Who was talking about copyrights anyway? I was talking about stealing and breaking the law So, it was just a random non sequitur, a bit of written Tourette's? You saw a thread about copyright and thought it'd be a good time to write about stealing instead?
Please. You were equating copyright infringement with stealing, which anyone who's thought about the issue for more than five minutes can see is false.
not some hippie mentality that says I can copy because The Man has enough money. I guess this is another one of those random outbursts, since neither of us has expressed that mentality.
The reasons copying is acceptable have nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the fact that copying doesn't deprive anyone of the work being copied or restrict how they can use it.
Yes, yes you can. In fact, I encourage it. It will make it easier to spot you without trying to pick you out from the other mouthbreathers. In other words, "I haven't thought about the consequences of my 'want money = deserve money' philosophy. Here, let me try to distract you."
But kudos for bringing out the ad hominem so early, saving your readers the bother of trying to take you seriously.
Or, you know, if you somehow were to break the law by stealing something that wasn't yours Copying isn't stealing because no one is deprived of the thing being copied. That's Copyright Debate 101, man.
or enjoying something without paying for it when the owner wants you to. So when I wear a funny T-shirt, can I demand money from everyone who laughs at it? I mean, I want that money, and according to copyright apologist logic, that means they owe it to me.
You know, silly things like that. No disagreement here.
Unlike anything covered by copyright law, these are services. There's no possible way that you can give your haircut to somebody else, nor the paint job on your house. There have always been a different set of rules regarding services compared to products. You're begging the question here. Why should we treat writing as a product at all? The service model works perfectly well: writing is something you do, not something you manufacture.
If you've truly discovered some miracle process by which you can cut something to a length with precision never before seen, you could try for a patent for that process and probably win it. Well, that standard is a little unfair, don't you think?
You don't demand that writers discover a "miracle process" by which they can place words with "precision never before seen" -- they get a copyright just for arranging words in a sequence that hasn't already been used. Surely, then, it would make sense to grant a lengthright to everyone who cuts a piece of paper to a length that hasn't already been used. (Unless you can find prior art, I'll start by claiming 12,345 mm.)
The copyright (/patent/trademark) systems are all abused, there's no doubt about that, but I still support the notion that non-tangible things have value and the concept that we should try to support creation of those things. I agree that we should support creation of those things, but we don't need copyright to do that. Writers can get paid for writing the same way other people get paid for doing other services: by selling their labor to the people who want it to be done.
If I write a book and there's no protections for me against a big publishing company going "thanks," paying me nothing, publishing my book, undercutting me on price and giggling all the way to the bank... I won't write that book. Most writers would probably rather focus on writing, not on selling copies. Once they get paid for writing the story in the first place (by their readers, or by anyone else who benefits from having it written), it doesn't matter who distributes the copies and how.
If you're going to argue that this is one of the cases we're better off leaving it absolutely free, okay. That is what I believe. Writing, painting, composing, etc. are services like any other, and the market for those services doesn't need special rules. Abolishing copyright would lead to those services being funded directly, rather than indirectly through the selling of copies.
Consumers would have the freedom to share and experience any media without the hassle or expense of licensing. Artists would be able to build on the works of others, and they'd be spared the risk of investing their time in something that never pays off: they'd know up front whether their work was in high enough demand to be profitable.
That may be true, depending on how you define "free speech", but it's not incompatible with the way free speech is codified in the First Amendment. "Free speech" is not used by any kind of authority to mean "the right to say anything you want, ever, no matter what." Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, fighting words, incitement to riot, etc. Sure it is. Those authorities recognize that a law against shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is in conflict with the principle of free speech -- but they also recognize that the First Amendment isn't meant to provide absolute protection for all types of free speech, just like the Second Amendment doesn't mean everyone can carry every type of weapon at every place and time. That is, you can restrict speech without "infringing the freedom of speech" in cases where the need for public safety, etc. overrides the principle of protecting free speech.
It pretty much is defined as that. We need to make sure we're not conflating "speech" (what comes out of your mouth when you vibrate your vocal cords) with "speech" (expression in general). The circumstances under which you can legally suppress my verbal speech based on copyright law are very slim: pretty much only public performances of a copyrighted work. "Speech" is a metaphor here, of course: I'm not only referring to vocalizations, nor is anyone else who talks about free speech in relation to copyright. The "exclusive Right to [one's] Writings" certainly has been interpreted to include veto power over what other people may write or transmit, even noncommercially.
I'm not arguing that copyright law is literally unconstitutional, only that it's incompatible with the principle of free speech.
