Damn, they're gonna be a bit behind if they're gonna make it compatible with Office 200. I mean, what, does it save files on clay tablets, or have they upgraded to lambskin parchment yet?
Re:Might be a bit off still?
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Oh, there's nothing wrong with the way new movies are now.
Except, last weekend I went and saw a midnight screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was great, except most of the colors were fairly washed out, and every time it got to a reel change (you know, when the little dots appear in the upper right corner), there was invariably a huge increase in the number of scratches on the print, a degradation in sound quality, and there were also a number of frames missing from each end of both reels (the movie would appear to skip a second or two or time).
Now, if we'd had an original digital print of the movie, it would have looked exactly the same as it had when it came out, twenty years ago (which is to say, a lot better than it did last week). That's half the idea.
As it stands, digital projection (DLP specifically) is a mixed bag. I've come to notice that people like me (geeks) who know what pixels are, know what jaggies are, know what anti-aliasing is, and so on, think the quality of digital is lower than people who aren't familiar with those concepts and don't look for them. On Saturday I went to see (for the fourth time) Attack of the Clones, and I saw it at a digital projection with my parents and two of my cousins (specifically, this was at the Pacific Theaters at The Grove, in Los Angeles). We were sitting on the entry aisle (it's stadium seating), maybe ten rows up.
I'd also seen it digitally at Grauman's Chinese (sitting maybe 17-20 rows back) and at the Loews Century City (15-17 rows back). It looked fantastic at both those theaters. I thought that it looked worse at the Grove (on a smaller screen than either other theater), but I realized it was because I was close enough to see the vertical pixel columns distinctly in a lot of shots (especially high-contrast shots with small details). My dad, however, thought it looked better than at the Chinese (the frickin' Chinese!) and he was sitting in the same row I was. We both wear glasses and have corrected 20/20 vision (in fact, my bare vision is much worse than his).
Anyway, I'm rambling, but my point is that there ARE reasons to go digital. Theoretically in a few years, resolution of digital will increase to the point where you need to be standing right in front of the screen to identify the pixels, in which case it will be visually indistinguishable from film for 99% of the viewing audience -- we'll be in the same situation we are now with "audiophiles" who claim that they can hear minuscule variations in sound quality based on what kind of wires their speakers use. Yeah, maybe they can, but almost nobody else can, or cares.
Plus, long-term (if Hollywood ever could think that way), the studios save huge amounts of money on film prints and distribution. If the studios were to pool together and equip every theater in the country with a digital projector over 5 years, they would have made back their money on film printing costs in another 5 years.
Conversely, Quake becomes everything... a friend of mine and I wrote a Quake mod that basically turned Quake into Gradius -- yes, a side-scrolling shooter, with all sorts of different levels, weapons, monsters, etc. It was called Gunship, and we never quite finished it... but almost.
I noticed you didn't say "sentient human females," and I'm not sure whether I should congratulate you for being open minded, or whether I should flee in terror.
Hmm, I see the "smurf", but your second example is just an empty pair of quotes... it seems like there should fnord be a word there, but I just can't see it...
1. That they come up with somethinig that is economically viable (i.e. they succeed). 2. That they aren't going to try to fail on purpose, to make the idea of "alternative vehicles" look bad, thus bolstering the consumer desire for "regular" vehicles for a long period. 3. That whatever vehicle they design LOOKS like cars do nowadays. Vehicles that are ugly, or distinctly different-looking than regular vehicles, will get ignored because most people don't want ugly cars. It's pissed me off that until recently, most hybrid or electric vehicles were sort of ugly and misshapen... and then everyone's surprised when they don't sell as well as regular cars! Well, duh.
It kind of bugs me that they're constantly talking about "discovering" these "new elements". It's not like it takes a great leap of imagination to think that, "Hey, there's an element with 107 protons... maybe there's one with 108 protons too! *gasp*"
I mean in theory any atom with any integer number of protons CAN exist for some period of time greater than Planck time, I just wish they'd say "created an atom of..." or "synthesized in the lab" rather than "discovered". It just seems kind of misleading. If someone comes up with a truly new way to combine various chemicals to do something, you can say they "discovered" it, because it's not like anyone could have predicted that exact process would exist... but on the periodic table, taking the highest element that has been shown to exist at some point, and then adding one to it, doesn't seem like much of a "discovery".
