Even if we don't need $100m movies, or $40m games, if the limit is whatever a rag-tag bunch of individuals can beg from their family & friends there'd be no cultural heritage for anyone to steal^H^H^H^H^H share, and the whole argument would be completely moot.
Odd how the 1%ers consider sharing to be "stealing". The love of money is the root of all evil.
Few are arguing for the abolition of copyright, I certainly don't, but its abolition would be far better for culture than the present forever+70 years. Art is like science and technology -- everything comes from what has come before. The "shoulders of giants" exist in the arts, too.
The theives in the copyright cartel have stolen our cultural heritage and locked it in vaults. Imagine how technology would suffer if patents lasted as long as copyrights?
And the fact is, piracy doesn't cost anyone. Study after study shows that pirates spend more on media than non-pirates. One study was commissioned by a book publisher a couple of years ago who wanted to find out how much money piracy was costing him. Since pirate versions of books take a few weeks to hit the internet, the researchers looked at data to see how much of a drop in sales occurred. They were astounded to find that there was a sales spike. They hypothesize that the spike was caused by internet buzz about the book after it hit the web.
As Cory Doctorow points out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. I would not have two dozen Isaac Asimov books on my shelf if I hadn't read Asimov for free from the public library. Movies and music are free at the library as well.
It isn't piracy that's hurting publishers, it's an obsolete and unworkable business model that's killing them. Their greed is killing them. If they were a lot more intelligent and a lot less greedy they'd give their media away over the internet and use marketing to convince people that a tangible item has more value than an intangible one. Give away the MP3s and sell physical media, preferably at an insanely high bitrate in beautiful boxes.
Why do you think the RIAA labels sued Napster? Same thing. During Napster's heyday, CD sales soared. But not just RIAA CDs, indie CDs as well. But the indies were dependant on P2P and the RIAA has radio and TV.
Note that after Napster was sued was when CD sales plummeted, and the lying bastards at the RIAA claimed it was Napster's fault that their sales were dropping. You don't have to be a physicist to know that cause never follows effect. Also note that none of the corporate media at all said one single word about the very large boycott against the RIAA labels after they sued Napster.
You are correct, the entire anti-piracy crusade by the MAFIAA is a fight against their independant competetion.
Tough room. Or, in other words, your joke just wasn't funny. Unless your karma is rock solid or you're certain what you're writing is hilarious, going for funny can be dangerous. If you succeed in getting that +5 funny, it gains no karma at all, while if the joke fails you'll be modded "troll" or "flamebait".
I think giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests.
That's illogical, Spock. For example, someone you love smokes marijuana. A friend, a son, a cousin... in your circle of people you care about, some smoke pot.
The Republicans and Democrats want your loved ones incarcerated. The Greens and Libertarians do not. Oh, and by the way, both those parties were on enough ballots last Presidential election to have a mathematical chance of winning the White House if the corporate media hadn't convinced everyone that the two wings of the Corporate Party were the only choices, and that a vote for any other party is wasted.
If a vote for a losing candidate is wasted, then everyone who voted Republican last Presidential election wasted their votes. How logical is that?
As a victim of Sony's XCP trojan, all I can say is the only thing Sony customers should do is stop being Sony customers. That company needs to die as horrible a death as possible.
He sounds exactly like the sleazeballs from the M.A.F.I.A.A. FTFS:
'These are property rights, these are basic property rights,' he said. 'There is no difference from going into a store and stealing a packet of Pringles or a handbag, and stealing something online. Right?'"
Wrong. If I steal a handbag, gles the store no longer has that handbag. If I make a copy of that handbag, the store has lost nothing. And, this comment is NOT my property, not according to the US Constitution. It belongs to everyone, I merely have a limited time monopoly on its publication, NOT ownership.
"Intellectual property" is a lie. If you have to lie in order to make your case, your case is damned weak.
If you change lanes when someone is in the lane you're changing to behind you doing 20mph faster than you, you're a moron and an asshole. It wouldn't matter a bit if a stupid asshole like that is doing the same speed as everyone else or not, he's a menace.
Those aren't disabilities, they're minor handicaps. Not being able to pay attention makes life harder for a person but (s)he can still function. A disability means you are completely unable to do something, like walk or see. Allergies? That's not even a handicap.
For one, I had an excellent surgeon, and for two, I was lucky; my outcome was much better than average, with 20/16 vision. However, the literature says that 98% of patients who have this procedure have 20/25 or better. Still pretty damned good, you wouldn't need glasses. Far better than the 20/400 my vision has been all my life.
Come to think of it, glasses are a prosthesis of sorts. The CrystaLens, artificial joints, etc. aren't prosthetic, they're cybernetic implants.
Anything that has a display of some sort has library calls to control that display
Well, IIRC the Sinclair had a 2k rom. That would have to include the display as well as the BASIC language, keyboard detection, read/write to the cassette, etc. The tanks game I wrote for it I wrote in hand-assembled machine code was only a couple hundred bytes, not counting the display code in ROM. It read the keyboard directly, so both players could hold their keys down at the same time without conflicts. I would imagine that the screen rendering from ROM wasn't much bigger than the game itself.