One could argue, however, that "the exclusive Right to [one's] Writings" doesn't include veto power over other people's speech. It could be defined as the exclusive right to profit from the distribution or performance, for example.
I wouldn't expect the Supreme Court to go along with that interpretation, though. Remember, this is the same Court that decided "limited Times" allows for retroactive extensions, even when it means copyright terms are effectively unlimited.
Turning combat mode completely off, for a second, what phone is it? I'm curious. I have the Samsung SCH-u740 ("Alias"), but these days, the LG Voyager might be a better comparison.
Admittedly, the iPhone SDK has put a little more distance between the iPhone and my phone. And while it's capable of doing every task that the iPhone can do, the implementations of most of those features probably aren't as well-rounded. On the other hand, it makes up for much of that with a smaller size and extra features like GPS, 3G, dictation, and expandability.
My point was that usability is different from "flashy or cute or whatever," which goes against the mindset that unfortuately pervades Slashdot and explains why the crowd here is so singularly terrible at predicting the success of certain gadgets. Usability is part of that "whatever". What I meant was if he thought he ended up with a better product, he shouldn't be afraid to admit that he paid more for that. Instead, his argument was that he paid more because somehow that actually meant paying less.
Freedom of your OWN speech is protected. Not to share other people's speeches without their consent. There is a big difference there. I'd say there's virtually no difference at all. When words are coming out of my mouth, that's my speech. It doesn't matter whether those words also came out of someone else's mouth a few years earlier.
Of course these people own what they say (or in the case of music, what they produce). They produced it. That's nice and glib, but it doesn't hold up. A barber "produces" your haircut, so does that mean he owns it? A house painter "produces" the color of your house - does he own that? If I cut a piece of paper to a precise length, maybe even a length which paper has never been cut to before, do I own that length?
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to speak of "owning" something which is an attribute of something else. A haircut is an arrangement of hairs on your head. A poem is an arrangement of words on a page. A painting is an arrangement of color on a canvas. You can't own an arrangement any more than you can own a length or a weight; the idea is ridiculous on its face.
Just because you say it out loud once (or sing it at a concert) does not mean it instantly belongs in the public domain. Likewise, just because you say something out loud once (or sing it at a concert) doesn't mean you instantly "own" that utterance and, from there on out, should be granted veto power over whether anyone else can say it or sing it.
How about you say or sing whatever you want, and they say or sing whatever they want, and neither of you tries to get in the other's way? That's freedom of speech.
If you can really find a feature-equivalent phone that is 95% as pleasant to use as the iPhone for 15% of the price of the iPhone, more power to you, but I doubt such a phone exists. Actually, I believe I own that phone already, and I got it for $50. But that's beside the point. The guy didn't say he was buying Apple products because he likes the interface and can't get it anywhere else; he said he was buying Apple products to save money, and that's clearly not true.
So I bought a computer I'll get at least five years of real use out of instead of a two year throw away HP or Dell. "Two year throw away HP or Dell"... what is that supposed to mean? Yes, of course it'd be a waste of money to throw away your HP laptop every two years - but it'd be an even bigger waste to throw away your MacBook every two years, wouldn't it? That's why you don't do that.
There's nothing stopping you from keeping a non-Apple product for longer than two years, you know. Hell, my Toshiba laptop must be at least 6 years old now.
As to replacing the phone, most people replace their phones every two years or so, the trendies replace them every six months. I'm certainly not discarding an 8 month old phone for GPS and faster networking. Sometimes buying the cheapest is not the best way to save money. In this case, however, there's a lot of room between "the cheapest" and an iPhone. For example, you could've gotten a feature phone that does 95% of the same stuff as an iPhone for 15% of the price, and you'd be able to keep it just as long as you're going to keep your iPhone.
See, buying something more expensive only saves you money in the long run if the cheaper one would need so much more maintenance or replacement that it wouldn't be cost-effective. But this isn't one of those situations. An HP, Dell, Toshiba, or any other competing laptop will last just as long as your MacBook (for hundreds of dollars less), and a Samsung, LG, Motorola, or any other competing phone will last just as long as your iPhone (for hundreds of dollars less).
There's nothing wrong with spending more money to get something flashy or cute or whatever, but don't pretend you're saving money this way.
That doesn't mean a video tape or DVD counts as a "phonorecord" for the purpose of this law. There was an explicit attempt to make video rentals require the copyright holder's permission, but it didn't pass. Do you really think every video store gets permission, or is supposed to get permission, for every single movie they rent out?