Yeah. It's like insulting stupid people. You'll never get an outcry of stupid people saying you're a bigot (intellect-ist?), because who's going to openly admit that they're stupid? Actual stupid people don't usually think they're stupid, so they just chuckle as if the person doing the insulting is talking about someone else...
Heck, even the kernel will have to change. Imagine the outcry when the average Merkin finds out that Linux sometimes kills orphans! Or, even worse, that your network card can become promiscuous!
Well just on first gloss, this seems like a bad idea. The idea, apparently, is that traffic is so bad in central London that they want to discourage people from driving in, and encourage them to use public transportation instead -- which kind of makes sense. One problem is that, like all other regressive taxes, this "fee" is essentially meaningless to those with enough money. Of course, this is £1300 a year if you drive into London 5 days a week, every week -- think about the holy hell that would get raised if you decided to charge a fee of $2500 a year to drive to Manhattan Island! (Personally, I'm against any scheme in which a citizen of a nation is charged money by the government to travel to or across particular public lands. They're public lands! Public!)
Then there's the issue of privacy -- the government randomly recording peoples' presence and location to see if they've paid this tax. Yeah, that's a nasty one. If you provide public transportation which is cheaper than driving, people will use it, you don't need to essentially force them to do so by charging an arm and a leg.
OMFG, I remember the Nintendo World Championships! I participated in that when I was about 12, at Universal Studios in Los Angeles... I actually did manage to get up on stage at one point, and I had even scored so well that they let me sit in the "throne" seat and simply watch while some other competitors played on the main stage consoles... but when it came time for me to compete with the other second-level winners, I got my ass kicked. Oh well:) As I recall, the three games were Rad Racer, Super Mario Bros., and Tetris. You had to finish the first track in Rad Racer, get 100 coins in SMB, and then complete 30 lines in Tetris... or something like that. Man, that was a fun day.
If you can find it, id Software had a guy named Bobby Prince rerecord much of the music from DOOM and DOOM II with real instruments. It's very listenable, especially if you're familiar with the music (from having spent way too much of your youth playing such games!). I tend to cue up the MP3s of those tracks at least once or twice a week while coding at work.
The album itself is called, I believe, "Doom Music." Probably eBay is your best bet, or something similar; I doubt you're going to find a copy in stores (maybe in a used music store).
Corollary to your post, I enjoy pointing out that the only natural laws are the laws of physics. Everything else is a social construct. (Although many social constructs are useful for societies, they are still human constructs.)
Slightly offtopic, but I recently bought a 2002 Honda Accord EX 4-cylinder sedan (with leather, etc.). The fuel efficiency isn't anything near a hybrid or EV (28 mpg or so), but I was surprised when I opened the hood and saw that it's a SULEV. Strict emissions standards are a good thing.
What happens if you heat bread in a vacuum? If you heat bread in atmosphere, it gets toasted -- the surface of the bread oxidizes, basically. In a vacuum, however, it would simply get warmer but there shouldn't be any kind of chemical reaction until it gets to -- dare I say it? -- the melting point of bread!
So in theory, bread heated in a vacuum should eventually become liquid or vapor. Am I even close to being right?
In order to see this from my point of view, you're going to have to let go of your assumption that the act of theft requires an act of deprivation. That's not necessarily true.
Our essential disagreement is that you DEFINE "theft" to include (among other things) copying something without depriving the original owner, and I do not. I see no reason to. Either your moral system makes the basic assumption that theft does not require deprivation, or the idea that theft does not require deprivation can be logically inferenced from the assumptions of your moral system. I'm curious which it is. If it's a base assumption, then why do you make that assumption? If it's a logical inference, what are your basic assumptions?
We're talking about right versus wrong, so the broad definition of stealing applies.
You mean your broad definition of stealing. You have defined stealing to not require deprivation without saying why that should be the definition.
