please take the time to explain to me the benefit to Apple of them continuing to support a processor that they do not use in any of their products.
Well, there I made a slight mistake: when referring to Consequentialism I was thinking of its most popular branch, Utilitarianism, which only takes into account the benefit to society at large rather than that of the individual executing the action (other branches of Consequentialism differ in that), so Apple wouldn't necessarily have to see a benefit for it to be ethically proper.
Or, for that matter, the benefit to society as a whole. As far as I can tell, the only people who would benefit are the relatively small number of experimenters who have hacked their netbooks to run OS X.
Correct. However as I pointed out, given that they had a working build not too long ago, it's fair to assume that the situation could be easily fixed with no considerable loss to Apple, likely taking at most one engineer's afternoon to detect the flaw and fix it, then sending it for testing along with any other security/functional patches they may integrate later. The benefit may not be *huge*, but I do think the cost of it would be negligible.
If it weren't, of course, and it was a result of an architectural change so deep it'd require thousands of man-hours to execute properly (like asking them to port iTunes to Linux, for instance), the situation would be vastly different but I doubt that's the case here.
I have no problem with them doing that--I've played around with building a Hackintosh myself--but they're not making Apple or it's shareholders any money and under U.S. law, that's a publicly owned company's main objective.
Law is, for the most part, independant of Ethics: an action can easily be argued to be illegal yet ethical, or unethical yet legal. Now, Consequentialism (and by extension, Utilitarianism) would probably add the legal costs of the potential lawsuit into the calculation but, as I said before, I think the costs of the fix would be so small as to be irrelevant and, as such, easily forgiven by any significant shareholder.
There's no legitimate reason--ethical, legal or otherwise--that Apple should be obligated to continue supporting a processor they don't use in any of their own products.
Wrong, there is a perfectly legitimate ethical reason for it: the benefit of having OSX working on Atom computers is likely far bigger than the effort required on their part to fix whatever problem is causing this, given that they had a working build not too long ago and the number of complains raised about it. See also: Consequentialism as for why it is so. And if the breaking was intentional, both Virtue ethics and Deontology would also like to have a word with Apple.
So many people here at Slashdot like to throw the word "Ethics" around, when they don't even know what it means. Please don't be one of them.
But there were complex technological obstacles to overcome to support alternate platforms back then, you couldn't just take the SPARC source, recompile it for the Alpha and expect it to work. Whereas in this case, the fact that there's a fairly recent OSX build that *does* run on Atom CPUs means that whatever the problem is, it's a fairly small one that could feasibly be corrected as easily as any normal bug.
Only strong levels of taxation (where by strong, I mean 95% taxation on all forms of personal income above a certain threshold, eg 200k) can make people reassess their own will to game the system, and thereby stop the elaborate schemes.
Actually, I'd say that'd only popularize the old scheme of the $1 salary with your company taking all your living expenses as "business costs", with the ePeen switching from "who has more millions in the bank" to "who owns the biggest number of tax-avoiding small businesses".
Try to outlaw *that* one, however, and I'm sure accountants and lawyers will quickly create a fork of Hollywood Accounting suitable for the legal system of your brand new government.
Forget it, if there's a truism about economics is that the rich will always find a way to stay rich. You may as well try to force him to do something *useful* while he's at it, which is what the free market tried to do with mixed success, but you'll never eliminate him completely.
Is it really prudent to try and search for a model in which to base our entire civilization and way of life that is perpetually stable, when we ourselves exist in an universe whose lifetime is inherently finite?
As the saying goes, in the long term we're all dead anyways. All our economic model is required to do is to provide some workable base until the next technological/economic/political/whatever revolution comes and we're forced to revise it yet again.
You give your fellow humans far too much credit. How likely it is that tomorrow, for instance, the entire world will stop watching reality shows? how likely is it that by next week, sales of classical music will have surpassed those of pop and rock? the behavior of an individual can't easily be predicted by a simple algorithm, but the behavior of many can and is.
