You're talking about using the fine as punishment. You can't throw the Verizon Corporation into a jail cell for 30 days, so you need an alternative method to "make them hurt" and be punished. A hefty fine is that method.
I have sworn the same other to charge a "fair fee" for my services.
However there are many instances where I think "fair" == "free" because the service I provided was done for my OWN enjoyment, and I was happy to be charitable. (Sometimes I even volunteer for the soup kitchen; shocking isn't it?) Fair has different meanings for different people, and nothing gives you the right to dictate to others what morals they should have. If they want to provide "free" services, that's THEIR business, not yours.
I used WordPerfect on an Amiga in 1989.
It was GUI based, and it worked beautifully. Never had any problems creating beautiful documents. I continued using it on a Macintosh from 1991 to 1995, and that too worked perfectly. Then I was forced to switch to Microsoft Word.
It was like having one hand tied behind my back.
>>>"Based on most UK news that seems far too low. We borrow things like American Idol from the US"
You got it backwards son.
American Idol was a hit in the UK first, and then later exported by the British producer Simon to the U.S. television.
I've already got a car that gets close to that: - Honda Insight - 80-90 mpg in real world I-95 driving (mine)
Volkswagen is also building a car that will get 240mpg, although it's only a two-seater. It will arrive late 2009 (europe), and hopefully hit the U.S. sometime shortly after.
It doesn't take "days" to download the latest Linux distro. For comparison, dialup is about 1/10th as fast (down) and 1/3 as fast (up) as my DSL account. It's quite useable:
- last night I downloaded the latest Acrobat Reader using my telephone line - 1/2 hour - then I visited ebay and bid on several items - then amazon where I bought a new antenna - and ended the evening by listening to BBC radio (downloaded via Utorrent)
Just because someone is on dialup does not mean they are unable to use the internet & visit various online businesses.
I tried to find my original message (posted on a different article), but I can't, so I'll just summarize:
- Imagine your boss tasked you to write a 100 page document, and after a week of work, you produce said document. The boss says, "Beautiful; great job" and you go home.
- You wait.
- And you wait some more, but no check arrives. You just gave away a week's worth of labor, and received no pay for that effort. That's called THEFT OF LABOR and is a violation of your basic rights.
----- Now imagine that your name is Stephen King, and the document you created was actually your latest short story. Your "boss" (aka the readers) copied the story off the internet, never paid for the story, and thus stole Stephen King's labor.
----- In another time (1700s/1800s) that would have been called slavery: Working for people, producing products, but not getting paid for it. It's a violation of the most basic human rights.
I don't consider downloading to be stealing property. Instead I consider it to be theft of another man's labor. I wouldn't want it done to me (creating documents w/o pay), and I'm sure Mr. King, et al do not like it either.
In my opinion: If you download a product, and you either (a) enjoyed it or (b) stored it in your personal library, then you have committed a Human Rights violation. You've enslaved another person to entertainment you, and stolen their labor without just compensation. IMHO you should pay the writer some cash; give him what he deserves.
I don't understand people who think they can do "other stuff" while driving. Just yesterday I almost got hit by a man who was so busy talking into his cell phone (yes it was handsfree headset so technically legal), that he drove right through a red light!
Dumb driver.
The brain is not a computer; it's can't multitask. It can timeslice, where it gives 50% of the time to the car and 50% of the time to the cellphone*, but devoting only 50% attention to driving is just not enough. You need to keep your attention focused & watching-out for anything that might suddenly pop-up in front of you (like a red light).
*
* In the case of yesterday's near-miss, I suspect that man was time-slicing his brain in this manner: - 5% on driving - 95% on whomever he was talking to
Well, he almost bought me a brand-new paintjob - it was that close. IMHO cell phones should be completely outlawed while driving. Along with shaving your beard, combing your hair, changing your clothes... basically anything that takes your eyes (or ears) away from the road.
"Imagination" is what created the Torah and later the Bible, which led to 800 years of Theocratic rule under the Catholic Church and a stifling of progress, because anyone who dared question the "imaginative fairy tale" presented in the Bible and punished & tortured & sometimes executed.
.
"Rational thought and reasoning" is what broke the Theocracy and lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the rapid development of today's technological world.
Imagination is a great thing IF AND ONLY IF it is tempered with a rational/reasoning intellect. Otherwise it is just pure fiction.