Here's why I think stealing should require deprivation. Society exists because humans have an ingrained sense of self-preservation. Long ago, we recognized that banding together was to our mutual benefit. Societies, as a result, give themselves rules to keep individuals from disrupting the cohesion of the society. Rules that do not have any effect on the cohesion of society are irrelevant. Making a copy of something for personal use does not, in general, affect the cohesion of society. As a result, it should not be illegal.
As I've explained at length elsewhere, I think the idea that stealing is wrong is so fundamental to every culture that your belief on that matter shouldn't be different from mine. It's a normative value judgment on my part, and I stand by it. It's nothing personal, though.
I agree that stealing is wrong. However I define stealing differently than you, which is why we are still talking.:) And I didn't mean to seem offended; but it seemed like you were telling me that I should agree with your definition of stealing, rather than telling me that I should think stealing is wrong.
And, for the record, economics is not a zero-sum game. Just ask your lawyer if he's ever billed two clients simultaneously while doing research on a matter of law to see what I mean.
Erm, yeah. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that. My bad.
But copyright isn't about money. It's about control.
In the US, copyright is entirely about the progress of the useful arts, including both "arts" (entertainment, literature, etc.) and "science" (research, theory, etc.). The method by which copyright entices creators to create is by granting an entirely artificial monopoly over control of that monopoly (except for fair use, of course). Copyright doesn't exist because it's right that you should control your works; copyright exists because it is in society's interest for it to exist. If the Founders had decided that copyright was bollocks, we wouldn't have it.
My right to control this comment lasts until I die, or until I transfer it to somebody else.
Only because the law says so. No moral system I've ever heard of has ever specified copyright terms, or for how long you should have control of your works. I personally believe that copyrights should expire in relatively short periods, to encourage creators to keep creating, rather than letting the most successful creators rest on their laurels after scoring one big hit.
So it's about control of the use and distribution of one's work or ideas. When you put it in those terms, suddenly it makes complete sense that copyright should work exactly the way it does now: you retain your copyright for as long as you live, plus a little more, unless you voluntarily give it up. This is only appropriate. It's your work or ideas, so you have the right to say who can use it and how.
I'm not following the logic here. You're saying that because copyright is about control, it is morally right that someone should have control over their works for the length of their entire life? I disagree entirely. As the purpose of copyright is to serve society (Article I Section 8), then copyright terms should be set based on what best serves society, not what best serves an individual's sense of control. By what moral logic should a person's ideas remain theirs to control until they die?
But it seems reasonable to me that a corporation-- say, Disney-- should have the right to control its creations-- say, Mickey Mouse-- for a reasonable amount of time-- say, the lifetime of the corporation.
Given that corporations can have unlimited lifetimes in this country (or at least, several times the lifespan of a human), this is a terrible idea. Either corporations must have limited lifespans, as short or shorter than the average human (and their copyrights expire at the end of their life), or copyrights must have limited lifespans (and copyright terms should not be able to be extended retroactively -- a work's copyright life should be fixed at whatever the law specified when the work was created).
I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's novel "A Deepness in the Sky", where our distantly descended spacefaring civilization uses only seconds to count time -- kiloseconds (ksec), megaseconds (msec), etc.
The reasoning was that when you're spending lots of time in zero-gravity artificial satellites floating in deep-space (and also to not have to reconcile different dates on planets with different rotational/orbital speeds), using a system of measurement that's bound to a particular planetary body is a bad idea. A work shift was about 30 ksec, sleep time was about that long, if you weren't needed for work for a while, you'd be put into cryosleep for a couple of Msec, etc.
I've wondered what kind of time system we'll use if we ever colonize other planets, or have orbital or free-floating satellite colonies.
First of all, economics isn't always a zero-sum game. The fact that person X still has his CD after person Y copied it doesn't change the fact that a transaction has taken place. Value-- in the form of the digital music stored on person X's CD-- has been received by person Y. In person X's case, he paid to receive that value. Person Y didn't.
Hmm, maybe it's just pedantry, but what if person X didn't pay for it either? Let's say he really DID steal a CD from Tower Records, or got a free promotional copy from the artist. Is it different? (I'm not saying whether it is or not, I honestly don't know and wonder what you think:)).
Person Y committed an act that is economically equivalent to walking out of a Tower Records with the CD under his coat. It's theft of value, whether or not that value has a material component.
