Videogames in general are irrelevant, at least above the level of Farmville and Solitaire. Really, even a dying company like Sun managed to pull in more money than Electronic Arts before being acquired, compared to guys like Apple or Microsoft they're just a speck of dust in the entirety of the computing world.
There's Inkscape for Illustrator, while for Dreamweaver the best alternative is a programmer's text editor and a brain. That last one is kinda hard to find among "creative" types, though, so I do understand the appeal of Dreamweaver a bit.
Gimp is not just not "exactly like photoshop", it's not layed out like any other Windows application.
Neither is Photoshop, Paint.NET, or any other image editor more complex than Paint.
Face it: the "traditional" Windows UI works for the most basic of things, Office productivity tools and *maybe* IDEs, but anything other than that and it breaks down, poorly.
I wouldn't call it voter apathy. I would simply say most voters are more concerned about whether or not they will be able to afford rent or the mortgage next month, or have enough money left after taxes to take their kids on that vacation, or even just be able to put good, healthy food on the table for them. When ordering priorities for a lot of people, being able to listen to music in any format they want or being able to stream the newest episode of whatever TV show online falls pretty low on the list.
And how, pray tell, does that differ from "apathy" at all?
People care more about the skin color and sexual preference of their candidates than their posture on copyright, an issue that affects multiple industries from entertainment to education and productivity tools. It's fucking depressing.
So what do you propose? not having patents, then be sued the everlasting shit of by any lawsuit-happy competitor with an axe to grind? *cough*Apple*cough*.
It's one thing to be against software patents, and another one to be suicidal.
We're not talking FOOD here people or shelter or even lifesaving drugs. What's being debated is not a need but a want.
Warning..car analogy.... I can't afford a Porsche, but does that mean I have a right to take one?
I take it, then, that if I'm hungry I'm free to go to your house and steal the food off your fridge?
Thought so.
If people stop buying something because it's too expensive, the maker either figures out how to make it cheaper or they go out of business.
Not when you've got a government-enforced monopoly on the area. Remove that however, and guess what: copyright infringement becomes completely, 100% legal! who would've thought.
Steal or don't steal, but don't try to clean it up or blame the company you're taking it from.
Copyright infringement != stealing, pretending otherwise only makes you look like a paid shill.
As far as I'm aware, patent law doesn't require commercialization to be liable, and I'm sure trademark law does not so no, you're still screwed even if you don't sell it.
You're right that it should, but the RIAA and MPAA have deep pockets and the rest of us don't, so the only realistic option we've got left is to screw the law and continue with our lives as normal, while hoping some day the Powers That Be stop selling themselves to the highest bidder and remove such idiocy from the law.
It's not wrong, but it's most definitely illegal. Gotta love those patent and trademark laws, huh? though copyright may also play a part, relating to its aesthetic design.
If your justification for stealing is, too much work to reach for my wallet, you may just be a thief.
And if you're still throwing the "copyright infringement == stealing" argument in this day and age, you may just be a shill for the industry.
Yes, putting a credit card number in to a form is a (very low) barrier. But downloading and installing LimeWire or a Bit Torrent client is also a barrier. Searching warez sites is a barrier. Running something from an unknown source is a barrier. Plenty of folks make it over those barriers. But PayPal is a "significant barrier"? I doubt it.
Spoken as your self-centered, US-born, employed adult self I take it.
Speaking for myself, it is just as easy, if not easier, for me to find and download music from iTunes than from Pirate Bay or some other torrent site. But I still get most of my music from torrents.
I correct myself: as your self-centered, US-born, employed adult and *hypocrite* self.
And if you care, last time I "pirated" music was about a year ago, Beethoven's Complete Symphonies by Karajan after being unable to find them retail since I dread giving my money to bloodsuckers like Amazon and Apple, most of the time I prefer to use Jamendo instead.
Except there are places (and/or hours of the day) where you *don't* get the long lineups, and most people prefer to do their shopping there instead. No way to avoid getting an international credit card for online shopping, though.