It's like coin tosses. If you throw a single coin, I can't tell you with any certainity what the outcome will be, but if you throw it a million times chances are the ratio between heads and tails will be pretty close to 1:1.
How is that any different from what we've always had? I'm not aware of any RPG that let you move around while you chatted with an NPC, its just Dragon Age puts some black bars and moves the camera angle during the conversation so it has a more 'cinematic' feel.
Why wouldn't that be a good enough reason to do so? when I was 16 I had a server triple-booting FreeBSD, Debian and Windows 2K serving no other purpose other than running Apache to test the websites I coded, which I could've easily done on my (far less powerful) laptop with no ill effects on performance.
Useless? yes. Redundant? very. Educative? certainly. Fun? you bet. And before the nerdy trolls come knocking, yes I also had a girlfriend who loved me very much, I just knew how to administer my time properly.
Hell, if I had enough time for it and didn't hate the idea of financing Apple by buying their crap OS, I'd probably try my hand at making a hackintosh as well, it sounds like a fun weekend project.
Sure, but when have people with Hackintosh cared about speed or working features? it is, and always has been, a "because we can" type of project, much like the NetBSD guys and their toaster.
Giving away free (gratis) access to some proprietary technology is nothing more than a complex marketing ploy to try to attract more commercial licensee in the long term, by gaining more fans and hackers in the short term. The basic idea is "let the Indie market play around with the engine, and if some group emerge with a new killer-app, they'll have to license our engine".
Well, yes. Much like the cute girl at the supermarket offering you to try some cookies is nothing more than a complex marketing ploy to attract more customers in the long term, by gaining more fans and cookie-addicts in the short term. However, it's still a free cookie so go, grab it and eat it. They get some extra marketing, cute girl keeps her job, you get a cookie, win for all involved.
Sure it'd be best if it was all GPL, BSD or whatever, but this is still a good step so I'll congratulate them for it.
And sightly off-topic comment: amazing how much like UT3 do those XreaL screenshots look, huh?;)
Or you could learn some statistics and see why an anecdote does not constitute universal data.
Face it, dear Troll, most people are using Ubuntu just fine just as most people are using Mandriva, Fedora and SuSE without problems. People with problematic hardware have long been a minority, and regardless of how angry you may be at being part of it, that won't make them a significant majority nor anyone who hasn't had a problem with it a "fanboy".
But don't worry, one day you'll grow up, get out of your momma's basement and be enlightened (in more ways than one) as you see the whole wide world open to you, filled with people who don't give a fuck about the problems you have with your computer. One day.
Not if they were paid to a company owned by the Prime Minister's brother-in-law. Which wouldn't surprise me, given the way they defend their rods' effectiveness.
Me, I'd communicate to the woman as an equal human being that, hey, I like where this is going but I need to get to a job interview for a job I'd really like to land. "I'd like to resume this conversation when we can; Unfortunately I can't reschedule a job interview the same way."
If you haven't exchanged means of communications yet, you're depending on mere chance to drive you together again to resume the conversation. Sure, we're all human beings and we shouldn't consider others as 'events' and all that but, at the end of the day, there's over 6 billion of us and the world is full of truly wonderful people you'll never have a chance to share time with before you die regardless of what you do, so when the opportunity to meet one comes knocking I'd rather not throw it away lest of all for financial reasons.
Good jobs, on the other hand, are much easier to find simply because there's less of them, if they would've hired me that day they'll surely hire me next year when another opening springs up, and if I was really interested about working there I'll make sure to know when it does. Plus, as my well-employed friend always said, "there's always a job for the really good ones" so who knows, I may well get a better job in my future. Whereas nice people can't be substituted.
'Mature' games are also a way for developers to safely tackle 'mature' issues such as the horrors of war (CoD series), or showing a decaying, amoral world (STALKER series, The Witcher) without making it more 'cartoony' to diminish their impact and appease the "think of the children!" crowd.