The problem I have with the statement, "It's a theft of value" is that "theft" implies that the original possessor of the value no longer has it, which is clearly not true -- they have the value, as does the "thief". Where there was before one, now there are two, and the second was created from (essentially) nothing. The total amount of value in the system has increased. Economics is indeed a zero-sum game, but information is not. I do not need to lose information for you to gain it. Hence, intellectual property does not operate via normal economic laws. At least, not inherently; a simulacrum of "normal" economic behavior has been implemented by way of copyright and patent law.
Now, the argument could be made that the value of the music that X possesses is less now that Y also has it, on the grounds that there is value in having something that someone else does not, or the grounds that as more people have it, its value is inherently lesser. However, economically, neither of these can be particularly well-quantified. Effectively, the argument is null.
Furthermore, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the creation of intellectual property is very much governed by economic forces. If the profit motive can't offer a sufficient reward for efforts, people will stop creating works like movies and such. A starving artist may write poetry, but he'll never make The Magnificent Ambersons. If you take away a person's ability to make money from his art-- by reducing the economic value of an electronic copy of that art to zero-- you're removing one of the key motives to make that sort of art in the first place. That would be bad.
What of artists who existed before modern copyright law. They did not operate under the assumption that their ideas would be protected from use by others. They did not operate under the idea that they could do a small amount of work a single time, and reap profits from that work for extended periods. If Mozart wanted money, he had to go out and perform, to keep earning it. The idea that you can work for a few weeks, and from that effort earn enough money to live on for several years, is a very recent one. Is it good for the economy? I don't think so. Content producers should be encouraged to keep producing, not to hit it big and live off the royalties.
I also agree that the amount of content would be lesser without IP law; but how much lesser? That is not so easy to assume. Nor is it easy to assume which segment of produced content would disappear. For all we know, if a lack of IP laws reduced the content output to 10% of what it is now, the missing 90% might have been the crappiest 90%. Or, for all we know, all the great works would vanish and we'd be left with nothing BUT crap. We don't know, and the only way to find out is to try it.
Large-scale productions that require multiple peoples' effort would probably be harmed. When your investment is that big, more people aren't willing to take the risk that it's going to get copied without compensation. On the other hand, we're used to the idea of copyright law. What if we were used to the idea of supporting our favorite artists because we wanted to encourage them to produce more?
The difference isn't as important as the similarity, and the similarity is a moral issue. You're still getting something for nothing, and that's not right. Whenever you receive something from somebody-- except in the case of gifts, of course-- you should give something in return. That's not a law, but it's a moral compulsion. Stealing music by downloading it without paying for it-- for that's what it is, stealing-- is just plain wrong, and it should feel wrong to you.
First things first. I don't take kindly to being told how I should feel about anything, or what my morals should be.
Also, what's with, "for that's what it is, stealing"? Last I checked, stealing means the victim no longer has the item in question. Just because you call it "stealing" doesn't magically make "stealing" music the same as stealing a car.
The issue that I see is that taking without giving something in return is self-defeating. If your favorite artist produces something you like, and you get a copy, but you never contribute anything back (namely, money), then the artist is less likely to keep producing. It is in your own interest to support artists whose work you like (giving more to artists you like more, and less to artists you like less), and to not support artists whom you dislike. Unfortunately, the copyright cartels have made it difficult to support an artist without supporting the numerous middlemen who add little value to the content. Mostly I'm thinking of the music and book industries here; movies are different because a film typically has so many people working on it, so who do you give your money to? Five cents to each of the crew, a quarter for the minor actors, a buck to the major actors, director, and screenwriter? Movies work well, actually, because you're paying for the cinema's service -- you're paying for space and time, not for information. (Movies on DVD, however, are functionally identical to CDs or books in a copyright context.)
