That's not what he said (and he should be modded "informative") and that's not how it is. You don't become religious if you think God ruined your life. You find God when you look for him with a pure heart, and that's usually when you realize your hell on earth was your own damned fault.
An example is my alcoholic friend Amy's new alcoholic husband. Their drinking was so bad they wound up losing everything, and homeless. Tim was an athiest, brought up by athiests, but they wound up in a Salvation Army homeless shelter. Sally's makes its residents attend church, Tim had a religious experience the first time he was inside the church and they've both been doing a lot better; he even has a job now. He had no god to blame for his troubles, now he has a God to credit the change in his life, which wouldn't have happened if he hadn't found God. If you believe God is a figment of his imagnation, that figment changed his life.
As to the research, I didn't RTFA but "belief in heaven and hell" is a little vague. The Muslims and Jews' religions say if you do bad things you go to hell, but Christians believe that their sins were paid for in blood. All a Christian has to do to get to heaven is repent his or her sins and believe that Christ is Lord and Savior. Of course, Christians who really believe are going to do the best they can to follow Christ's teachings, even though it's an impossible task.
And what about Bhuddists and Hindus? They don't believe in heaven, hell, or death, but they do believe in karma; to a Bhuddist or Hindu, if you're good you'll be reborn into a better life after you die, and if you're evil your next life will be a miserable existance. They should have a look at these folks, as well; rebirth into a better or worse life doesn't seem that much different than heaven and hell.
Even professional recording studios are cheap these days. I have friends who've recorded and had professionally stamped CDs (including cover art and packaging) for about a dollar per CD in lots of 2000. A decent piano costs more than that.
Someone who strings together 3 chords certainly can't dictate what another person who strings together the same 3 chords can do
I'm afraid you're wrong. George Harrison was sucessfully sued for the three note song "My Sweet Lord", ZZ Top was successfully sued by Howlin' Wolf for the "Ahow how how" in "La Grange".
And that worked for a long, long time, until they forgot what the agreement was. Why is it always THEY who forgot what the agreement was? Why isn't it YOU who forgot what the agreement was?
Because "YOU" were not part of the agreement. The agreement was between author, publisher, and government. There is and never was any agreement between author or publisher and consumer.
Quite frankly, I doubt you ever honored the terms of the agreement. Fess up, you started pirating before you EVER purchased any music or movies didn't you?
LOL, I'm not the guy you were responding to, but there were no PCs when I was a teenager, let alone an internet, and there were no movies for sale or rent because the VCR hadn't been invented yet. But yeah, we taped records we borrowed from friends. You know what? It was perfectly legal.
You rail against the creeping term of copyrights, while at the same time ripping off music and movies on which the ink hasn't even dried yet.
But I don't. I get my movies at Walmart and my CDs from the local bands that produce them *and who thank me for sharing them, they get bigger audiences that way); today's commercial music is almost all crap. There has always been crap music, but it's worse now than it's ever been. It's not only not worth paying for, it's not worth the effort to download. I have the book I wrote and a lot of FOSS seeding on bittorrent.
You are not alone, there seems to be a lot of people like you who have never created anything of value
There are about 400 slashdotters who would disagree with you. One fellow called my/. journals "slashdot's best kept secret gem". Another said he had it as his home page. Yet another said "I don't know if you're a great writer, or jst a really good one who knows a lot of interesting people". I've written songs, poetry, science fiction. And I've never tried to monetize it.
I see the fellow you responded to is in a similar position, even though he's only half my age.
How do you tell if that new device will work with Linux?
Just plug it in. If there are divers needed and available, Linux will find them and install them automatically. If there are no drivers, the device won't work and you simply remove it and return it to the supplier.
Hell try the Hairyfeet challenge, take ANY distro, your choice, from just 4 years ago (less than half the Windows support cycle) and update it to current using JUST the GUI as any normal user would be expected to do. Know what you'll get?