Why it's labeled "insightful" makes no sense to me. It was condescending & insulting to the poster who was making a point that comes direct from the Enlightenment:
- use rational reasoning; investigate; question
People who don't follow Enlightenment humanism, and don't question thing are:
Physically speaking, a 13 year old is only a few months from being a biological adult. (In other words, capable of making babies.) For all we know, she may have already reached that stage. POINT: You don't treat a young adult the same way you treat a child. Instead you need to teach them how to "get along" in the world, including how to deal with the trash found on the internet, rather than hide from it.
And so:
I'm sure the parents told this young woman many times, "If you need help, or you need to talk about problems, come to us." If she chose to ignore that advice, that's HER fault, not the parents' fault. They made themselves available to help; she simply chose not to go to them.
Don't blame others for your poor choices.
I've been online since age seventeen, but it's certainly not the first time I've been bullied, because bullying happens in the real world too. I was bullied as early as 2nd grade, and I could have killed myself to "solve" the problem, but chose not to. Instead I listened to my parents' advice to "come talk", I told them about the bullies, and they helped guide me in the right direction.
That's what this young lady should have done: talk to mom and dad about the hate-mail.
Okay well the Dalhmers may not be identical, but they are not the only twins featured in Playboy. I've seen differing breast sizes in other twins as well.
(Let's see - College Girls Special Edition, circa 1999, two hispanic twins. One has C size and the other has B size (approximately). I had figured one had eaten more fatty food, but maybe it's in the genes.)
I feel sorry for the girl, but ultimately it was HER DECISION to commit suicide. You can't blame somebody else for your own actions.... there are a lot of assholes & bullies out there, and learning to deal with them is a part of life.
If the girl has been wiser, she could have (a) mark the hate mail as "spam" so they'd go straight to trash (b) ask her parents for help, if she didn't know how to do that
My brother just bought a Vista machine after I specifically told him *not* to buy Vista, but to get an XP machine instead. Of course he insisted he HAS to have the newest thing (never mind that new often equals buggy). But does he listen to his engineer brother's expertise??? No because he's a truck driver, and of course a truck driver knows better than an engineer, because truck drivers use computers all the time, and.....
Ahem.
Anyway. I swear his vista machine with 3 gigahertz processor runs *slower* than my 0.4 gigahertz laptop with Windows 98!
Win98 > Vista in speed? Sad. Vista's a kludge. I'll stick with XP thank you.
XP is not perfect, but runs a lot faster than Vista ever will. So Vista's Service Pack 1 caused problems for users? Gee. Shocking.
I don't understand people who "see things" where nothing exists. Like the Face on Mars. Okay yes it kinda, sorta looks like a face. HOWEVER it also looks like a bunch of rocks, which is what it is (later images confirm this).
People need to learn to Question what they see, rather than just blindly believe.
I was mainly trying to refute the statement that Commodore 64 made its users "remember funky parameters and obscure sequences".
LOAD "*"
should be blatantly obvious to anyone who knows wildcards or uses search engines. It simply loads the first program it sees. Nothing complicated about that. And the appended,8 is simply the drive (like a: b: c: d: on Windows).
The command is not "obscure" is you use your brain. I guess that's something else that's become obsolete (casual users don't need to use their brains on modern winDoze).
Any dictionary that defines Republic == Democracy is wrong. There are many, many Republics in the world that don't have any democracy of any kind. For example, the former Soviet Socialist Republics, and modern-day Republic of China.
Democracy == majority rules Republic == the law rules.
Under a Democracy, the majority can squash the minority underfoot with a simple 50%+1 vote. Under the U.S. Republic, the majority can not do that because the LAW reigns supreme, and our law includes a Bill of Rights that protects individuals from being squashed by the majority.
We are a Republic (rule of law; protection of individual rights). We are not a Democracy (majority rule; no protection of the individual). Don't confuse the two.
>>>I have found that modern dictionaries accept democracy and republic as synonyms>>"Such weighty decisions should be left in the hands of an educated, above-average intelligent body."
>>>"I wouldn't think to argue with a subjective argument like that. However: I would have wished that you had clarified what you meant by "above average". Is that the upper 50 percent? The upper 10 percent? The upper 1 percent? That would have helped me understand what social status you think of yourself as having."
I wasn't speaking of myself. I was speaking of the Supreme Court. And "above average" means above average. If the average person is a high school grad, I would expect our leaders to be above that. And virtually all of them do hold advanced degrees/knowledge. (As far as I know, the supremes all have Ph.Ds (or the legal equivalent thereof), and many many years of legal experience.) I certainly wouldn't want Joe Billy Bob with his GED to be assigned to the U.S.S.C.