Hell, even audiobooks don't count. This page isn't about video rentals, but it explains the limited scope of the rental exception:
The Court chose this latter reading after looking to legislative history and policy rationales behind the rental record amendment. Given the context of the legislation and the time the Amendment was passed, the Court concluded that Congress meant to specifically address the rampant piracy in popular musical recordings. Where technology has led to a new class of works needing protection, such as computer software, Congress has amended the statute to exempt these works from the first sale doctrine. Thus, absent explicit Congressional action, the Court construed the statute narrowly to avoid upsetting the traditional balance between rights of copyright owners and personal property rights of individual owners of copies.
Which part of that Wikipedia page says renting video tapes without permission is prohibited? I see this part:
The Record Rental Amendment of 1984 and the Computer Software Rental Amendments Act of 1990 both amended Section 109 to prevent all owners of software copies or phonorecords... to dispose of said copies through the acts of rental, lease, or lending... unless authorized by the owners of the copyright. But that only applies to software and phonorecords (i.e. audio), not video.
Meh. I paid $99 for TiVo, $149 for a surround receiver, $80 for a Harmony remote, and $99 for an Xbox that I loaded with XBMC and emulators (used ones are $49 now). MP3s and video are served from my desktop PC.
Including monthly fees for the past 4 years, I've spent around $1000 total... on the other hand, if I'd gotten the lifetime subscription, I'd be at $827 with no monthly fees. And with this setup I can also play Xbox games and connect other devices to the surround receiver (Xbox 360, Wii, VCR).
Plus, you need to pay around $10 per month for every Tivo that you have, if you have several that quickly adds up. You get a discount after the first one. For four boxes, you'd be paying $33.80 a month, which admittedly is nothing to sneeze at.
I can also do number of other things that Tivo doesn't do, like play games, listen to music, view photos, check the weather, subscribe to RSS feeds, stream media over the internet, burn DVDs and a bunch of other things. TiVo does most of those now.
Play games: check (although the games suck).
Listen to music: check, you can browse shares on your LAN or stream from Rhapsody and Live365.
View photos: check, from your LAN or a couple internet sharing services.
Weather: check.
Stream media over the internet: not for video, but you can use the Podcaster applet to stream podcasts. (You might be able to stream internet video if you install Galleon on your PC, but I never got that to work.)
Burn DVDs: you can copy recordings to your PC, convert them to plain MPEG-2 with a free utility, and then burn or transcode from there.
I'm a little bit surprised that slashdot has Tivo users. How can anybody here resist the urge to dust off one of the old PCs you have laying around to convert into a MythTV/BeyondTV box? It's Nerd-101 - A fairly straight-forward, practically free (assuming you have a space computer laying around), and immensely nerdy 4-6 hour project. I have a spare computer, but a mid-tower with a standard power supply and CPU fan is much too loud for the living room. That's the same thing that stopped me from using it as an emulator box, even after I'd paid for some front end software and a couple gamepads. The sound of a TiVo, on the other hand, is barely noticeable.
Also, the TiVo fits conveniently in my entertainment center, which has shelves designed to hold a VCR, DVD player, or cable box. A desktop PC would have to go on the floor and get bonked around by my Roomba.
Sure, I could buy a TV tuner, a remote, a miniature case, a quiet power supply, maybe another mobo if the case was too small for my ATX motherboard... but after all that expense, I'd still have to spend hours configuring and maintaining it? No thanks, TiVo works out of the box.
Oh, and I have two TiVos, but only one spare PC. Setting up another MythTV would mean buying a whole separate PC, and that one would need to be damn quiet in order to stay in my bedroom.
You have dealt with the logical side of the brain well enough, but what about the emotional side? Children and teenagers especially allow their logical minds to be overridden by their emotions, although adults do the same often enough. Perhaps you could explain what kind of scenario you're trying to prevent.
As it is, I don't see why we should concern ourselves with a person's emotional state, once we've already established that they have the decision-making capacity to give informed consent.
The emotional side of the brain is of critical importance, especially because that is the side of the brain that reacts strongest to pleasure, to hormones and to the senses. Yes, those are the motivations for having sex in the first place, but I don't see how they're relevant to the question of whether a person's consent is valid. If they know what they're getting into and they choose to do it, why does it matter how they feel about it?
However, if the only mindset we can easily examine is the intellectual one, then that leaves a lot of combinations that should be legal according to common sense left illegal. If we want to create (or just imagine) a wholly rational, equitable and just system, then that's not good enough. Again, could you explain this? Are you suggesting that some people who don't know what sex is, or what it can lead to, or aren't sure whether they want to have it should still be considered capable of consenting to sex because of their "emotional maturity" or the physical structure of their brain?