My wife proposed an idea which would probably be hell to implement, but at least gets you thinking. The idea is that copyright (or patent) lasts until you make a certain amount of money, or a certain amount of time, whichever came first. The amount would be based on the expenditure to create the content. If you spent $100 million to make a movie, then your copyright would expire as soon as you made $500 million back (including box office, DVD rentals/sales, TV licensing fees, etc.). If your movie sucks and never makes $500 million, then the copyright expires in 20 years. (There might be a minimum time period, as well, say 5 years -- that way if you have something that's wildly and unexpectedly successful, the public has time to digest it in its original form before mutations appear.) The exact numbers and details would vary, but the idea is that once you get a certain amount out of that work, it becomes part of the public domain and you are encouraged to make more. The potential still exists to make lots of money.
Personally, I think that copyrights should be 20 years to start (I'm flexible on the exact number). Individuals could apply for a single extension on a copyright, but only the original owner could do so, and only if they were alive at the time of copyright expiration -- their heirs, or anyone who may have bought the copyright from them, would not be allowed to extend the copyright, as THEY did not create anything and don't deserve anything. Corporations could own a copyright only if they created the content to begin with (either by contracting to an outside individual or corporation, or by officers of the corporation creating something themselves); they could not purchase already-created copyrights from individuals (but could from other corporations), and could not extend the term on ANY copyright. Twenty years is plenty of time to reap the benefits of a work. One downside, of course, is work produced before its time; someone who writes a brilliant novel that isn't appreciated because it'll be 25 years before society is ready for it, isn't going to get a lot out of it when the 25 years have passed. On the other hand, that person is going to have to keep working in the intervening 25 years, and no doubt their current works will benefit from the public's knowledge that they wrote this brilliant thing 25 years ago, even if they don't derive much direct compensation from it.
That is indeed how our capitalist market economy currently works. A large part of it is predicated on the idea of intellectual property: patents, copyrights, and (to a much lesser extent) trademarks. There is no particular reason why the economy must work this way.
However, as Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and many others pointed out, ideas and information are not even remotely similar to physical property like cars, food, clothing, etc. Information can be replicated infinitely at minimal cost, whereas cars, food, and clothing cannot. (Not yet, anyway.) The obvious question arises: should ideas, then, be treated the same as regular property? More and more people are coming to believe that the answer is "no".
If I physically steal a CD, I have the CD and the original owner no longer has the CD. If I copy the CD but leave it with the original owner, they still have everything they had before, and I had more than I have. There is a significant difference.
with all of linux's efforts it's only a matter of time someone writes a virii
Wow, that's a first. I've seen the plural of virus written (incorrectly) as "virii", but I've never seen the SINGULAR of "virus" written as anything except "virus" until now. Kudos for expanding the English language!;)
All joking aside, "virii" is not any form of the word "virus". I'm not trying to be pedantic, I just can't stand it when otherwise intelligent people make mistakes like this.
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Damn, they're gonna be a bit behind if they're gonna make it compatible with Office 200. I mean, what, does it save files on clay tablets, or have they upgraded to lambskin parchment yet?
You lied!
Except, last weekend I went and saw a midnight screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was great, except most of the colors were fairly washed out, and every time it got to a reel change (you know, when the little dots appear in the upper right corner), there was invariably a huge increase in the number of scratches on the print, a degradation in sound quality, and there were also a number of frames missing from each end of both reels (the movie would appear to skip a second or two or time).
Now, if we'd had an original digital print of the movie, it would have looked exactly the same as it had when it came out, twenty years ago (which is to say, a lot better than it did last week). That's half the idea.
As it stands, digital projection (DLP specifically) is a mixed bag. I've come to notice that people like me (geeks) who know what pixels are, know what jaggies are, know what anti-aliasing is, and so on, think the quality of digital is lower than people who aren't familiar with those concepts and don't look for them. On Saturday I went to see (for the fourth time) Attack of the Clones, and I saw it at a digital projection with my parents and two of my cousins (specifically, this was at the Pacific Theaters at The Grove, in Los Angeles). We were sitting on the entry aisle (it's stadium seating), maybe ten rows up.
I'd also seen it digitally at Grauman's Chinese (sitting maybe 17-20 rows back) and at the Loews Century City (15-17 rows back). It looked fantastic at both those theaters. I thought that it looked worse at the Grove (on a smaller screen than either other theater), but I realized it was because I was close enough to see the vertical pixel columns distinctly in a lot of shots (especially high-contrast shots with small details). My dad, however, thought it looked better than at the Chinese (the frickin' Chinese!) and he was sitting in the same row I was. We both wear glasses and have corrected 20/20 vision (in fact, my bare vision is much worse than his).