In Mandriva or kubuntu, you'll get a fully functional computer that runs faster than before the upgrade. Of course, if a newer component has more hardware requirements than the box you're upgrading requires it will break, but I've never seen that happen yet with open source software, although I have with Flash when I upgraded kubuntu.
Oh, and the "upgrade with a mouse"? One click is all it takes. No reboot unless the kernel is updated.
the guts are even worse off, with all kinds of incompatible bullshit down in the networking guts especially.
Again, I've never seen this in ten years of Linux.
Any Windows machine I sell will continue to function for the life of the Windows install barring hardware failure
You were talking about updating the OS. I've never seen a bug fix or performance update break anything in Linux, ever. As I said, I have in Windows XP. What I spoke of in the first paragraph was the equivalent of going from XP to Vista. A popup appears saying there's a new version, one click and your kubuntu 10.04 (XP) is upgraded to kubuntu 11.01 (Win 7). And you actually believe Windows is less of a hassle??
Oh, as to the hardware failure, Linux is far more fault tolerant or hardware problems. Six or seven years ago, Windows XP started getting flaky; bluescreening and booting itself and all sorts of nonsense, while Linux just plugged along, until one evening it froze -- the power supply had been going out. Linux didn't flinch until the power supply was completely dead, Windows had been flaky for months.
A couple of years ago I had Win 7 and kubuntu on a notebook dual boot. The computer had a hardware design flaw (they've since fixed the flaw in newer machines) that if it was set to hibernate when you close the lid on battery but do something else on AC, if you shut the lid then plugged it in before the lights stopped blinking, it wouldn't boot when you tried to restart it, and you had to pull the battery to get it going again. This corrupted the registry and file system so badly that it killed Windows dead, no problem with Linux.
Finally if you'd taken just 10 minutes of your time before install you'd never have had that problem with drivers as there is this place called DriverPacks where you can simply download a pack with ALL the drivers for damned near every piece of hardware, all compressed with a nice little GUI that will do the work for you.
I prefer not to install anything on my computers from some random site. With Linux, I don't have to. The installer knows what drivers to use and where to get them. The installation is automatic. No searching for drivers, no downloads from maybe questionable websites. If I'm installing windows drivers in a Dell I'll go to Dell's website, for HP HP's. If it's a Dell running Linux, I don't have to do anything, the drivers are there, unlike Windows.
Last year I decided to get a bluetooth dongle to transfer photos from my phone to one of the computers. It had an install CD for Windows and Mac, but not Linux. I figured it wouldn't work in the Linux box, so I installed the files in Windows (requiring a reboot, of course) and it worked. Out of curiosity I plugged it into the Linux box just to see what would happen -- and it just worked. No programs to install, no drivers to hunt for, no rebooting, just plug it in and it works.
Free sells. Read the coment again -- look at the Doctorow quote. Had it not been for reading hundreds of Isaac Asimov's books for free, checked out from the public library, I wouldn't have bought the two dozen volumes of his work on my shelf right now. The same goes for the albums and tapes and CDs I have.
I repeat -- nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many have starved from obscurity. I'm not going to buy a pig in a poke; if you see a CD from someone you've never heard of, what on earth would get you to buy it?
I'm sorry, but this is far to simple for anyone to not be able to understand.
It's like saying that elementary school math doesn't teach you how to solve large multiplication problems anymore, they just teach times tables!... but it's hard to do a multiplication problem without knowing what 6 * 8 is off the top of your head.
I was never any good at rote memorization. OTOH, if something interested me I learned it easily and retained it, and I never did memorize multiplication tables. Instead, if I wanted 6*8 I'd multiply 6*4 and double the answer (I had them memorized up to 5). By junior high I had a slide rule, with one of those you don't need to memorize it.
I also thought memorization was stupid; why memorize when you can look at a piece of paper? As long as you know why 6*8=32, why should you need to remember what 6*8 is? Just look it up, it only takes a second, and has the added advantage of being right; memory fails all of us sometimes.