Once a method of testing people's maturity within both hemispheres of the brain on a non-subjective and non-invasive basis has been developed and has itself matured to the point where it is practical and cost-effective for it to be part of a regular check-up, then maybe - just maybe - the laws could be changed to match the reality of the situation for each individual rather than whatever the culture says should be the reality for all people with individuality cut out. You don't need new medical technology for that.
Let me use a computer analogy, since this is Slashdot: if I put a computer in front of you and tell you that this computer is capable of doing floating-point math, do you need to open it up and look at the motherboard to know whether I'm telling the truth? Do you need to look inside the CPU with an electron microscope to make sure it has an FPU?
Do you even need to check whether it has an FPU at all?
No. Floating-point math is a process, not a device. Even on machines without an FPU, you can still do floating-point math and get the same results, with the right software. All you need to do is open up the calculator program and type in some numbers. If it gives you accurate results, it passes the test, whether or not it has special hardware support.
Now, back to the topic at hand: maturity, decision-making, the ability to give informed consent, or whatever you want to call it... is a process, not a device (or an organ).
You don't need to look inside someone's brain to know whether they're capable of giving informed consent. All you need to do is define what "informed consent" means and then interact with them to decide whether it's within their grasp.
For sex, you can probably break it down into "knows what sex is", "knows what sex can lead to" (the informed part) and "still wants to have sex in light of that knowledge" (the consent). And you'll quickly find that these aren't things that require special insight or wisdom in order to grasp. If you can retain knowledge, make rational conclusions based on that knowledge, and form an opinion based on those conclusions, then you're capable of giving informed consent to just about anything.
Do you really think that the high oil prices really drives down consumption? Actually, it does, in the places where there's an alternative. Traffic in Seattle, among other places, has gone down as people switch to mass transit.
The problem is that in much of the country, there is no alternative to driving. I live in a city of 200,000 and transit is useless, turning a 10 minute car trip into a 90 minute bus ride. Cities like this have been laid out in such a way that they're only livable when driving is cheap, and that's going to be hard for the people who live there, but the fact is they just aren't sustainable: the assumption that driving would be cheap forever turned out to be false.
Sure, we might decrease oil consumption by a MARGINAL amount from people who will give up optional driving (yay for even less quality of life!), but people can't cut back on required driving. At some point, the cost of all that driving will outweigh the cost of moving someplace where less driving is required.
And more importantly, it'll encourage future investment and development in those places: someone who doesn't yet own a home will be factor in transportation costs when he's deciding where to move. Homes will be built closer to businesses instead of 25 miles away, and so on.
Yet in the same way in which this is not the same as photographing actual abuse, neither is it the same as merely using a child's picture in an advertisement without consent. Because it is child porn, but not child porn of the type that is also coincident with child sexual abuse. But the type that's coincident with sexual abuse is the only type that matters.
The abuse is where the harm comes from. If there is no abuse, it's no different from manipulating any other image. It might be offensive to the person who's falsely portrayed as engaging in this phony sex act, but that hardly justifies treating it as a separate crime: you could be just as offensive by, say, photoshopping the child into some photos from Abu Ghraib.
There's a difference between telling the age of a girl with clothes on by an amateur and telling the age of a naked girl with doctors there pointing at physiological signs that are very reliable (distribution of fat, proportions, etc). I don't think those signs are very reliable once you get more than a few years past puberty. Certainly, no doctor could tell the difference between a 17.5 year old and an 18 year old without asking for a birth certificate.
Besides, these people aren't just being put into prison because they might abuse children, they're actively supporting and distributing these acts to other people. So, why isn't it illegal to possess pictures of other crimes?
Following your logic, it "actively supports" police brutality to download pictures of a cop beating someone up; it "actively supports" underage drinking to download pictures of a high school party; it "actively supports" murders to download pictures of a serial killer's victims, and so on.
This is something the business can model, ie for every 95 customers that take 1 plate, there will be 5 customers that take 10 plates giving an average of 1.5 plates per customer. Now those heavy customers are taking 500 plates for an average of 26 plates per customer. See the problem? I don't think that's accurate. P2P has always been a driving force in the adoption of broadband.
It's not like people just suddenly started using file sharing. If those heavy users are only just now using 500 times as much as the low users, it's because the cap has been raised: they're now able to use 500 times as much bandwidth because the ISP has started offering that much bandwidth.