Not all mature games are an orgy of sex, blood and profanities ala Conker's Bad Fur Day, some *do* earn the adjective, well, maturely.
Stable: 1. The ability for software to do its function continually without crashing or otherwise producing an error. 2. Software whose workings does not change throughout its lifetime.
You're using the first definition, as does most 'regular' people when talking about stability, Debian and Ubuntu are using the second one, as do most businesses. Most large enterprises would rather learn how to work around a little calculation bug in Excel 2003 than having all their users confronted by 2007's Ribbon interface after the last 'patch', and that's the definition of stability Ubuntu and Debian follow: you learn it once, you don't have to learn it again until you, willingly and deliberately, switch to a newer version, and in the mean time you're provided with security updates for the one you do have.
In fact, that's precisely why I stopped using Arch and switched to Ubuntu in the first place: I was tired of having them switch the format for configuration files every fucking week. I love UNIX, I love Linux, but I have better things to do on my weekends than running a diff against half of the crap in/etc and spend an entire evening looking at config files 'porting' my settings over.
Flagging this as "Troll" for being critical of how Linux distros don't get the same levels of QA testing isn't exactly demonstrating great professionalism...
It is, if you don't produce proof of Linux distros in general, and Ubuntu in particular, not getting the same levels of QA testing as Windows and OSX.
Name any version of Windows and I'll readily provide you with anecdotes of obscure errors, troublesome bugs and missing functionality, so if the bugs of TFA are your only proof behind your statement, it'll be quite insuficient.
As a wise man once said, "Perfect is the enemy of good". If they delayed their releases until every last problem was sorted out, we'd have no release at all.
For what is worth, Karmic worked perfectly on both my laptop and my desktop, whereas Windows 7 decided last night to deny me any sound from my speakers without a single error message about it, and restored said functionality this morning again without giving me reason. Guess Microsoft needed to do more QA before release, huh?
There's a difference between charging for a song, and extortion. $1 per song isn't too bad if the song was CD-quality and had no time limit on usage (i.e. rest of my life). But to charge $1 for a poor-quality lossy-compressed song whose license-of-use can be revoked any time "they" feel like it is pure theft in my opinion.
I believe charging at *all* for poor-quality lossy-compressed song with revocable licenses is an utterly moronic thing, which is why whenever I buy music I do so from Magnatune.com. I'd recommend their Classical catalogue in particular, some of the interpretations they have are the best I've ever heard, and given the size of my classical collection that's no small compliment.
Shop around, and you'll almost always find somebody selling what you want under reasonable terms and reasonable prices, so "piracy" isn't needed or, in my opinion, quite justifiable. Unless, of course, you can't stand the *thought* of listening to a rock band other than Pink Floyd or such dreck, in which case the problem isn't entirely on the RIAA's shoulders.
So you're saying writers and singers should get paid by the hour, just like engineers and programmers. That's fine but if people copy the books and songs, rather than pay for them, how will the corporation pay those wages?
Many ways. One is to sell them for cheaper than people can copy them. Books, for instance, are almost always (read: always except for university-level textbooks) cheaper to buy than to print your own, and to top it off the quality is much higher which is why dead-tree books have largely been unaffected by the whole "piracy" thing.
Another is to sell ancilliary products. You don't sell copies of music, you sell your ad-making services which include, among other things, some guy hired to compose a suitable song for it. Or you sell the drinks while people listen to music. Or sell the priviledge of standing within hearing distance of the singer/band/orchestra as they play their instrument(s), who in turn have previously paid a songwriter/composer to give them attractive songs to play.
And those are just the models already at work today. Its likely enterpreneurs would think of many others, were copying not so tightly regulated.
Actually, I'm making a bit of an unfair judgment here. I'm presuming that you don't know how to design a site that gracefully degrades but still works properly when a user has a browser with missing or deliberately disabled features. But you know what they say: it's only 99.99% of web designers that make the rest look bad!:)
This, a thousand times this. As much as I dislike the idea by itself, having certain control over fonts in the web isn't a bad thing by itself, it helps make it prettier and more readable when done correctly. The problems start, however, at the very point where the website stops working correctly because the user had the "arrogance" of replacing the font with his own, or the "nerve" to press Ctrl++ to try and make the text bigger.