A high school grad doesn't have the intelligence or experience required to do the job. (I'll qualify that; even if he were intelligent, he's still lacking the experience;) (like how to read legalese, historical precedent, original intent, et cetera...)
A high school grad could no more be a Supreme Court Judge than he could pick-up a pen and start designing a skyscraper. It just does not work that way. You have to have the knowledge to perform the job, and the high school grad (your "average" person) does not have that knowledge.
>>>"I'd likely get a bunch of Christians and Muslims who would think I should be "sentenced to burn in hell" via an electric chair.
>>>"I think that your knowledge of the U.S. legal system is limited. A jury only has the power to acquit, or allow the prosecutor and judge to convict."
Uh huh.
Yes I exaggerated a bit. However I could still be found "guilty" by that Christian/Muslim jury (of having naked photographs on my computer), even though the U.S. Constitution explicity protects my right to have such content in the privacy of my own home.
No. A jury should not be the one to enforce Constitutionality. In most cases they'd find people "guilty" purely on morality, and ignore the Constitutional protections completely. No thanks. Bad idea.
I trust the Law. I don't trust the people around me. I trust the Constitution to protect my individual freedom. I don't trust a jury filled with dummies. (Just read history to see how juries failed to protect blacks; they'd find blacks guilty because they *ignored the constitution* and went with their own racist attitudes.) Pass; bad idea; a jury should not be the final arbiter of the U.S. Constitution.
>>>"I only have one viable choice other than Comcast"
So then you DO have a choice. You don't have to continue bending over and letting Comcast have its way with you. You could quit them, and go to the other company. As I have done.
>>>"most people don't even have that."
Disagree. There are SOME people living in rural Wyoming who don't even have basic cell phone service, but "most" people live near cities, and living near a city gives you a lot of different options. Like Dialup. Like Satellite. Like Wireless. They don't "have" to use Comcast's internet.
>>>"The problem with DRM is that the people it's intended for know how to circumvent it, and all other pirates get the illigal, non-DRM version. Meantime, the paying customers are stuck with crappy DRM-limited versions."
Yes true, but with Bittorrent even casual users can become pirates. Rip a CD, create a torrent, and within just one or two months, you've created 10,000 copies for whoever leeched off that torrent.
Hence the need for DRM.
The only problem is that the DRM needs to be reasonable (say 5 copies per purchase), not a 1 copy per customer limit. That's just nuts. Or greedy. Given how RIAA operates, probably greedy.
CD sales dropped because single sales (itunes, rhapsody, et cetera) have gone through the roof. People want individual songs, not whole albums.
(Of course the record companies conveniently keep that statistic quiet. They don't want us to know that Singles Sales are setting new records. That would ruin their anti-piracy campaign.)
>>>"You've done this numerous times so you don't really care about the quality of your work so long as you get that check. What you've done is worthless. What you've done is taken money for worthless labor on your part. Like what the RIAA is doing to consumers."
That does happen sometimes. For example I downloaded Prison Break season 1, determined it was crap afer watching it, and promptly erased it from my computer's disk. Not worth paying money and I'll never watch that show again. However....
There are many users with 100+ DVD-Rs (or 1 terabyte drives) filling their shelves.
If the work is worthless, why are they hanging on to it? Apparently the content on those DVD-Rs/hard drives must have SOME value to them, since they are keeping those works on their shelves. Therefore they should pay up, and pay for the labor of Stephen King, et cetera rather than steal the labor.
It doesn't work both ways. You can't complain "this is worthless" and yet horde it on your bookshelf.
If you're keeping it, that means it isn't worthless. That means you should pay for the labor of the creator, rather than turn him into an Unpaid slave/employee.
Yeah. Well. My Commodore 64 only cost $300! ($100 for the computer and $200 for the drive). Bet you couldn't buy an Atari or Apple equivalent for the same price. So there!;-)
Actually the low price was the reason Commodore 64 became the best-selling computer 1984, 85, and 86. But anyway.... This conversation reminds me of the old flame wars on 1980s-era BBSes. "68020 is better. No 80286! You're wrong! No you are." Heh. Seems kinda pointless now.
I now have my C64 hooked to a 27 inch television. It is slightly blurry (S-video), but fun to play the old games.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words:
You're talking about using the fine as punishment. You can't throw the Verizon Corporation into a jail cell for 30 days, so you need an alternative method to "make them hurt" and be punished. A hefty fine is that method.
I have sworn the same other to charge a "fair fee" for my services.