I also wonder if it has to do with books. Reading is out, other forms of media is in.
That's nothing new, in my experience aliterates have vastly outnumbered literates for over half a century. "Spot the nerd" was an easy excersize when I was a kid, he was the one with a book and a pair of glasses. And the slide rule was a dead giveaway... There was a TV in my house my entire life, nothing has changed there, except there's more to watch.
What's next critical thinking? That cannot happen or else religions would cease to be followed.
If you've seen an elephant, no amount of critical thinking will persuade you that elephants can't possibly exist. If you've never seen one but half the people you know claim to have, and you still refuse to believe elephants exist, your "critical" thinking is getting in your way. If you absolutely refuse under any circumstances that elephants can't exist and you see one, your critical "thinking" (rationalizing) will convince you that someone must have druuged you or you've gone crazy.
Disbelief in something you've not experienced takes as much faith as belief in something you've never experienced, and far more fath than someone who believes in that thing and has actually experienced it.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Obviously, that fellow wasn't talking about you.
That is : the problem of finding a device (say: server, virtual server, coffee maker, whatever) without having to enter an arbitrary number of digits.
You mean like we did with phones for a hundred years? When is the last time you typed a URL into the address bar? Hell, the easiest way to get to the Pirate Bay is type TPB in google and hit the "feeling lucky" button. DNS is as useful as paper phone books; used to be lots, now is very little.
I would make an OS a lot less dependent on DNS actually functioning
WTF does your OS have to do with it? Your OS isn't dependent on the internet! Just make the BROWSER less dependent on DNS.
easier to transfer such between computers
Your PC has a URL? I can transfer files to you without your IP address?
I have a reasonable expectation that people should respect my wishes when it comes to how the song should be copied, played, or otherwise consumed.
I disagree, your expectations are completely unreasonable. What is reasonable is for you to expect that I won't sell copies of it.
Your right to listen to my song ends where my right to protect my work begins.
No, your rights to control what I have in my possession are extremely limited, except by artificial constructs. Which is a good thing for you, if you have any talent. If I give your stuff to someone who has never heard it, they may become your customer. If they never hear it you'll never get their money.
Doctorow puts it succinctly: nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. As long as it isn't pure crap, the more people that are exposed to your work, the more people will shovel money your way.
IMO any artist who doesn't embrace noncommercial piracy is a damned fool.
Good day, sir. Enjoy your obscurity.
Now, of course the realities are that the internet makes it so that many people can get their fill of listening to my song once it's been recorded and distributed without paying compensation.
If I "get my fill" of hearing your song, it sucks. I see why you're so anti-pirate, talentless hacks are always against piracy.
Like most sayings, that isn't entirely correct. What is more correct is "the more you love, the more you are owned." Folks who own nothing are damned miserable. It's when losing those thing hurts that they own you. If bending a fender ruins your day, your car owns you. If you shrug and say "it's just a damned car, it'll still get me to work" then your ownership of it only works one way.
The whole purpose of copyright is to make sure artists get paid for their labor.
In your country maybe, but in the US our constitution says "for the promotion of the useful arts and sciences". Writing a book doesn't guarantee it will be published, and getting published doesn't gurantee it will sell. With that in mind, and considering that most songs, movies, and books are financial flops, from your perspective copyright must have failed miserably, because most do NOT get paid for their work. Only the good stuff earns any cash. Well, usually only the good stuff, sometimes crap is successful.
What I took exception to was "'By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work".
But your work is NOT your property, at least not according to the US Constitution (haven't rtfa so I don't know if it applies to this fellow). I never heard the term "intellectual property" until they passed the Bono Act (which should have never been passed; copyright was already too long).
Plus, under US copyright law, phonoecords are "works for hire", meaning the label holds the copyright. The artist doesn't hold the copyright unless he's self-published.