The two most important words for anyone doing web design and/or development are degrade gracefully. They should be hammered into the skull of every new student, branded with fire on their arses, and giving out 100 pages of the phrase hand-written in cursive should be mandatory before graduation.
Use Silverlight to show an h264-encoded 1080p introductory video to visitors of your website if you want, write the entire menu in a client-side version of lolcode if you wish and use CSS features that won't be implemented by anyone before the year 2020 to make it prettier if you must, as long as you degrade gracefully and show something *useful* to people who don't have support for your dearest gizmo.
Seriously. Once desktop computers stop being the norm for web browsing, you and your boss will thank me for it.
The "for many of us" wasn't meant to refer to me specifically, only "those of us pushing against the current copyright regime" in general. Hence why I later said that *I* thought distribution was a moral gray area, with good arguments for both sides, yet *I* considered restrictions of use morally objectionable by themselves. Poorly phrased, perhaps, but when reading my whole post the intent should've been clear.
Which is why I also object to your characterization of me saying that redistribution *should not* be allowed. It could be restricted, given good enough reasons, but it could not be and I'd be OK with it too. Hence the "moral gray area" thing.
You CLEARLY stated that you think once something is sold you should be able to do ANYTHING with it
Then you could easily produce a quote of such an statement.
You are now clearly contradicting your own moral assertions because you are saying that there are conditions to the sale i.e. You can't do certain things with the product once you buy it (such as copy and redistribute the copies).
Technically it'd be the government conditioning the terms of use after the sale, much like I can sell you a gun but you still can't shoot somebody with it, it's not *me* who is prohibiting you from doing so. I did state that *use* of creative works should not be limited, meaning by either the original creator nor the government, but I never did so for redistribution and in fact I conceded there were valid points for both sides.
Current copyright is not perfect, but the idea that people should have no control over their creative works because it is "immoral" to place stipulations on the sale of something is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
The idea that people have an inalienable right to control how their work is used even after selling it is much worse.
You are advocating anarchy through your 'morals'.
Wrong, and irrelevant.
Normally I respect ones 'morals' but I think you have clearly demonstrated you are a self interested individual. You only care how this affects you and have no considerations to who else if affected by your ideas of right and wrong.
Wrong. Unlike you, however, I give creators the same value as users, I do not give them preferential treatment over some alleged "right" they may possess, hence my conclusions in contrast to yours.
Without this condition DVDs could not exist because the makers of the movie would not get compensated for their time and effort but someone else would.
Wrong. DVDs would still exist, movies would (likely) still exist, its just that DVDs would only be manufactured by, well, manufacturers, then had a movie copied to them by regular people rather than being made and sold by movie studios trying to make an extra buck.
You can argue that morals are held by individuals
I didn't argue, I stated. I'm merely informing you of a fact.
but all morals are the product of socialization one way or another. Socialization is the product of a society. Society is very closely involved with shaping the morals of the individual.
And cars are built by machines who are built by people who are (usually) created through a couple having sexual intercourse. Are cars a product of sex? 'morality' is simply how an individual feels towards the concept of certain acts, societies cannot have morality much like they cannot have feelings or thoughts, only the individuals contained therein.
Only in the most abstract sense of morality do you end up in the zone where morality is just an opinion. The generally accepted definition requires some sort of semi-logical justification of the view you take.
No, the generally-accepted definition is that of mere opinions, the whole concept of logical justifications and analysis of morality is what we call Ethics which is only related to the concept of morality as gravity is to Physics.
Slashdot Mirror
please take the time to explain to me the benefit to Apple of them continuing to support a processor that they do not use in any of their products.