However there are many instances where I think "fair" == "free" because the service I provided was done for my OWN enjoyment, and I was happy to be charitable. (Sometimes I even volunteer for the soup kitchen; shocking isn't it?) Fair has different meanings for different people, and nothing gives you the right to dictate to others what morals they should have. If they want to provide "free" services, that's THEIR business, not yours.
Butt out.
People rarely give away money or products without strings attached.
I used WordPerfect on an Amiga in 1989. It was GUI based, and it worked beautifully. Never had any problems creating beautiful documents. I continued using it on a Macintosh from 1991 to 1995, and that too worked perfectly. Then I was forced to switch to Microsoft Word. It was like having one hand tied behind my back.
>>>"Based on most UK news that seems far too low. We borrow things like American Idol from the US" You got it backwards son. American Idol was a hit in the UK first, and then later exported by the British producer Simon to the U.S. television.
I've already got a car that gets close to that:
- Honda Insight - 80-90 mpg in real world I-95 driving (mine)
Volkswagen is also building a car that will get 240mpg, although it's only a two-seater. It will arrive late 2009 (europe), and hopefully hit the U.S. sometime shortly after.
It doesn't take "days" to download the latest Linux distro. For comparison, dialup is about 1/10th as fast (down) and 1/3 as fast (up) as my DSL account. It's quite useable:
- last night I downloaded the latest Acrobat Reader using my telephone line - 1/2 hour
- then I visited ebay and bid on several items
- then amazon where I bought a new antenna
- and ended the evening by listening to BBC radio (downloaded via Utorrent)
Just because someone is on dialup does not mean they are unable to use the internet & visit various online businesses.
I tried to find my original message (posted on a different article), but I can't, so I'll just summarize:
- Imagine your boss tasked you to write a 100 page document, and after a week of work, you produce said document. The boss says, "Beautiful; great job" and you go home.
- You wait.
- And you wait some more, but no check arrives. You just gave away a week's worth of labor, and received no pay for that effort. That's called THEFT OF LABOR and is a violation of your basic rights.
----- Now imagine that your name is Stephen King, and the document you created was actually your latest short story. Your "boss" (aka the readers) copied the story off the internet, never paid for the story, and thus stole Stephen King's labor.
----- In another time (1700s/1800s) that would have been called slavery: Working for people, producing products, but not getting paid for it. It's a violation of the most basic human rights.
I don't consider downloading to be stealing property.
Instead I consider it to be theft of another man's labor.
I wouldn't want it done to me (creating documents w/o pay),
and I'm sure Mr. King, et al do not like it either.
In my opinion: If you download a product, and you either (a) enjoyed it or (b) stored it in your personal library, then you have committed a Human Rights violation. You've enslaved another person to entertainment you, and stolen their labor without just compensation. IMHO you should pay the writer some cash; give him what he deserves.
I don't understand people who think they can do "other stuff" while driving. Just yesterday I almost got hit by a man who was so busy talking into his cell phone (yes it was handsfree headset so technically legal), that he drove right through a red light!
Dumb driver.
The brain is not a computer; it's can't multitask. It can timeslice, where it gives 50% of the time to the car and 50% of the time to the cellphone*, but devoting only 50% attention to driving is just not enough. You need to keep your attention focused & watching-out for anything that might suddenly pop-up in front of you (like a red light).
*
* In the case of yesterday's near-miss, I suspect that man was time-slicing his brain in this manner:
- 5% on driving
- 95% on whomever he was talking to
Well, he almost bought me a brand-new paintjob - it was that close. IMHO cell phones should be completely outlawed while driving. Along with shaving your beard, combing your hair, changing your clothes... basically anything that takes your eyes (or ears) away from the road.
"Imagination" is what created the Torah and later the Bible, which led to 800 years of Theocratic rule under the Catholic Church and a stifling of progress, because anyone who dared question the "imaginative fairy tale" presented in the Bible and punished & tortured & sometimes executed.
.
"Rational thought and reasoning" is what broke the Theocracy and lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the rapid development of today's technological world.
Imagination is a great thing IF AND ONLY IF it is tempered with a rational/reasoning intellect. Otherwise it is just pure fiction.
Why it's labeled "insightful" makes no sense to me. It was condescending & insulting to the poster who was making a point that comes direct from the Enlightenment:
- use rational reasoning; investigate; question
People who don't follow Enlightenment humanism, and don't question thing are:
- superstitious; zealots; easily fooled
I'd like to know who marked "theaveng" posting as a troll?