Yours is good, too -- it has neither worked for the fans, nor the artists. But you are correct, it has indeed worked for the MAFIAA.
I don't see why we need DNS any more. Who types URLs in these days? The search engines can find your content and serve it up via IP address.
Sure, ten or fifteen years ago when getting listed with AltaVista was hard to do, but not with today's search engines.
Of course, web page writers would bitch about having to type IPs into their hrefs, but not many; HTML documents would still have names. They would only need to put an IP in for an external link.
The concept of a general purpose computer sans keyboard is utterly stupid.
Well, there's your problem -- you listened to the marketers and journalists. The fact is, a tablet is not a general purpose computer. It's a glorified book reader/movie watcher/web surfer/picture displayer.
I have an old HP plugged into my TV. It was designed as a general purpose computer, but I don't use it for one. I use it for watching movies and TV, listening to the radio, ripping CDs and DVDs; almost all media stuff (kind of like a tablet only it's not touch screen, is 42 inches diagonal, and weighs 215 pounds). I run it almost 100% with the mouse (yes, it's Linux) andI haven't touched its keyboard in months. In fact the reason I haven't downgraded Flash on it is because the batteries in the keyboard are dead and I need to buy more.
If I need to type, I just use the notebook. I'll take the notebook to the bar to surf the web while I'm there, but a tablet would be handier.
I see you've never seen the insides of an airplane. When I was in the USAF in the '70s we had C5-As at Dover. Everyone else wondered how anything that huge could fly, but I wondered how anything that complex could stay together and actually work.
The first ones were pretty buggy, though. Landing gear not coming down, engines falling off, etc.
Software isn't more complex than much hardware, but hardware engineering has a far longer history and is far more a mature field. Programmers make excuses (like you just did), engineers don't.
"Oh, yeah, I'll get this, listen to it for a few months, but doubt I'll throw it on again."
If you remember, you were probably similar to this; I was in some ways. Only instead of streaming I'd copy it on tape from a friend's LP, and music that was kinda ok but not really good got recorded over. After being burned once or twice by buying an album with a great song and finding that the rest was crap, I got to the point I'd only buy live and greatest hits albums, unless they were from a band that I'd already bought and liked everything.
But pretty much everything I've bought...I listen to OVER and over again...and have for decades.
So are the kids... only it's our generation's music they're listening to over and over again. Go to any live cover band in a bar full of twentysomethings. They're not covering NStynk and Linkin Pork, they're covering Zeppelin and Skynard and Van Halen and the like.
I never get tired of hearing Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall....and I usually play those in their entirety, from beginning to end since to me..they are whole pieces of music...the whole album is.
I was discussing that very same thing with a young person here a while back. He said that "Money" didn't really fit the album. I had to explain to him that DSOM was engineered to be listened to in two movements; play side one, and turning the LP over is an intermission. To some extent, that's how most such albums were designed, and how I lpay them. When I'm listening to MP3s or oggs, I have TenSecondsOfSilence.MP3 between sides.
I'm trying to figure out...when did music become disposable?
Yes, assuming *reasonable* regulations are made. I don't have much faith in that.
The FAA has done a fair job of regulating the airline industry. The EPA did a damned good job of cleaning up ithe toxic mess that was the USA before the EPA was established. The FDA does a pretty good job regulating medicines (not that they're perfect) and they also do a fair job, even understaffed, of inspecting the foold supply.
OTOH, local government regs are often incredibly stupid. Don't get your governments confused. The biggest problem with Federal regulators is bloat and innefiency.
Slashdot Mirror
And the even more evil Kira Narise and her goateed buddy Ben.
That's not what he said (and he should be modded "informative") and that's not how it is. You don't become religious if you think God ruined your life. You find God when you look for him with a pure heart, and that's usually when you realize your hell on earth was your own damned fault.