Well, there I made a slight mistake: when referring to Consequentialism I was thinking of its most popular branch, Utilitarianism, which only takes into account the benefit to society at large rather than that of the individual executing the action (other branches of Consequentialism differ in that), so Apple wouldn't necessarily have to see a benefit for it to be ethically proper.
Or, for that matter, the benefit to society as a whole. As far as I can tell, the only people who would benefit are the relatively small number of experimenters who have hacked their netbooks to run OS X.
Correct. However as I pointed out, given that they had a working build not too long ago, it's fair to assume that the situation could be easily fixed with no considerable loss to Apple, likely taking at most one engineer's afternoon to detect the flaw and fix it, then sending it for testing along with any other security/functional patches they may integrate later. The benefit may not be *huge*, but I do think the cost of it would be negligible.
If it weren't, of course, and it was a result of an architectural change so deep it'd require thousands of man-hours to execute properly (like asking them to port iTunes to Linux, for instance), the situation would be vastly different but I doubt that's the case here.
I have no problem with them doing that--I've played around with building a Hackintosh myself--but they're not making Apple or it's shareholders any money and under U.S. law, that's a publicly owned company's main objective.
Law is, for the most part, independant of Ethics: an action can easily be argued to be illegal yet ethical, or unethical yet legal. Now, Consequentialism (and by extension, Utilitarianism) would probably add the legal costs of the potential lawsuit into the calculation but, as I said before, I think the costs of the fix would be so small as to be irrelevant and, as such, easily forgiven by any significant shareholder.
There's no legitimate reason--ethical, legal or otherwise--that Apple should be obligated to continue supporting a processor they don't use in any of their own products.
Wrong, there is a perfectly legitimate ethical reason for it: the benefit of having OSX working on Atom computers is likely far bigger than the effort required on their part to fix whatever problem is causing this, given that they had a working build not too long ago and the number of complains raised about it. See also: Consequentialism as for why it is so. And if the breaking was intentional, both Virtue ethics and Deontology would also like to have a word with Apple.
So many people here at Slashdot like to throw the word "Ethics" around, when they don't even know what it means. Please don't be one of them.
But there were complex technological obstacles to overcome to support alternate platforms back then, you couldn't just take the SPARC source, recompile it for the Alpha and expect it to work. Whereas in this case, the fact that there's a fairly recent OSX build that *does* run on Atom CPUs means that whatever the problem is, it's a fairly small one that could feasibly be corrected as easily as any normal bug.
Only strong levels of taxation (where by strong, I mean 95% taxation on all forms of personal income above a certain threshold, eg 200k) can make people reassess their own will to game the system, and thereby stop the elaborate schemes.
Actually, I'd say that'd only popularize the old scheme of the $1 salary with your company taking all your living expenses as "business costs", with the ePeen switching from "who has more millions in the bank" to "who owns the biggest number of tax-avoiding small businesses".
Try to outlaw *that* one, however, and I'm sure accountants and lawyers will quickly create a fork of Hollywood Accounting suitable for the legal system of your brand new government.
Forget it, if there's a truism about economics is that the rich will always find a way to stay rich. You may as well try to force him to do something *useful* while he's at it, which is what the free market tried to do with mixed success, but you'll never eliminate him completely.
One less than those who subsist thanks to the works of that 1%.
"Give a man a fish..." and all that.
Is it really prudent to try and search for a model in which to base our entire civilization and way of life that is perpetually stable, when we ourselves exist in an universe whose lifetime is inherently finite?
As the saying goes, in the long term we're all dead anyways. All our economic model is required to do is to provide some workable base until the next technological/economic/political/whatever revolution comes and we're forced to revise it yet again.
You give your fellow humans far too much credit. How likely it is that tomorrow, for instance, the entire world will stop watching reality shows? how likely is it that by next week, sales of classical music will have surpassed those of pop and rock? the behavior of an individual can't easily be predicted by a simple algorithm, but the behavior of many can and is.
It's like coin tosses. If you throw a single coin, I can't tell you with any certainity what the outcome will be, but if you throw it a million times chances are the ratio between heads and tails will be pretty close to 1:1.