Anyway, I'm rambling, but my point is that there ARE reasons to go digital. Theoretically in a few years, resolution of digital will increase to the point where you need to be standing right in front of the screen to identify the pixels, in which case it will be visually indistinguishable from film for 99% of the viewing audience -- we'll be in the same situation we are now with "audiophiles" who claim that they can hear minuscule variations in sound quality based on what kind of wires their speakers use. Yeah, maybe they can, but almost nobody else can, or cares.
Plus, long-term (if Hollywood ever could think that way), the studios save huge amounts of money on film prints and distribution. If the studios were to pool together and equip every theater in the country with a digital projector over 5 years, they would have made back their money on film printing costs in another 5 years.
Conversely, Quake becomes everything... a friend of mine and I wrote a Quake mod that basically turned Quake into Gradius -- yes, a side-scrolling shooter, with all sorts of different levels, weapons, monsters, etc. It was called Gunship, and we never quite finished it... but almost.
I noticed you didn't say "sentient human females," and I'm not sure whether I should congratulate you for being open minded, or whether I should flee in terror.
By the time all these DVDs come out, the Unisys patent may very well have expired, so Galadriel may not have anything to worry about. :)
Hmm, I see the "smurf", but your second example is just an empty pair of quotes... it seems like there should fnord be a word there, but I just can't see it...
So now can we start hunting advertising executives for sport? Please?
1. That they come up with somethinig that is economically viable (i.e. they succeed).
2. That they aren't going to try to fail on purpose, to make the idea of "alternative vehicles" look bad, thus bolstering the consumer desire for "regular" vehicles for a long period.
3. That whatever vehicle they design LOOKS like cars do nowadays. Vehicles that are ugly, or distinctly different-looking than regular vehicles, will get ignored because most people don't want ugly cars. It's pissed me off that until recently, most hybrid or electric vehicles were sort of ugly and misshapen... and then everyone's surprised when they don't sell as well as regular cars! Well, duh.
It kind of bugs me that they're constantly talking about "discovering" these "new elements". It's not like it takes a great leap of imagination to think that, "Hey, there's an element with 107 protons... maybe there's one with 108 protons too! *gasp*"
I mean in theory any atom with any integer number of protons CAN exist for some period of time greater than Planck time, I just wish they'd say "created an atom of..." or "synthesized in the lab" rather than "discovered". It just seems kind of misleading. If someone comes up with a truly new way to combine various chemicals to do something, you can say they "discovered" it, because it's not like anyone could have predicted that exact process would exist... but on the periodic table, taking the highest element that has been shown to exist at some point, and then adding one to it, doesn't seem like much of a "discovery".
Maybe I'm just nitpicking...
Yeah. It's like insulting stupid people. You'll never get an outcry of stupid people saying you're a bigot (intellect-ist?), because who's going to openly admit that they're stupid? Actual stupid people don't usually think they're stupid, so they just chuckle as if the person doing the insulting is talking about someone else...
Heck, even the kernel will have to change. Imagine the outcry when the average Merkin finds out that Linux sometimes kills orphans! Or, even worse, that your network card can become promiscuous!
Well just on first gloss, this seems like a bad idea. The idea, apparently, is that traffic is so bad in central London that they want to discourage people from driving in, and encourage them to use public transportation instead -- which kind of makes sense. One problem is that, like all other regressive taxes, this "fee" is essentially meaningless to those with enough money. Of course, this is £1300 a year if you drive into London 5 days a week, every week -- think about the holy hell that would get raised if you decided to charge a fee of $2500 a year to drive to Manhattan Island! (Personally, I'm against any scheme in which a citizen of a nation is charged money by the government to travel to or across particular public lands. They're public lands! Public!)
Then there's the issue of privacy -- the government randomly recording peoples' presence and location to see if they've paid this tax. Yeah, that's a nasty one. If you provide public transportation which is cheaper than driving, people will use it, you don't need to essentially force them to do so by charging an arm and a leg.