That wasn't a troll. In fact it was quite informative to learn how the U.S. government protects its laptops.
Physically speaking, a 13 year old is only a few months from being a biological adult. (In other words, capable of making babies.) For all we know, she may have already reached that stage. POINT: You don't treat a young adult the same way you treat a child. Instead you need to teach them how to "get along" in the world, including how to deal with the trash found on the internet, rather than hide from it.
And so:
I'm sure the parents told this young woman many times, "If you need help, or you need to talk about problems, come to us." If she chose to ignore that advice, that's HER fault, not the parents' fault. They made themselves available to help; she simply chose not to go to them.
Don't blame others for your poor choices.
I've been online since age seventeen, but it's certainly not the first time I've been bullied, because bullying happens in the real world too. I was bullied as early as 2nd grade, and I could have killed myself to "solve" the problem, but chose not to. Instead I listened to my parents' advice to "come talk", I told them about the bullies, and they helped guide me in the right direction.
That's what this young lady should have done:
talk to mom and dad about the hate-mail.
NSFW? (not safe for work?)
Okay well the Dalhmers may not be identical, but they are not the only twins featured in Playboy. I've seen differing breast sizes in other twins as well.
(Let's see - College Girls Special Edition, circa 1999, two hispanic twins. One has C size and the other has B size (approximately). I had figured one had eaten more fatty food, but maybe it's in the genes.)
I feel sorry for the girl, but ultimately it was HER DECISION to commit suicide. You can't blame somebody else for your own actions.... there are a lot of assholes & bullies out there, and learning to deal with them is a part of life.
If the girl has been wiser, she could have
(a) mark the hate mail as "spam" so they'd go straight to trash
(b) ask her parents for help, if she didn't know how to do that
Gee.
Gosh.
What a surprise.
My brother just bought a Vista machine after I specifically told him *not* to buy Vista, but to get an XP machine instead. Of course he insisted he HAS to have the newest thing (never mind that new often equals buggy). But does he listen to his engineer brother's expertise??? No because he's a truck driver, and of course a truck driver knows better than an engineer, because truck drivers use computers all the time, and.....
Ahem.
Anyway. I swear his vista machine with 3 gigahertz processor runs *slower* than my 0.4 gigahertz laptop with Windows 98!
Win98 > Vista in speed?
Sad. Vista's a kludge.
I'll stick with XP thank you.
XP is not perfect, but runs a lot faster than Vista ever will. So Vista's Service Pack 1 caused problems for users? Gee. Shocking.
I don't understand people who "see things" where nothing exists. Like the Face on Mars. Okay yes it kinda, sorta looks like a face. HOWEVER it also looks like a bunch of rocks, which is what it is (later images confirm this).
People need to learn to Question what they see,
rather than just blindly believe.
Thanks.
,8 is simply the drive (like a: b: c: d: on Windows).
I was mainly trying to refute the statement that Commodore 64 made its users "remember funky parameters and obscure sequences".
LOAD "*"
should be blatantly obvious to anyone who knows wildcards or uses search engines. It simply loads the first program it sees. Nothing complicated about that. And the appended
The command is not "obscure" is you use your brain.
I guess that's something else that's become obsolete
(casual users don't need to use their brains on modern winDoze).
P.S.
Any dictionary that defines Republic == Democracy is wrong. There are many, many Republics in the world that don't have any democracy of any kind. For example, the former Soviet Socialist Republics, and modern-day Republic of China.
Democracy == majority rules
Republic == the law rules.
Under a Democracy, the majority can squash the minority underfoot with a simple 50%+1 vote. Under the U.S. Republic, the majority can not do that because the LAW reigns supreme, and our law includes a Bill of Rights that protects individuals from being squashed by the majority.
We are a Republic (rule of law; protection of individual rights).
We are not a Democracy (majority rule; no protection of the individual).
Don't confuse the two.
>>>I have found that modern dictionaries accept democracy and republic as synonyms>>"Such weighty decisions should be left in the hands of an educated, above-average intelligent body."
>>>"I wouldn't think to argue with a subjective argument like that. However: I would have wished that you had clarified what you meant by "above average". Is that the upper 50 percent? The upper 10 percent? The upper 1 percent? That would have helped me understand what social status you think of yourself as having."
I wasn't speaking of myself. I was speaking of the Supreme Court. And "above average" means above average. If the average person is a high school grad, I would expect our leaders to be above that. And virtually all of them do hold advanced degrees/knowledge. (As far as I know, the supremes all have Ph.Ds (or the legal equivalent thereof), and many many years of legal experience.) I certainly wouldn't want Joe Billy Bob with his GED to be assigned to the U.S.S.C.