Try females then, its pretty hard to make an ugly one (well, unless you go for a female dwarf, but I'm assuming you're going for a human character).
How is that any different from what we've always had? I'm not aware of any RPG that let you move around while you chatted with an NPC, its just Dragon Age puts some black bars and moves the camera angle during the conversation so it has a more 'cinematic' feel.
THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes.
Copying the works of a group nearly half a century after they were first made, of a band whose half of its members are already dead?
No, this is EXACTLY the sort of copyright that I think any intelligent being ought to oppose.
Why wouldn't that be a good enough reason to do so? when I was 16 I had a server triple-booting FreeBSD, Debian and Windows 2K serving no other purpose other than running Apache to test the websites I coded, which I could've easily done on my (far less powerful) laptop with no ill effects on performance.
Useless? yes. Redundant? very. Educative? certainly. Fun? you bet. And before the nerdy trolls come knocking, yes I also had a girlfriend who loved me very much, I just knew how to administer my time properly.
Hell, if I had enough time for it and didn't hate the idea of financing Apple by buying their crap OS, I'd probably try my hand at making a hackintosh as well, it sounds like a fun weekend project.
Sure, but when have people with Hackintosh cared about speed or working features? it is, and always has been, a "because we can" type of project, much like the NetBSD guys and their toaster.
Giving away free (gratis) access to some proprietary technology is nothing more than a complex marketing ploy to try to attract more commercial licensee in the long term, by gaining more fans and hackers in the short term. The basic idea is "let the Indie market play around with the engine, and if some group emerge with a new killer-app, they'll have to license our engine".
Well, yes. Much like the cute girl at the supermarket offering you to try some cookies is nothing more than a complex marketing ploy to attract more customers in the long term, by gaining more fans and cookie-addicts in the short term. However, it's still a free cookie so go, grab it and eat it. They get some extra marketing, cute girl keeps her job, you get a cookie, win for all involved.
Sure it'd be best if it was all GPL, BSD or whatever, but this is still a good step so I'll congratulate them for it.
And sightly off-topic comment: amazing how much like UT3 do those XreaL screenshots look, huh? ;)
Or you could learn some statistics and see why an anecdote does not constitute universal data.
Face it, dear Troll, most people are using Ubuntu just fine just as most people are using Mandriva, Fedora and SuSE without problems. People with problematic hardware have long been a minority, and regardless of how angry you may be at being part of it, that won't make them a significant majority nor anyone who hasn't had a problem with it a "fanboy".
But don't worry, one day you'll grow up, get out of your momma's basement and be enlightened (in more ways than one) as you see the whole wide world open to you, filled with people who don't give a fuck about the problems you have with your computer. One day.
Not if they were paid to a company owned by the Prime Minister's brother-in-law. Which wouldn't surprise me, given the way they defend their rods' effectiveness.
Me, I'd communicate to the woman as an equal human being that, hey, I like where this is going but I need to get to a job interview for a job I'd really like to land. "I'd like to resume this conversation when we can; Unfortunately I can't reschedule a job interview the same way."
If you haven't exchanged means of communications yet, you're depending on mere chance to drive you together again to resume the conversation. Sure, we're all human beings and we shouldn't consider others as 'events' and all that but, at the end of the day, there's over 6 billion of us and the world is full of truly wonderful people you'll never have a chance to share time with before you die regardless of what you do, so when the opportunity to meet one comes knocking I'd rather not throw it away lest of all for financial reasons.
Good jobs, on the other hand, are much easier to find simply because there's less of them, if they would've hired me that day they'll surely hire me next year when another opening springs up, and if I was really interested about working there I'll make sure to know when it does. Plus, as my well-employed friend always said, "there's always a job for the really good ones" so who knows, I may well get a better job in my future. Whereas nice people can't be substituted.
