that case, your life must be pretty hard, getting robbed every time you buy goods or services and every time you receive a paycheck.
Perhaps you could move to an uninhabited island, where there's no government to steal your hard-earned money. Or perhaps you could adopt the same view as most of your fellow citizens, i.e. that taxes are the price you pay for living in a society with infrastructure, law enforcement, emergency response, and a basic safety net. After all, people aren't very productive if they're dead or too sick to work.
Please explain how HSAs are a realistic solution for people who (1) don't have a big pile of spare cash to fill up the account immediately and (2) have a nonzero chance of getting sick or injured before the account is full.
When something really expensive happens, the pre-tax money can't cover your super-high deductible if there is no pre-tax money yet.
The effects of second-hand smoke are often overstated, especially now that in many places, you can't even legally smoke indoors except in a private residence. The guy who walks past you on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette is not killing you.
The problem, of course, is that if one of those emergencies occurs before your HSA is filled up, you might find yourself suddenly facing a bill between $1000 and $10,000.
HSAs are fine for people who either (1) have lots of spare cash or (2) are 100% sure they won't get sick within however many months or years it takes to save up for those huge deductibles. The rest of us need traditional insurance.
The article. Let me quote it once again, this time with emphasis:
"Expelled" means kicked out. Who else would have the power to kick this girl out of her father's house, other than her father himself?
What, were you so eager to reply to my comment that you skipped everything after the first sentence?
The father can't send his daughter anywhere because she doesn't live with him anymore. He already kicked her out of his house. If he wanted to make decisions for her as her parent, the time to do that was when she was still living with him.
Fundamentally, what copyright does is make certain communications subject to a third party's approval. If I hold the copyright on a certain work, that means there's a certain set of facts which you aren't allowed to share without my permission. I haven't seen a convincing reason why we should grant anyone such power, especially when the only thing at stake is the smooth operation of one particular business model, not public safety or national security.
I understand the rhetorical value of starting by condemning the tangible restrictions that everyone is opposed to (the DMCA prevents you from doing X with your DVDs, etc.) and then moving to abstract, principled criticisms such as those above. But in the context of this thread, I was directly addressing a factual claim about support for copyright law itself; I wasn't trying to gently convince anyone to come to my side.
Sorry, but just because you procreated -- which, as Bill Maher says, is something a dog can do -- doesn't give you the "moral authority" to order other people around. Especially when they're not even living under your roof, as TFA explains:
That is, if offering customers "up to 10 Mbps" results in too much bandwidth usage, then they should offer "up to 6 Mbps" or "up to 2 Mbps" instead. They can even use something like Comcast's PowerBoost to raise the cap for quick bursts, so web surfing and email won't be affected.
Or does the cable company really have an obligation to make more bandwidth available by cutting down on the number of subscribers per "line"? Their only obligation is to deliver what they promise.If the only way to offer "up to 10 Mbps" while ensuring that the service will still be usable is to cut down the number of customers per segment, then that's what they'll have to do. But they don't have to keep offering "up to 10 Mbps" if they don't have the network capacity for it; they could just admit that their network can't handle the level of service they've been promising, and go back to promising something less.
If they're selling him "up to 10 Mbps", then that means he should get to use "up to 10 Mbps" whenever he likes, via any application or protocol, as long as he's paying his bill.
"Up to 10 Mbps" only means "we don't guarantee there will be 10 Mbps available for you to use", not "you have to limit yourself to under 10 Mbps" or "we will artificially limit you to under 10 Mbps". If there's 10 Mbps or more available, then you get to use the full 10; if there's less, then you get to use whatever bandwidth is available.