You seem to advocate that by saying they can give you bursts of speed, but then seem to expect that anything below that burst is an unfair limitation? Not at all! What I'm saying is there can be two caps: a burst cap and a sustained cap. If you want to make web surfing fast but prevent bandwidth from being sucked up by heavy users, set a high burst cap and a low sustained cap. That's perfectly fair, as long as it applies equally to all connections.
An advertising statement like "up to 6 Mbps" isn't talking about the burst cap, it's talking about the sustained cap: most ISPs don't have a separate burst cap. That statement means you can use whatever bandwidth is available at any given moment, which might be less than 6 Mbps, but never more than 6 Mbps for very long.
The unfair limitation is when customers aren't even allowed to go up to the sustained cap because they're using the "wrong" application.
If I'm paying for "up to 6 Mbps", then I expect to be able to use up to 6 Mbps for whatever program I want. If the network is so crowded at a given time that there aren't 6 Mbps available for me to use, I'll accept that (that's what "up to" means), but if that bandwidth is available, I expect to be able to use it.
(responding to both posts here)
Except now those people want to take 50 more plates, give them out to complete strangers and are perfectly fine if the resturant increases the price a little bit for all customers to compensate. What they aren't fine with is having a higher price for *them*, they want to pay the same as everyone else. Yes, like I said, that's how the business model is supposed to work. Some people only have a glass of soda, some people eat one plate of food, some people eat two plates, some people eat a dozen plates, and everyone pays the same flat rate.
If the buffet owner wants to use the flat-rate "all you can eat" business model, it's his responsibility to set his prices at a level where the total revenue from all customers is enough to pay for all the food they consume. If he isn't willing to do that, then he picked the wrong business model!
My point is why should the rest of the users have their connections slowed down when their patterns haven't changed? Why not only slow the traffic of those that would otherwise monopolize their connections? Because that's the deal. You pay a flat rate no matter how much you use; everyone has the same opportunity to use as much as they want; and the model works because for every customer who wants to use a lot, there's another customer who only wants a little but is willing to pay the same price.
I mean, you might as well ask why the people who only eat one plate of food at a buffet should have to pay the same price as the people who eat five plates. They're getting a worse deal, but is it really unfair? They knew how the business model worked when they came in. No one is stopping them from eating more than one plate; if they don't get a good value for their money, they have only themselves to blame.
Also, there are already technologies to let people use extra bandwidth in bursts. Comcast calls it "PowerBoost": you get the advertised 6 Mbps for sustained transfers, but for short bursts like web surfing, it goes up to 12 Mbps. They could halve the sustained rate to 3 Mbps, but keep the 12 Mbps rate in place for bursts, and the low-usage customers we're talking about wouldn't even notice the difference.
What you're asking is for the mass majority to subsidize the 5% very vocal folk who think that their $40 entitles them to a dedicated circuit. I hate to break it to you, but that's how it's supposed to work. Infrequent users "subsidize" frequent users, just like the people who go to a buffet and only eat one plate "subsidize" the people who go back for three more plates. ISPs knew it would work that way when they chose that business model, and customers knew it when they signed up.
I don't believe you're giving the ISPs the credit due to them: something did change and that "something" was the QoS for p2p traffic in general and BitTorrent specifically. "QoS" has a specific meaning, and it's not what's going on here.
If ISPs want to prioritize "important" packets like web surfing and VoIP over P2P packets, you know, that's fair enough. What that means is if there are two packets being sent, and only enough room on the network to fit one of them, a router will forward the VoIP packet and drop the P2P packet.
It's basically the same as what happens anyway when the network is congested, except instead of randomly choosing which one to drop, they'd always drop the "less important" one. And, this is the key difference, it only happens when the network is congested. If there's enough available bandwidth to send both packets, then they both get sent.
That's not what the ISPs are doing. They aren't changing QoS, they're deliberately breaking the protocol by sending false resets and so on. They're interfering with BitTorrent even when there's plenty of available bandwidth for it.
Well, SerpentMage said "you probably even have wireless from another telco". Either he was talking about cellular, or he's hopelessly optimistic about the number of people covered by wireless ISPs.
Slashdot Mirror
Please. You were equating copyright infringement with stealing, which anyone who's thought about the issue for more than five minutes can see is false. not some hippie mentality that says I can copy because The Man has enough money. I guess this is another one of those random outbursts, since neither of us has expressed that mentality.