A high school grad doesn't have the intelligence or experience required to do the job.
(I'll qualify that; even if he were intelligent, he's still lacking the experience;)
(like how to read legalese, historical precedent, original intent, et cetera...)
A high school grad could no more be a Supreme Court Judge than he could pick-up a pen and start designing a skyscraper. It just does not work that way. You have to have the knowledge to perform the job, and the high school grad (your "average" person) does not have that knowledge.
>>>"I'd likely get a bunch of Christians and Muslims who would think I should be "sentenced to burn in hell" via an electric chair.
>>>"I think that your knowledge of the U.S. legal system is limited. A jury only has the power to acquit, or allow the prosecutor and judge to convict."
Uh huh.
Yes I exaggerated a bit. However I could still be found "guilty" by that Christian/Muslim jury (of having naked photographs on my computer), even though the U.S. Constitution explicity protects my right to have such content in the privacy of my own home.
No. A jury should not be the one to enforce Constitutionality.
In most cases they'd find people "guilty" purely on morality,
and ignore the Constitutional protections completely.
No thanks.
Bad idea.
I trust the Law. I don't trust the people around me. I trust the Constitution to protect my individual freedom. I don't trust a jury filled with dummies. (Just read history to see how juries failed to protect blacks; they'd find blacks guilty because they *ignored the constitution* and went with their own racist attitudes.) Pass; bad idea; a jury should not be the final arbiter of the U.S. Constitution.
>>>"I only have one viable choice other than Comcast"
So then you DO have a choice. You don't have to continue bending over and letting Comcast have its way with you. You could quit them, and go to the other company. As I have done.
>>>"most people don't even have that."
Disagree. There are SOME people living in rural Wyoming who don't even have basic cell phone service, but "most" people live near cities, and living near a city gives you a lot of different options. Like Dialup. Like Satellite. Like Wireless. They don't "have" to use Comcast's internet.
>>>"Please re-read the GP"
I would if I knew what a "GP" was?
L8r.
>>>"The problem with DRM is that the people it's intended for know how to circumvent it, and all other pirates get the illigal, non-DRM version. Meantime, the paying customers are stuck with crappy DRM-limited versions."
Yes true, but with Bittorrent even casual users can become pirates. Rip a CD, create a torrent, and within just one or two months, you've created 10,000 copies for whoever leeched off that torrent.
Hence the need for DRM.
The only problem is that the DRM needs to be reasonable (say 5 copies per purchase), not a 1 copy per customer limit. That's just nuts. Or greedy. Given how RIAA operates, probably greedy.
CD sales didn't drop because of piracy.
CD sales dropped because single sales (itunes, rhapsody, et cetera) have gone through the roof. People want individual songs, not whole albums.
(Of course the record companies conveniently keep that statistic quiet. They don't want us to know that Singles Sales are setting new records. That would ruin their anti-piracy campaign.)
>>>"You've done this numerous times so you don't really care about the quality of your work so long as you get that check. What you've done is worthless. What you've done is taken money for worthless labor on your part. Like what the RIAA is doing to consumers."
That does happen sometimes. For example I downloaded Prison Break season 1, determined it was crap afer watching it, and promptly erased it from my computer's disk. Not worth paying money and I'll never watch that show again. However....
There are many users with 100+ DVD-Rs
(or 1 terabyte drives) filling their shelves.
If the work is worthless, why are they hanging on to it? Apparently the content on those DVD-Rs/hard drives must have SOME value to them, since they are keeping those works on their shelves. Therefore they should pay up, and pay for the labor of Stephen King, et cetera rather than steal the labor.
It doesn't work both ways.
You can't complain "this is worthless"
and yet horde it on your bookshelf.
If you're keeping it, that means it isn't worthless. That means you should pay for the labor of the creator, rather than turn him into an Unpaid slave/employee.
Yeah. ;-)
Well.
My Commodore 64 only cost $300! ($100 for the computer and $200 for the drive). Bet you couldn't buy an Atari or Apple equivalent for the same price. So there!
Actually the low price was the reason Commodore 64 became the best-selling computer 1984, 85, and 86. But anyway.... This conversation reminds me of the old flame wars on 1980s-era BBSes. "68020 is better. No 80286! You're wrong! No you are." Heh. Seems kinda pointless now.
I now have my C64 hooked to a 27 inch television.
It is slightly blurry (S-video), but fun to play the old games.