An example is my alcoholic friend Amy's new alcoholic husband. Their drinking was so bad they wound up losing everything, and homeless. Tim was an athiest, brought up by athiests, but they wound up in a Salvation Army homeless shelter. Sally's makes its residents attend church, Tim had a religious experience the first time he was inside the church and they've both been doing a lot better; he even has a job now. He had no god to blame for his troubles, now he has a God to credit the change in his life, which wouldn't have happened if he hadn't found God. If you believe God is a figment of his imagnation, that figment changed his life.
As to the research, I didn't RTFA but "belief in heaven and hell" is a little vague. The Muslims and Jews' religions say if you do bad things you go to hell, but Christians believe that their sins were paid for in blood. All a Christian has to do to get to heaven is repent his or her sins and believe that Christ is Lord and Savior. Of course, Christians who really believe are going to do the best they can to follow Christ's teachings, even though it's an impossible task.
And what about Bhuddists and Hindus? They don't believe in heaven, hell, or death, but they do believe in karma; to a Bhuddist or Hindu, if you're good you'll be reborn into a better life after you die, and if you're evil your next life will be a miserable existance. They should have a look at these folks, as well; rebirth into a better or worse life doesn't seem that much different than heaven and hell.
Indeed, ten seconds is about the shortest I deem necessary. You forgot getting up and walking to the turntable, that alone will take ten seconds.
Yep, I sure am. I was 24 in 1976. I watched the moon landing live on TV.
Even professional recording studios are cheap these days. I have friends who've recorded and had professionally stamped CDs (including cover art and packaging) for about a dollar per CD in lots of 2000. A decent piano costs more than that.
Someone who strings together 3 chords certainly can't dictate what another person who strings together the same 3 chords can do
I'm afraid you're wrong. George Harrison was sucessfully sued for the three note song "My Sweet Lord", ZZ Top was successfully sued by Howlin' Wolf for the "Ahow how how" in "La Grange".
And that worked for a long, long time, until they forgot what the agreement was.
Why is it always THEY who forgot what the agreement was?
Why isn't it YOU who forgot what the agreement was?
Because "YOU" were not part of the agreement. The agreement was between author, publisher, and government. There is and never was any agreement between author or publisher and consumer.
Quite frankly, I doubt you ever honored the terms of the agreement. Fess up, you started pirating before you EVER purchased any music or movies didn't you?
LOL, I'm not the guy you were responding to, but there were no PCs when I was a teenager, let alone an internet, and there were no movies for sale or rent because the VCR hadn't been invented yet. But yeah, we taped records we borrowed from friends. You know what? It was perfectly legal.
You rail against the creeping term of copyrights, while at the same time ripping off music and movies on which the ink hasn't even dried yet.
But I don't. I get my movies at Walmart and my CDs from the local bands that produce them *and who thank me for sharing them, they get bigger audiences that way); today's commercial music is almost all crap. There has always been crap music, but it's worse now than it's ever been. It's not only not worth paying for, it's not worth the effort to download. I have the book I wrote and a lot of FOSS seeding on bittorrent.
You are not alone, there seems to be a lot of people like you who have never created anything of value
There are about 400 slashdotters who would disagree with you. One fellow called my /. journals "slashdot's best kept secret gem". Another said he had it as his home page. Yet another said "I don't know if you're a great writer, or jst a really good one who knows a lot of interesting people". I've written songs, poetry, science fiction. And I've never tried to monetize it.
I see the fellow you responded to is in a similar position, even though he's only half my age.
How do you tell if that new device will work with Linux?
Just plug it in. If there are divers needed and available, Linux will find them and install them automatically. If there are no drivers, the device won't work and you simply remove it and return it to the supplier.
Hell try the Hairyfeet challenge, take ANY distro, your choice, from just 4 years ago (less than half the Windows support cycle) and update it to current using JUST the GUI as any normal user would be expected to do. Know what you'll get?