OMFG, I remember the Nintendo World Championships! I participated in that when I was about 12, at Universal Studios in Los Angeles... I actually did manage to get up on stage at one point, and I had even scored so well that they let me sit in the "throne" seat and simply watch while some other competitors played on the main stage consoles... but when it came time for me to compete with the other second-level winners, I got my ass kicked. Oh well :) As I recall, the three games were Rad Racer, Super Mario Bros., and Tetris. You had to finish the first track in Rad Racer, get 100 coins in SMB, and then complete 30 lines in Tetris... or something like that. Man, that was a fun day.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
If you can find it, id Software had a guy named Bobby Prince rerecord much of the music from DOOM and DOOM II with real instruments. It's very listenable, especially if you're familiar with the music (from having spent way too much of your youth playing such games!). I tend to cue up the MP3s of those tracks at least once or twice a week while coding at work.
The album itself is called, I believe, "Doom Music." Probably eBay is your best bet, or something similar; I doubt you're going to find a copy in stores (maybe in a used music store).
Corollary to your post, I enjoy pointing out that the only natural laws are the laws of physics. Everything else is a social construct. (Although many social constructs are useful for societies, they are still human constructs.)
Slightly offtopic, but I recently bought a 2002 Honda Accord EX 4-cylinder sedan (with leather, etc.). The fuel efficiency isn't anything near a hybrid or EV (28 mpg or so), but I was surprised when I opened the hood and saw that it's a SULEV. Strict emissions standards are a good thing.
Here's a vaguely related question.
What happens if you heat bread in a vacuum? If you heat bread in atmosphere, it gets toasted -- the surface of the bread oxidizes, basically. In a vacuum, however, it would simply get warmer but there shouldn't be any kind of chemical reaction until it gets to -- dare I say it? -- the melting point of bread!
So in theory, bread heated in a vacuum should eventually become liquid or vapor. Am I even close to being right?
Here's why I think stealing should require deprivation. Society exists because humans have an ingrained sense of self-preservation. Long ago, we recognized that banding together was to our mutual benefit. Societies, as a result, give themselves rules to keep individuals from disrupting the cohesion of the society. Rules that do not have any effect on the cohesion of society are irrelevant. Making a copy of something for personal use does not, in general, affect the cohesion of society. As a result, it should not be illegal.
I agree that stealing is wrong. However I define stealing differently than you, which is why we are still talking.I'm reminded of Vernor Vinge's novel "A Deepness in the Sky", where our distantly descended spacefaring civilization uses only seconds to count time -- kiloseconds (ksec), megaseconds (msec), etc.
The reasoning was that when you're spending lots of time in zero-gravity artificial satellites floating in deep-space (and also to not have to reconcile different dates on planets with different rotational/orbital speeds), using a system of measurement that's bound to a particular planetary body is a bad idea. A work shift was about 30 ksec, sleep time was about that long, if you weren't needed for work for a while, you'd be put into cryosleep for a couple of Msec, etc.
I've wondered what kind of time system we'll use if we ever colonize other planets, or have orbital or free-floating satellite colonies.
Now, the argument could be made that the value of the music that X possesses is less now that Y also has it, on the grounds that there is value in having something that someone else does not, or the grounds that as more people have it, its value is inherently lesser. However, economically, neither of these can be particularly well-quantified. Effectively, the argument is null.
What of artists who existed before modern copyright law. They did not operate under the assumption that their ideas would be protected from use by others. They did not operate under the idea that they could do a small amount of work a single time, and reap profits from that work for extended periods. If Mozart wanted money, he had to go out and perform, to keep earning it. The idea that you can work for a few weeks, and from that effort earn enough money to live on for several years, is a very recent one. Is it good for the economy? I don't think so. Content producers should be encouraged to keep producing, not to hit it big and live off the royalties.I also agree that the amount of content would be lesser without IP law; but how much lesser? That is not so easy to assume. Nor is it easy to assume which segment of produced content would disappear. For all we know, if a lack of IP laws reduced the content output to 10% of what it is now, the missing 90% might have been the crappiest 90%. Or, for all we know, all the great works would vanish and we'd be left with nothing BUT crap. We don't know, and the only way to find out is to try it.