'Mature' games are also a way for developers to safely tackle 'mature' issues such as the horrors of war (CoD series), or showing a decaying, amoral world (STALKER series, The Witcher) without making it more 'cartoony' to diminish their impact and appease the "think of the children!" crowd.
Not all mature games are an orgy of sex, blood and profanities ala Conker's Bad Fur Day, some *do* earn the adjective, well, maturely.
Stable:
1. The ability for software to do its function continually without crashing or otherwise producing an error.
2. Software whose workings does not change throughout its lifetime.
You're using the first definition, as does most 'regular' people when talking about stability, Debian and Ubuntu are using the second one, as do most businesses. Most large enterprises would rather learn how to work around a little calculation bug in Excel 2003 than having all their users confronted by 2007's Ribbon interface after the last 'patch', and that's the definition of stability Ubuntu and Debian follow: you learn it once, you don't have to learn it again until you, willingly and deliberately, switch to a newer version, and in the mean time you're provided with security updates for the one you do have.
In fact, that's precisely why I stopped using Arch and switched to Ubuntu in the first place: I was tired of having them switch the format for configuration files every fucking week. I love UNIX, I love Linux, but I have better things to do on my weekends than running a diff against half of the crap in /etc and spend an entire evening looking at config files 'porting' my settings over.
Flagging this as "Troll" for being critical of how Linux distros don't get the same levels of QA testing isn't exactly demonstrating great professionalism...
It is, if you don't produce proof of Linux distros in general, and Ubuntu in particular, not getting the same levels of QA testing as Windows and OSX.
Name any version of Windows and I'll readily provide you with anecdotes of obscure errors, troublesome bugs and missing functionality, so if the bugs of TFA are your only proof behind your statement, it'll be quite insuficient.
As a wise man once said, "Perfect is the enemy of good". If they delayed their releases until every last problem was sorted out, we'd have no release at all.
For what is worth, Karmic worked perfectly on both my laptop and my desktop, whereas Windows 7 decided last night to deny me any sound from my speakers without a single error message about it, and restored said functionality this morning again without giving me reason. Guess Microsoft needed to do more QA before release, huh?
There's a difference between charging for a song, and extortion. $1 per song isn't too bad if the song was CD-quality and had no time limit on usage (i.e. rest of my life). But to charge $1 for a poor-quality lossy-compressed song whose license-of-use can be revoked any time "they" feel like it is pure theft in my opinion.
I believe charging at *all* for poor-quality lossy-compressed song with revocable licenses is an utterly moronic thing, which is why whenever I buy music I do so from Magnatune.com. I'd recommend their Classical catalogue in particular, some of the interpretations they have are the best I've ever heard, and given the size of my classical collection that's no small compliment.
Shop around, and you'll almost always find somebody selling what you want under reasonable terms and reasonable prices, so "piracy" isn't needed or, in my opinion, quite justifiable. Unless, of course, you can't stand the *thought* of listening to a rock band other than Pink Floyd or such dreck, in which case the problem isn't entirely on the RIAA's shoulders.
So you're saying writers and singers should get paid by the hour, just like engineers and programmers. That's fine but if people copy the books and songs, rather than pay for them, how will the corporation pay those wages?
Many ways. One is to sell them for cheaper than people can copy them. Books, for instance, are almost always (read: always except for university-level textbooks) cheaper to buy than to print your own, and to top it off the quality is much higher which is why dead-tree books have largely been unaffected by the whole "piracy" thing.
Another is to sell ancilliary products. You don't sell copies of music, you sell your ad-making services which include, among other things, some guy hired to compose a suitable song for it. Or you sell the drinks while people listen to music. Or sell the priviledge of standing within hearing distance of the singer/band/orchestra as they play their instrument(s), who in turn have previously paid a songwriter/composer to give them attractive songs to play.
And those are just the models already at work today. Its likely enterpreneurs would think of many others, were copying not so tightly regulated.