Hell, make it free, available via FTP and even include the source code alongside and it'll *still* be pirated by idiots justifying themselves with crap like "freedom means free to use it for propietary products without giving you anything in return, you zealous tyrant!". Who will then sue anyone that dares copy *their* product in return, of course.
Drugs: hurt users mostly, or no one at all; considered ethical by large strata of the population; prohibition in democratic states is proven to be ineffective.
Citation needed. As I replied to another guy above, decriminalization is a very different beast from legalization, which to my knowledge hasn't been tried anywhere. Find me a (large) place where manufacturing and selling Cocaine and LSD is as trouble-free as making and selling bread, let's take a look at the before and after, and then we'll talk.
My point was, in case you missed it, that arguing that something should be made legal just because it'll never dissapear completely is idiotic, and as such if you want legalization you'll have to provide a far stronger argument than that.
You're doing it wrong, you should've already been refusing to buy Apple because of Apple, not Sony.
When Sony does evil, they do it in a 5-years-old kind of way: petty and sometimes bothersome, but if you have patience it's easily ignored. When Apple does evil, however, they do it like old politicians: they'll use every connection and leverage over the industry they have to make sure that you're still screwed, but that if you buy their products they'll make sure to use some lube beforehand.
As interesting as that article is, decriminalization is a different beast from legalization, and would likely sound just as Big Brother-y as the status quo to te GP. After all, the only thing that's changing is that instead of throwing addicts into jail they help them in treatment centers, selling it is still criminalized.
And yet we still own cars. Why? Because they're _fun_. Who's going to drop US$50,000 on a car that they don't get to drive?
The same people that drop $2-3k on a computer whose OS they don't get to compile, most likely.
This is much like the GUI vs CLI debate of the computing world except when an instruction fails to compile here people die, often some that didn't have anything to do with the guilty party's computer in the first place other than being nearby.
Because there's huge amounts of data telling us we can't trust the people around us to drive safely, and when their car impacts ours "it's his fault!" won't keep you out of the hospital.
And BTW, with respect to aeroplanes the degree of automation these days compared to 20, 30 years ago is astounding, for precisely the same reason: it's been shown to save lives a few orders of magnitude more times than the ones they take. They're still able to be overriden by a human, but that's considered an action reserved only for the direst of emergencies; a commercial pilot that insists on flying a whole trip manually will likely not stay a pilot for long, and that's in *spite* of them receiving an education far more thorough than your average city driver.
And here's the problem with robotic drivers... They are all identical.
Like the Operating System on every computer in the world are identical? oh, wait.
Humans on the other hand are all different. Just because one causes an accident under certain circumstance doesn't mean another would.
Ahh, yes, the key word: "circumstances". Which also differ for these robotic drivers, do they not?
Still, it's irrelevant: statistics are what they are, and if this lowers one's chances of death then it deserves to be put in place. Which, considering how fucking irresponsible and arrogant your average driver is, isn't a very high standard to meet either.
I'm not convinced there's ever been any "Good Guys" in any conflict whatsoever. People love to point out World War II as an example, but even a cursory knowledge of history would show that many of the Allies' actions were worse even than those of most modern dictators and despots.
I like how you post a supposed rebuttal that contains nothing but Ad Hominem. If you want to do better than logical fallacy, you're going to have to do better than this.
It's not a rebuttal, it's simply a question, because there's so many things wrong with your post (some that even glancing at a non-sensationalistic article on the subject would correct) that simply listing them would be longer than your post itself and, as such, I really can't picture a reason for it besides trolling or an utter disdain for education and knowledge and I'm wondering which one it is.
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Videogames in general are irrelevant, at least above the level of Farmville and Solitaire. Really, even a dying company like Sun managed to pull in more money than Electronic Arts before being acquired, compared to guys like Apple or Microsoft they're just a speck of dust in the entirety of the computing world.
There's Inkscape for Illustrator, while for Dreamweaver the best alternative is a programmer's text editor and a brain. That last one is kinda hard to find among "creative" types, though, so I do understand the appeal of Dreamweaver a bit.