The reasons copying is acceptable have nothing to do with money, and everything to do with the fact that copying doesn't deprive anyone of the work being copied or restrict how they can use it. Yes, yes you can. In fact, I encourage it. It will make it easier to spot you without trying to pick you out from the other mouthbreathers. In other words, "I haven't thought about the consequences of my 'want money = deserve money' philosophy. Here, let me try to distract you."
But kudos for bringing out the ad hominem so early, saving your readers the bother of trying to take you seriously.
You don't demand that writers discover a "miracle process" by which they can place words with "precision never before seen" -- they get a copyright just for arranging words in a sequence that hasn't already been used. Surely, then, it would make sense to grant a lengthright to everyone who cuts a piece of paper to a length that hasn't already been used. (Unless you can find prior art, I'll start by claiming 12,345 mm.) The copyright (/patent/trademark) systems are all abused, there's no doubt about that, but I still support the notion that non-tangible things have value and the concept that we should try to support creation of those things. I agree that we should support creation of those things, but we don't need copyright to do that. Writers can get paid for writing the same way other people get paid for doing other services: by selling their labor to the people who want it to be done. If I write a book and there's no protections for me against a big publishing company going "thanks," paying me nothing, publishing my book, undercutting me on price and giggling all the way to the bank... I won't write that book. Most writers would probably rather focus on writing, not on selling copies. Once they get paid for writing the story in the first place (by their readers, or by anyone else who benefits from having it written), it doesn't matter who distributes the copies and how. If you're going to argue that this is one of the cases we're better off leaving it absolutely free, okay. That is what I believe. Writing, painting, composing, etc. are services like any other, and the market for those services doesn't need special rules. Abolishing copyright would lead to those services being funded directly, rather than indirectly through the selling of copies.
Consumers would have the freedom to share and experience any media without the hassle or expense of licensing. Artists would be able to build on the works of others, and they'd be spared the risk of investing their time in something that never pays off: they'd know up front whether their work was in high enough demand to be profitable.
I'm not arguing that copyright law is literally unconstitutional, only that it's incompatible with the principle of free speech.
One could argue, however, that "the exclusive Right to [one's] Writings" doesn't include veto power over other people's speech. It could be defined as the exclusive right to profit from the distribution or performance, for example.
I wouldn't expect the Supreme Court to go along with that interpretation, though. Remember, this is the same Court that decided "limited Times" allows for retroactive extensions, even when it means copyright terms are effectively unlimited.
Admittedly, the iPhone SDK has put a little more distance between the iPhone and my phone. And while it's capable of doing every task that the iPhone can do, the implementations of most of those features probably aren't as well-rounded. On the other hand, it makes up for much of that with a smaller size and extra features like GPS, 3G, dictation, and expandability. My point was that usability is different from "flashy or cute or whatever," which goes against the mindset that unfortuately pervades Slashdot and explains why the crowd here is so singularly terrible at predicting the success of certain gadgets. Usability is part of that "whatever". What I meant was if he thought he ended up with a better product, he shouldn't be afraid to admit that he paid more for that. Instead, his argument was that he paid more because somehow that actually meant paying less.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense to speak of "owning" something which is an attribute of something else. A haircut is an arrangement of hairs on your head. A poem is an arrangement of words on a page. A painting is an arrangement of color on a canvas. You can't own an arrangement any more than you can own a length or a weight; the idea is ridiculous on its face. Just because you say it out loud once (or sing it at a concert) does not mean it instantly belongs in the public domain. Likewise, just because you say something out loud once (or sing it at a concert) doesn't mean you instantly "own" that utterance and, from there on out, should be granted veto power over whether anyone else can say it or sing it.
How about you say or sing whatever you want, and they say or sing whatever they want, and neither of you tries to get in the other's way? That's freedom of speech.
There's nothing stopping you from keeping a non-Apple product for longer than two years, you know. Hell, my Toshiba laptop must be at least 6 years old now. As to replacing the phone, most people replace their phones every two years or so, the trendies replace them every six months. I'm certainly not discarding an 8 month old phone for GPS and faster networking. Sometimes buying the cheapest is not the best way to save money. In this case, however, there's a lot of room between "the cheapest" and an iPhone. For example, you could've gotten a feature phone that does 95% of the same stuff as an iPhone for 15% of the price, and you'd be able to keep it just as long as you're going to keep your iPhone.
See, buying something more expensive only saves you money in the long run if the cheaper one would need so much more maintenance or replacement that it wouldn't be cost-effective. But this isn't one of those situations. An HP, Dell, Toshiba, or any other competing laptop will last just as long as your MacBook (for hundreds of dollars less), and a Samsung, LG, Motorola, or any other competing phone will last just as long as your iPhone (for hundreds of dollars less).