Actually, I'm making a bit of an unfair judgment here. I'm presuming that you don't know how to design a site that gracefully degrades but still works properly when a user has a browser with missing or deliberately disabled features. But you know what they say: it's only 99.99% of web designers that make the rest look bad! :)
This, a thousand times this. As much as I dislike the idea by itself, having certain control over fonts in the web isn't a bad thing by itself, it helps make it prettier and more readable when done correctly. The problems start, however, at the very point where the website stops working correctly because the user had the "arrogance" of replacing the font with his own, or the "nerve" to press Ctrl++ to try and make the text bigger.
The two most important words for anyone doing web design and/or development are degrade gracefully. They should be hammered into the skull of every new student, branded with fire on their arses, and giving out 100 pages of the phrase hand-written in cursive should be mandatory before graduation.
Use Silverlight to show an h264-encoded 1080p introductory video to visitors of your website if you want, write the entire menu in a client-side version of lolcode if you wish and use CSS features that won't be implemented by anyone before the year 2020 to make it prettier if you must, as long as you degrade gracefully and show something *useful* to people who don't have support for your dearest gizmo.
Seriously. Once desktop computers stop being the norm for web browsing, you and your boss will thank me for it.
The "for many of us" wasn't meant to refer to me specifically, only "those of us pushing against the current copyright regime" in general. Hence why I later said that *I* thought distribution was a moral gray area, with good arguments for both sides, yet *I* considered restrictions of use morally objectionable by themselves. Poorly phrased, perhaps, but when reading my whole post the intent should've been clear.
Which is why I also object to your characterization of me saying that redistribution *should not* be allowed. It could be restricted, given good enough reasons, but it could not be and I'd be OK with it too. Hence the "moral gray area" thing.
You CLEARLY stated that you think once something is sold you should be able to do ANYTHING with it
Then you could easily produce a quote of such an statement.
You are now clearly contradicting your own moral assertions because you are saying that there are conditions to the sale i.e. You can't do certain things with the product once you buy it (such as copy and redistribute the copies).
Technically it'd be the government conditioning the terms of use after the sale, much like I can sell you a gun but you still can't shoot somebody with it, it's not *me* who is prohibiting you from doing so. I did state that *use* of creative works should not be limited, meaning by either the original creator nor the government, but I never did so for redistribution and in fact I conceded there were valid points for both sides.
Current copyright is not perfect, but the idea that people should have no control over their creative works because it is "immoral" to place stipulations on the sale of something is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
The idea that people have an inalienable right to control how their work is used even after selling it is much worse.
You are advocating anarchy through your 'morals'.
Wrong, and irrelevant.
Normally I respect ones 'morals' but I think you have clearly demonstrated you are a self interested individual. You only care how this affects you and have no considerations to who else if affected by your ideas of right and wrong.
Wrong. Unlike you, however, I give creators the same value as users, I do not give them preferential treatment over some alleged "right" they may possess, hence my conclusions in contrast to yours.
Without this condition DVDs could not exist because the makers of the movie would not get compensated for their time and effort but someone else would.
Wrong. DVDs would still exist, movies would (likely) still exist, its just that DVDs would only be manufactured by, well, manufacturers, then had a movie copied to them by regular people rather than being made and sold by movie studios trying to make an extra buck.
You can argue that morals are held by individuals
I didn't argue, I stated. I'm merely informing you of a fact.
but all morals are the product of socialization one way or another. Socialization is the product of a society. Society is very closely involved with shaping the morals of the individual.
And cars are built by machines who are built by people who are (usually) created through a couple having sexual intercourse. Are cars a product of sex? 'morality' is simply how an individual feels towards the concept of certain acts, societies cannot have morality much like they cannot have feelings or thoughts, only the individuals contained therein.
Only in the most abstract sense of morality do you end up in the zone where morality is just an opinion. The generally accepted definition requires some sort of semi-logical justification of the view you take.
No, the generally-accepted definition is that of mere opinions, the whole concept of logical justifications and analysis of morality is what we call Ethics which is only related to the concept of morality as gravity is to Physics.