Gimp is not just not "exactly like photoshop", it's not layed out like any other Windows application.
Neither is Photoshop, Paint.NET, or any other image editor more complex than Paint.
Face it: the "traditional" Windows UI works for the most basic of things, Office productivity tools and *maybe* IDEs, but anything other than that and it breaks down, poorly.
I wouldn't call it voter apathy. I would simply say most voters are more concerned about whether or not they will be able to afford rent or the mortgage next month, or have enough money left after taxes to take their kids on that vacation, or even just be able to put good, healthy food on the table for them. When ordering priorities for a lot of people, being able to listen to music in any format they want or being able to stream the newest episode of whatever TV show online falls pretty low on the list.
And how, pray tell, does that differ from "apathy" at all?
People care more about the skin color and sexual preference of their candidates than their posture on copyright, an issue that affects multiple industries from entertainment to education and productivity tools. It's fucking depressing.
So what do you propose? not having patents, then be sued the everlasting shit of by any lawsuit-happy competitor with an axe to grind? *cough*Apple*cough*.
It's one thing to be against software patents, and another one to be suicidal.
We're not talking FOOD here people or shelter or even lifesaving drugs. What's being debated is not a need but a want.
Warning..car analogy....
I can't afford a Porsche, but does that mean I have a right to take one?
I take it, then, that if I'm hungry I'm free to go to your house and steal the food off your fridge?
Thought so.
If people stop buying something because it's too expensive, the maker either figures out how to make it cheaper or they go out of business.
Not when you've got a government-enforced monopoly on the area. Remove that however, and guess what: copyright infringement becomes completely, 100% legal! who would've thought.
Steal or don't steal, but don't try to clean it up or blame the company you're taking it from.
Copyright infringement != stealing, pretending otherwise only makes you look like a paid shill.
I've never heard anyone make the claim that piracy exists because the laws are inadequate.
May I direct you to politicians' speech concerning the DMCA before and after its approval?
perhaps piracy stems from a moral failure of the individual who chooses to pirate. Can we ever accept that?
Sure, if you had scientific proof for it as TFA.
As far as I'm aware, patent law doesn't require commercialization to be liable, and I'm sure trademark law does not so no, you're still screwed even if you don't sell it.
You're right that it should, but the RIAA and MPAA have deep pockets and the rest of us don't, so the only realistic option we've got left is to screw the law and continue with our lives as normal, while hoping some day the Powers That Be stop selling themselves to the highest bidder and remove such idiocy from the law.
It's not wrong, but it's most definitely illegal. Gotta love those patent and trademark laws, huh? though copyright may also play a part, relating to its aesthetic design.
If your justification for stealing is, too much work to reach for my wallet, you may just be a thief.
And if you're still throwing the "copyright infringement == stealing" argument in this day and age, you may just be a shill for the industry.
Yes, putting a credit card number in to a form is a (very low) barrier. But downloading and installing LimeWire or a Bit Torrent client is also a barrier. Searching warez sites is a barrier. Running something from an unknown source is a barrier. Plenty of folks make it over those barriers. But PayPal is a "significant barrier"? I doubt it.
Spoken as your self-centered, US-born, employed adult self I take it.
Speaking for myself, it is just as easy, if not easier, for me to find and download music from iTunes than from Pirate Bay or some other torrent site. But I still get most of my music from torrents.
I correct myself: as your self-centered, US-born, employed adult and *hypocrite* self.
And if you care, last time I "pirated" music was about a year ago, Beethoven's Complete Symphonies by Karajan after being unable to find them retail since I dread giving my money to bloodsuckers like Amazon and Apple, most of the time I prefer to use Jamendo instead.
Except there are places (and/or hours of the day) where you *don't* get the long lineups, and most people prefer to do their shopping there instead. No way to avoid getting an international credit card for online shopping, though.