There's nothing wrong with spending more money to get something flashy or cute or whatever, but don't pretend you're saving money this way.
Hell, even audiobooks don't count. This page isn't about video rentals, but it explains the limited scope of the rental exception: The Court chose this latter reading after looking to legislative history and policy rationales behind the rental record amendment. Given the context of the legislation and the time the Amendment was passed, the Court concluded that Congress meant to specifically address the rampant piracy in popular musical recordings. Where technology has led to a new class of works needing protection, such as computer software, Congress has amended the statute to exempt these works from the first sale doctrine. Thus, absent explicit Congressional action, the Court construed the statute narrowly to avoid upsetting the traditional balance between rights of copyright owners and personal property rights of individual owners of copies.
Meh. I paid $99 for TiVo, $149 for a surround receiver, $80 for a Harmony remote, and $99 for an Xbox that I loaded with XBMC and emulators (used ones are $49 now). MP3s and video are served from my desktop PC.
Including monthly fees for the past 4 years, I've spent around $1000 total... on the other hand, if I'd gotten the lifetime subscription, I'd be at $827 with no monthly fees. And with this setup I can also play Xbox games and connect other devices to the surround receiver (Xbox 360, Wii, VCR).
Play games: check (although the games suck).
Listen to music: check, you can browse shares on your LAN or stream from Rhapsody and Live365.
View photos: check, from your LAN or a couple internet sharing services.
Weather: check.
Stream media over the internet: not for video, but you can use the Podcaster applet to stream podcasts. (You might be able to stream internet video if you install Galleon on your PC, but I never got that to work.)
Burn DVDs: you can copy recordings to your PC, convert them to plain MPEG-2 with a free utility, and then burn or transcode from there.
Also, the TiVo fits conveniently in my entertainment center, which has shelves designed to hold a VCR, DVD player, or cable box. A desktop PC would have to go on the floor and get bonked around by my Roomba.
Sure, I could buy a TV tuner, a remote, a miniature case, a quiet power supply, maybe another mobo if the case was too small for my ATX motherboard... but after all that expense, I'd still have to spend hours configuring and maintaining it? No thanks, TiVo works out of the box.
Oh, and I have two TiVos, but only one spare PC. Setting up another MythTV would mean buying a whole separate PC, and that one would need to be damn quiet in order to stay in my bedroom.
As it is, I don't see why we should concern ourselves with a person's emotional state, once we've already established that they have the decision-making capacity to give informed consent. The emotional side of the brain is of critical importance, especially because that is the side of the brain that reacts strongest to pleasure, to hormones and to the senses. Yes, those are the motivations for having sex in the first place, but I don't see how they're relevant to the question of whether a person's consent is valid. If they know what they're getting into and they choose to do it, why does it matter how they feel about it? However, if the only mindset we can easily examine is the intellectual one, then that leaves a lot of combinations that should be legal according to common sense left illegal. If we want to create (or just imagine) a wholly rational, equitable and just system, then that's not good enough. Again, could you explain this? Are you suggesting that some people who don't know what sex is, or what it can lead to, or aren't sure whether they want to have it should still be considered capable of consenting to sex because of their "emotional maturity" or the physical structure of their brain?
Let me use a computer analogy, since this is Slashdot: if I put a computer in front of you and tell you that this computer is capable of doing floating-point math, do you need to open it up and look at the motherboard to know whether I'm telling the truth? Do you need to look inside the CPU with an electron microscope to make sure it has an FPU?
Do you even need to check whether it has an FPU at all?
No. Floating-point math is a process, not a device. Even on machines without an FPU, you can still do floating-point math and get the same results, with the right software. All you need to do is open up the calculator program and type in some numbers. If it gives you accurate results, it passes the test, whether or not it has special hardware support.
Now, back to the topic at hand: maturity, decision-making, the ability to give informed consent, or whatever you want to call it... is a process, not a device (or an organ).
You don't need to look inside someone's brain to know whether they're capable of giving informed consent. All you need to do is define what "informed consent" means and then interact with them to decide whether it's within their grasp.
For sex, you can probably break it down into "knows what sex is", "knows what sex can lead to" (the informed part) and "still wants to have sex in light of that knowledge" (the consent). And you'll quickly find that these aren't things that require special insight or wisdom in order to grasp. If you can retain knowledge, make rational conclusions based on that knowledge, and form an opinion based on those conclusions, then you're capable of giving informed consent to just about anything.