In Mandriva or kubuntu, you'll get a fully functional computer that runs faster than before the upgrade. Of course, if a newer component has more hardware requirements than the box you're upgrading requires it will break, but I've never seen that happen yet with open source software, although I have with Flash when I upgraded kubuntu.
Oh, and the "upgrade with a mouse"? One click is all it takes. No reboot unless the kernel is updated.
the guts are even worse off, with all kinds of incompatible bullshit down in the networking guts especially.
Again, I've never seen this in ten years of Linux.
Any Windows machine I sell will continue to function for the life of the Windows install barring hardware failure
You were talking about updating the OS. I've never seen a bug fix or performance update break anything in Linux, ever. As I said, I have in Windows XP. What I spoke of in the first paragraph was the equivalent of going from XP to Vista. A popup appears saying there's a new version, one click and your kubuntu 10.04 (XP) is upgraded to kubuntu 11.01 (Win 7). And you actually believe Windows is less of a hassle??
Oh, as to the hardware failure, Linux is far more fault tolerant or hardware problems. Six or seven years ago, Windows XP started getting flaky; bluescreening and booting itself and all sorts of nonsense, while Linux just plugged along, until one evening it froze -- the power supply had been going out. Linux didn't flinch until the power supply was completely dead, Windows had been flaky for months.
A couple of years ago I had Win 7 and kubuntu on a notebook dual boot. The computer had a hardware design flaw (they've since fixed the flaw in newer machines) that if it was set to hibernate when you close the lid on battery but do something else on AC, if you shut the lid then plugged it in before the lights stopped blinking, it wouldn't boot when you tried to restart it, and you had to pull the battery to get it going again. This corrupted the registry and file system so badly that it killed Windows dead, no problem with Linux.
Finally if you'd taken just 10 minutes of your time before install you'd never have had that problem with drivers as there is this place called DriverPacks where you can simply download a pack with ALL the drivers for damned near every piece of hardware, all compressed with a nice little GUI that will do the work for you.
I prefer not to install anything on my computers from some random site. With Linux, I don't have to. The installer knows what drivers to use and where to get them. The installation is automatic. No searching for drivers, no downloads from maybe questionable websites. If I'm installing windows drivers in a Dell I'll go to Dell's website, for HP HP's. If it's a Dell running Linux, I don't have to do anything, the drivers are there, unlike Windows.
Last year I decided to get a bluetooth dongle to transfer photos from my phone to one of the computers. It had an install CD for Windows and Mac, but not Linux. I figured it wouldn't work in the Linux box, so I installed the files in Windows (requiring a reboot, of course) and it worked. Out of curiosity I plugged it into the Linux box just to see what would happen -- and it just worked. No programs to install, no drivers to hunt for, no rebooting, just plug it in and it works.
Support nightmare? That's Windows, not Linux.
Google has no monopoly on search engines.
Who pays the artist then?
Free sells. Read the coment again -- look at the Doctorow quote. Had it not been for reading hundreds of Isaac Asimov's books for free, checked out from the public library, I wouldn't have bought the two dozen volumes of his work on my shelf right now. The same goes for the albums and tapes and CDs I have.
I repeat -- nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many have starved from obscurity. I'm not going to buy a pig in a poke; if you see a CD from someone you've never heard of, what on earth would get you to buy it?
I'm sorry, but this is far to simple for anyone to not be able to understand.
DOH! 6*4 is 48. I suck...
It's like saying that elementary school math doesn't teach you how to solve large multiplication problems anymore, they just teach times tables! ... but it's hard to do a multiplication problem without knowing what 6 * 8 is off the top of your head.
I was never any good at rote memorization. OTOH, if something interested me I learned it easily and retained it, and I never did memorize multiplication tables. Instead, if I wanted 6*8 I'd multiply 6*4 and double the answer (I had them memorized up to 5). By junior high I had a slide rule, with one of those you don't need to memorize it.