Hell, make it free, available via FTP and even include the source code alongside and it'll *still* be pirated by idiots justifying themselves with crap like "freedom means free to use it for propietary products without giving you anything in return, you zealous tyrant!". Who will then sue anyone that dares copy *their* product in return, of course.
You just can't win against piracy.
Drugs: hurt users mostly, or no one at all; considered ethical by large strata of the population; prohibition in democratic states is proven to be ineffective.
Citation needed. As I replied to another guy above, decriminalization is a very different beast from legalization, which to my knowledge hasn't been tried anywhere. Find me a (large) place where manufacturing and selling Cocaine and LSD is as trouble-free as making and selling bread, let's take a look at the before and after, and then we'll talk.
Talk about overdramatization.
My point was, in case you missed it, that arguing that something should be made legal just because it'll never dissapear completely is idiotic, and as such if you want legalization you'll have to provide a far stronger argument than that.
You're doing it wrong, you should've already been refusing to buy Apple because of Apple, not Sony.
When Sony does evil, they do it in a 5-years-old kind of way: petty and sometimes bothersome, but if you have patience it's easily ignored. When Apple does evil, however, they do it like old politicians: they'll use every connection and leverage over the industry they have to make sure that you're still screwed, but that if you buy their products they'll make sure to use some lube beforehand.
As interesting as that article is, decriminalization is a different beast from legalization, and would likely sound just as Big Brother-y as the status quo to te GP. After all, the only thing that's changing is that instead of throwing addicts into jail they help them in treatment centers, selling it is still criminalized.
How's that prohibition of murder working out for you? huh, guess we should legalize it, then.
Just because you can't eliminate it completely doesn't mean it's worthless to fight it.
And yet we still own cars. Why? Because they're _fun_. Who's going to drop US$50,000 on a car that they don't get to drive?
The same people that drop $2-3k on a computer whose OS they don't get to compile, most likely.
This is much like the GUI vs CLI debate of the computing world except when an instruction fails to compile here people die, often some that didn't have anything to do with the guilty party's computer in the first place other than being nearby.
Because there's huge amounts of data telling us we can't trust the people around us to drive safely, and when their car impacts ours "it's his fault!" won't keep you out of the hospital.
And BTW, with respect to aeroplanes the degree of automation these days compared to 20, 30 years ago is astounding, for precisely the same reason: it's been shown to save lives a few orders of magnitude more times than the ones they take. They're still able to be overriden by a human, but that's considered an action reserved only for the direst of emergencies; a commercial pilot that insists on flying a whole trip manually will likely not stay a pilot for long, and that's in *spite* of them receiving an education far more thorough than your average city driver.
And here's the problem with robotic drivers... They are all identical.
Like the Operating System on every computer in the world are identical? oh, wait.
Humans on the other hand are all different. Just because one causes an accident under certain circumstance doesn't mean another would.
Ahh, yes, the key word: "circumstances". Which also differ for these robotic drivers, do they not?
Still, it's irrelevant: statistics are what they are, and if this lowers one's chances of death then it deserves to be put in place. Which, considering how fucking irresponsible and arrogant your average driver is, isn't a very high standard to meet either.
Also, drivers are legally responsible when they make a stupid mistake, but who is responsible when the car makes a mistake?
Who cares? it's not like the other guy being found guilty of your death will reverse it, you're dead either way.
I'm not convinced there's ever been any "Good Guys" in any conflict whatsoever. People love to point out World War II as an example, but even a cursory knowledge of history would show that many of the Allies' actions were worse even than those of most modern dictators and despots.
I like how you post a supposed rebuttal that contains nothing but Ad Hominem. If you want to do better than logical fallacy, you're going to have to do better than this.
It's not a rebuttal, it's simply a question, because there's so many things wrong with your post (some that even glancing at a non-sensationalistic article on the subject would correct) that simply listing them would be longer than your post itself and, as such, I really can't picture a reason for it besides trolling or an utter disdain for education and knowledge and I'm wondering which one it is.
Your ignorance of the situation is astounding, really. Are you trolling, or do you just hate knowledge?