The problem is that in much of the country, there is no alternative to driving. I live in a city of 200,000 and transit is useless, turning a 10 minute car trip into a 90 minute bus ride. Cities like this have been laid out in such a way that they're only livable when driving is cheap, and that's going to be hard for the people who live there, but the fact is they just aren't sustainable: the assumption that driving would be cheap forever turned out to be false. Sure, we might decrease oil consumption by a MARGINAL amount from people who will give up optional driving (yay for even less quality of life!), but people can't cut back on required driving. At some point, the cost of all that driving will outweigh the cost of moving someplace where less driving is required.
And more importantly, it'll encourage future investment and development in those places: someone who doesn't yet own a home will be factor in transportation costs when he's deciding where to move. Homes will be built closer to businesses instead of 25 miles away, and so on.
The abuse is where the harm comes from. If there is no abuse, it's no different from manipulating any other image. It might be offensive to the person who's falsely portrayed as engaging in this phony sex act, but that hardly justifies treating it as a separate crime: you could be just as offensive by, say, photoshopping the child into some photos from Abu Ghraib.
Following your logic, it "actively supports" police brutality to download pictures of a cop beating someone up; it "actively supports" underage drinking to download pictures of a high school party; it "actively supports" murders to download pictures of a serial killer's victims, and so on.
It's not like people just suddenly started using file sharing. If those heavy users are only just now using 500 times as much as the low users, it's because the cap has been raised: they're now able to use 500 times as much bandwidth because the ISP has started offering that much bandwidth. You seem to advocate that by saying they can give you bursts of speed, but then seem to expect that anything below that burst is an unfair limitation? Not at all! What I'm saying is there can be two caps: a burst cap and a sustained cap. If you want to make web surfing fast but prevent bandwidth from being sucked up by heavy users, set a high burst cap and a low sustained cap. That's perfectly fair, as long as it applies equally to all connections.
An advertising statement like "up to 6 Mbps" isn't talking about the burst cap, it's talking about the sustained cap: most ISPs don't have a separate burst cap. That statement means you can use whatever bandwidth is available at any given moment, which might be less than 6 Mbps, but never more than 6 Mbps for very long.
The unfair limitation is when customers aren't even allowed to go up to the sustained cap because they're using the "wrong" application.
If I'm paying for "up to 6 Mbps", then I expect to be able to use up to 6 Mbps for whatever program I want. If the network is so crowded at a given time that there aren't 6 Mbps available for me to use, I'll accept that (that's what "up to" means), but if that bandwidth is available, I expect to be able to use it.
If the buffet owner wants to use the flat-rate "all you can eat" business model, it's his responsibility to set his prices at a level where the total revenue from all customers is enough to pay for all the food they consume. If he isn't willing to do that, then he picked the wrong business model! My point is why should the rest of the users have their connections slowed down when their patterns haven't changed? Why not only slow the traffic of those that would otherwise monopolize their connections? Because that's the deal. You pay a flat rate no matter how much you use; everyone has the same opportunity to use as much as they want; and the model works because for every customer who wants to use a lot, there's another customer who only wants a little but is willing to pay the same price.
I mean, you might as well ask why the people who only eat one plate of food at a buffet should have to pay the same price as the people who eat five plates. They're getting a worse deal, but is it really unfair? They knew how the business model worked when they came in. No one is stopping them from eating more than one plate; if they don't get a good value for their money, they have only themselves to blame.
Also, there are already technologies to let people use extra bandwidth in bursts. Comcast calls it "PowerBoost": you get the advertised 6 Mbps for sustained transfers, but for short bursts like web surfing, it goes up to 12 Mbps. They could halve the sustained rate to 3 Mbps, but keep the 12 Mbps rate in place for bursts, and the low-usage customers we're talking about wouldn't even notice the difference.
If ISPs want to prioritize "important" packets like web surfing and VoIP over P2P packets, you know, that's fair enough. What that means is if there are two packets being sent, and only enough room on the network to fit one of them, a router will forward the VoIP packet and drop the P2P packet.
It's basically the same as what happens anyway when the network is congested, except instead of randomly choosing which one to drop, they'd always drop the "less important" one. And, this is the key difference, it only happens when the network is congested. If there's enough available bandwidth to send both packets, then they both get sent.
That's not what the ISPs are doing. They aren't changing QoS, they're deliberately breaking the protocol by sending false resets and so on. They're interfering with BitTorrent even when there's plenty of available bandwidth for it.
Well, SerpentMage said "you probably even have wireless from another telco". Either he was talking about cellular, or he's hopelessly optimistic about the number of people covered by wireless ISPs.