I also thought memorization was stupid; why memorize when you can look at a piece of paper? As long as you know why 6*8=32, why should you need to remember what 6*8 is? Just look it up, it only takes a second, and has the added advantage of being right; memory fails all of us sometimes.
I also wonder if it has to do with books. Reading is out, other forms of media is in.
That's nothing new, in my experience aliterates have vastly outnumbered literates for over half a century. "Spot the nerd" was an easy excersize when I was a kid, he was the one with a book and a pair of glasses. And the slide rule was a dead giveaway... There was a TV in my house my entire life, nothing has changed there, except there's more to watch.
What's next critical thinking? That cannot happen or else religions would cease to be followed.
If you've seen an elephant, no amount of critical thinking will persuade you that elephants can't possibly exist. If you've never seen one but half the people you know claim to have, and you still refuse to believe elephants exist, your "critical" thinking is getting in your way. If you absolutely refuse under any circumstances that elephants can't exist and you see one, your critical "thinking" (rationalizing) will convince you that someone must have druuged you or you've gone crazy.
Disbelief in something you've not experienced takes as much faith as belief in something you've never experienced, and far more fath than someone who believes in that thing and has actually experienced it.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Obviously, that fellow wasn't talking about you.
That is : the problem of finding a device (say: server, virtual server, coffee maker, whatever) without having to enter an arbitrary number of digits.
You mean like we did with phones for a hundred years? When is the last time you typed a URL into the address bar? Hell, the easiest way to get to the Pirate Bay is type TPB in google and hit the "feeling lucky" button. DNS is as useful as paper phone books; used to be lots, now is very little.
I would make an OS a lot less dependent on DNS actually functioning
WTF does your OS have to do with it? Your OS isn't dependent on the internet! Just make the BROWSER less dependent on DNS.
easier to transfer such between computers
Your PC has a URL? I can transfer files to you without your IP address?
I have a reasonable expectation that people should respect my wishes when it comes to how the song should be copied, played, or otherwise consumed.
I disagree, your expectations are completely unreasonable. What is reasonable is for you to expect that I won't sell copies of it.
Your right to listen to my song ends where my right to protect my work begins.
No, your rights to control what I have in my possession are extremely limited, except by artificial constructs. Which is a good thing for you, if you have any talent. If I give your stuff to someone who has never heard it, they may become your customer. If they never hear it you'll never get their money.
Doctorow puts it succinctly: nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. As long as it isn't pure crap, the more people that are exposed to your work, the more people will shovel money your way.
IMO any artist who doesn't embrace noncommercial piracy is a damned fool.
Good day, sir. Enjoy your obscurity.
Now, of course the realities are that the internet makes it so that many people can get their fill of listening to my song once it's been recorded and distributed without paying compensation.
If I "get my fill" of hearing your song, it sucks. I see why you're so anti-pirate, talentless hacks are always against piracy.
Like most sayings, that isn't entirely correct. What is more correct is "the more you love, the more you are owned." Folks who own nothing are damned miserable. It's when losing those thing hurts that they own you. If bending a fender ruins your day, your car owns you. If you shrug and say "it's just a damned car, it'll still get me to work" then your ownership of it only works one way.
Odd username you have there, BTW.
The whole purpose of copyright is to make sure artists get paid for their labor.
In your country maybe, but in the US our constitution says "for the promotion of the useful arts and sciences". Writing a book doesn't guarantee it will be published, and getting published doesn't gurantee it will sell. With that in mind, and considering that most songs, movies, and books are financial flops, from your perspective copyright must have failed miserably, because most do NOT get paid for their work. Only the good stuff earns any cash. Well, usually only the good stuff, sometimes crap is successful.
What I took exception to was "'By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work".
But your work is NOT your property, at least not according to the US Constitution (haven't rtfa so I don't know if it applies to this fellow). I never heard the term "intellectual property" until they passed the Bono Act (which should have never been passed; copyright was already too long).