Large-scale productions that require multiple peoples' effort would probably be harmed. When your investment is that big, more people aren't willing to take the risk that it's going to get copied without compensation. On the other hand, we're used to the idea of copyright law. What if we were used to the idea of supporting our favorite artists because we wanted to encourage them to produce more?
First things first. I don't take kindly to being told how I should feel about anything, or what my morals should be.Also, what's with, "for that's what it is, stealing"? Last I checked, stealing means the victim no longer has the item in question. Just because you call it "stealing" doesn't magically make "stealing" music the same as stealing a car.
The issue that I see is that taking without giving something in return is self-defeating. If your favorite artist produces something you like, and you get a copy, but you never contribute anything back (namely, money), then the artist is less likely to keep producing. It is in your own interest to support artists whose work you like (giving more to artists you like more, and less to artists you like less), and to not support artists whom you dislike. Unfortunately, the copyright cartels have made it difficult to support an artist without supporting the numerous middlemen who add little value to the content. Mostly I'm thinking of the music and book industries here; movies are different because a film typically has so many people working on it, so who do you give your money to? Five cents to each of the crew, a quarter for the minor actors, a buck to the major actors, director, and screenwriter? Movies work well, actually, because you're paying for the cinema's service -- you're paying for space and time, not for information. (Movies on DVD, however, are functionally identical to CDs or books in a copyright context.)
My wife proposed an idea which would probably be hell to implement, but at least gets you thinking. The idea is that copyright (or patent) lasts until you make a certain amount of money, or a certain amount of time, whichever came first. The amount would be based on the expenditure to create the content. If you spent $100 million to make a movie, then your copyright would expire as soon as you made $500 million back (including box office, DVD rentals/sales, TV licensing fees, etc.). If your movie sucks and never makes $500 million, then the copyright expires in 20 years. (There might be a minimum time period, as well, say 5 years -- that way if you have something that's wildly and unexpectedly successful, the public has time to digest it in its original form before mutations appear.) The exact numbers and details would vary, but the idea is that once you get a certain amount out of that work, it becomes part of the public domain and you are encouraged to make more. The potential still exists to make lots of money.
Personally, I think that copyrights should be 20 years to start (I'm flexible on the exact number). Individuals could apply for a single extension on a copyright, but only the original owner could do so, and only if they were alive at the time of copyright expiration -- their heirs, or anyone who may have bought the copyright from them, would not be allowed to extend the copyright, as THEY did not create anything and don't deserve anything. Corporations could own a copyright only if they created the content to begin with (either by contracting to an outside individual or corporation, or by officers of the corporation creating something themselves); they could not purchase already-created copyrights from individuals (but could from other corporations), and could not extend the term on ANY copyright. Twenty years is plenty of time to reap the benefits of a work. One downside, of course, is work produced before its time; someone who writes a brilliant novel that isn't appreciated because it'll be 25 years before society is ready for it, isn't going to get a lot out of it when the 25 years have passed. On the other hand, that person is going to have to keep working in the intervening 25 years, and no doubt their current works will benefit from the public's knowledge that they wrote this brilliant thing 25 years ago, even if they don't derive much direct compensation from it.
That is indeed how our capitalist market economy currently works. A large part of it is predicated on the idea of intellectual property: patents, copyrights, and (to a much lesser extent) trademarks. There is no particular reason why the economy must work this way.
However, as Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and many others pointed out, ideas and information are not even remotely similar to physical property like cars, food, clothing, etc. Information can be replicated infinitely at minimal cost, whereas cars, food, and clothing cannot. (Not yet, anyway.) The obvious question arises: should ideas, then, be treated the same as regular property? More and more people are coming to believe that the answer is "no".
If I physically steal a CD, I have the CD and the original owner no longer has the CD. If I copy the CD but leave it with the original owner, they still have everything they had before, and I had more than I have. There is a significant difference.
This is /., right? I thought Bill Gates was the featured creep in this story. :)
All joking aside, "virii" is not any form of the word "virus". I'm not trying to be pedantic, I just can't stand it when otherwise intelligent people make mistakes like this.
All I want is a cellphone with a frickin' laser beam on it, is that too much to ask? Honestly, throw me a bone here...