Plus, under US copyright law, phonoecords are "works for hire", meaning the label holds the copyright. The artist doesn't hold the copyright unless he's self-published.
Yours is good, too -- it has neither worked for the fans, nor the artists. But you are correct, it has indeed worked for the MAFIAA.
I don't see why we need DNS any more. Who types URLs in these days? The search engines can find your content and serve it up via IP address.
Sure, ten or fifteen years ago when getting listed with AltaVista was hard to do, but not with today's search engines.
Of course, web page writers would bitch about having to type IPs into their hrefs, but not many; HTML documents would still have names. They would only need to put an IP in for an external link.
The concept of a general purpose computer sans keyboard is utterly stupid.
Well, there's your problem -- you listened to the marketers and journalists. The fact is, a tablet is not a general purpose computer. It's a glorified book reader/movie watcher/web surfer/picture displayer.
I have an old HP plugged into my TV. It was designed as a general purpose computer, but I don't use it for one. I use it for watching movies and TV, listening to the radio, ripping CDs and DVDs; almost all media stuff (kind of like a tablet only it's not touch screen, is 42 inches diagonal, and weighs 215 pounds). I run it almost 100% with the mouse (yes, it's Linux) andI haven't touched its keyboard in months. In fact the reason I haven't downgraded Flash on it is because the batteries in the keyboard are dead and I need to buy more.
If I need to type, I just use the notebook. I'll take the notebook to the bar to surf the web while I'm there, but a tablet would be handier.
The problem with software is the complexity.
I see you've never seen the insides of an airplane. When I was in the USAF in the '70s we had C5-As at Dover. Everyone else wondered how anything that huge could fly, but I wondered how anything that complex could stay together and actually work.
The first ones were pretty buggy, though. Landing gear not coming down, engines falling off, etc.
Software isn't more complex than much hardware, but hardware engineering has a far longer history and is far more a mature field. Programmers make excuses (like you just did), engineers don't.
I don't think a baton down the hatches is going to keep the water out.
"Oh, yeah, I'll get this, listen to it for a few months, but doubt I'll throw it on again."
If you remember, you were probably similar to this; I was in some ways. Only instead of streaming I'd copy it on tape from a friend's LP, and music that was kinda ok but not really good got recorded over. After being burned once or twice by buying an album with a great song and finding that the rest was crap, I got to the point I'd only buy live and greatest hits albums, unless they were from a band that I'd already bought and liked everything.
But pretty much everything I've bought...I listen to OVER and over again...and have for decades.
So are the kids... only it's our generation's music they're listening to over and over again. Go to any live cover band in a bar full of twentysomethings. They're not covering NStynk and Linkin Pork, they're covering Zeppelin and Skynard and Van Halen and the like.
I never get tired of hearing Dark Side of the Moon, or The Wall....and I usually play those in their entirety, from beginning to end since to me..they are whole pieces of music...the whole album is.
I was discussing that very same thing with a young person here a while back. He said that "Money" didn't really fit the album. I had to explain to him that DSOM was engineered to be listened to in two movements; play side one, and turning the LP over is an intermission. To some extent, that's how most such albums were designed, and how I lpay them. When I'm listening to MP3s or oggs, I have TenSecondsOfSilence.MP3 between sides.
I'm trying to figure out...when did music become disposable?
When it became flushable.
So, when I buy a mobo and an HD and memory and processor and power supply and build a computer out of them, I'm not building a computer?
Yes, assuming *reasonable* regulations are made. I don't have much faith in that.
The FAA has done a fair job of regulating the airline industry. The EPA did a damned good job of cleaning up ithe toxic mess that was the USA before the EPA was established. The FDA does a pretty good job regulating medicines (not that they're perfect) and they also do a fair job, even understaffed, of inspecting the foold supply.
OTOH, local government regs are often incredibly stupid. Don't get your governments confused. The biggest problem with Federal regulators is bloat and innefiency.