I already have a defective part swapped out. I got a steroid-induced cataract in my left eye, and its lens was replaced with a CrystaLens, which sits on struts and can actually focus. After wearing thick glasses all my life I now need no corrective lenses at all, not even reading glasses -- and I'm 60.
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile? You'll BEG to be assimilated.
when you are screaming down an Interstate that goes through or around an major US city, at rush hour, doing 85 MPH to keep up with traffic
Lemming, that's really dumb. If everybody's doing 20 mph over the speed limit, set the cruise to 70 and you have a very enjoyable ride as traffic backs up behind you and you have no need to pass anyone.
But the lemmings all drive as if it's some sort of race. Jesus, in a ten mile trip that 15 mph difference doesn't make much of a time difference at all, and driving is a lot less harrowing and a lot cheaper when you don't have to keep speeding up and slowing down just because everybody else is. Yes, we have a herding instinct, being social animals, but we supposedly have the intelligence to overcome dangerous instincts.
Hell, a few years ago when gas was $4.50 and I made a hundred mile trip I'd drive 55. Half an hour more on the road, but used a lot less gas.
Odd, I find the stories mostly to be more interesting than they were back in the day. If fact, when I first got an account I didn't post much, and went a few years without reading it at all; went to k5 instead about 2003, came back when Pete Jongular took all the fun out of it (he was a stalking troll who was also an admin).
When I came back I'd changed residences, email, and ISPs a few times and just registered a new account. Got the old one back by emailing/. staff with my old email addresses.
You guys who complain about the posted stories should visit the firehose more often.
Uh, mods, the AC was going for "funny". You might want to think before you moderate. See how well that FPS runs if you take the memory out of the computer.
He does have a good point about the 20 mb browser. A web browser shouldn't take near that much memory. I don't remember the first browser I used, but it came on a single floppy.
I don't carry a briefcase either. Whay would one? I see people with briefcases in my building every day, my "briefcase" is a thumb drive. Other times (like in a bar) I use my little notebook.
Well, at the turn of the century the internet was mostly nobody but geeks, nerds, and PC gamers. Those were the days when folks would ask "why in the world would you need a computer at home?" and there was no such thing as internet on a cell phone. So of course slashdot would have had a higher percentage of web traffic than now. I don't know what the numbers are, but I would guess that actual visitors are up from then, even if they make a smaller percentage of total web traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
Business and cheap energy are pretty damn valuable which is why we invest so heavily in them. Beauty of nature? Not so much
I pity anyone who values filthy lucre over beauty. IMO it's a mental illness.
Even if we don't need $100m movies, or $40m games, if the limit is whatever a rag-tag bunch of individuals can beg from their family & friends there'd be no cultural heritage for anyone to steal^H^H^H^H^H share, and the whole argument would be completely moot.
Odd how the 1%ers consider sharing to be "stealing". The love of money is the root of all evil.
Few are arguing for the abolition of copyright, I certainly don't, but its abolition would be far better for culture than the present forever+70 years. Art is like science and technology -- everything comes from what has come before. The "shoulders of giants" exist in the arts, too.
The theives in the copyright cartel have stolen our cultural heritage and locked it in vaults. Imagine how technology would suffer if patents lasted as long as copyrights?
And the fact is, piracy doesn't cost anyone. Study after study shows that pirates spend more on media than non-pirates. One study was commissioned by a book publisher a couple of years ago who wanted to find out how much money piracy was costing him. Since pirate versions of books take a few weeks to hit the internet, the researchers looked at data to see how much of a drop in sales occurred. They were astounded to find that there was a sales spike. They hypothesize that the spike was caused by internet buzz about the book after it hit the web.
As Cory Doctorow points out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. I would not have two dozen Isaac Asimov books on my shelf if I hadn't read Asimov for free from the public library. Movies and music are free at the library as well.
It isn't piracy that's hurting publishers, it's an obsolete and unworkable business model that's killing them. Their greed is killing them. If they were a lot more intelligent and a lot less greedy they'd give their media away over the internet and use marketing to convince people that a tangible item has more value than an intangible one. Give away the MP3s and sell physical media, preferably at an insanely high bitrate in beautiful boxes.
Sounds like Microsoft. Remember "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"? Or Stack Electronics? This is the same M.O.
Why do you think the RIAA labels sued Napster? Same thing. During Napster's heyday, CD sales soared. But not just RIAA CDs, indie CDs as well. But the indies were dependant on P2P and the RIAA has radio and TV.
Note that after Napster was sued was when CD sales plummeted, and the lying bastards at the RIAA claimed it was Napster's fault that their sales were dropping. You don't have to be a physicist to know that cause never follows effect. Also note that none of the corporate media at all said one single word about the very large boycott against the RIAA labels after they sued Napster.
You are correct, the entire anti-piracy crusade by the MAFIAA is a fight against their independant competetion.
Tough room. Or, in other words, your joke just wasn't funny. Unless your karma is rock solid or you're certain what you're writing is hilarious, going for funny can be dangerous. If you succeed in getting that +5 funny, it gains no karma at all, while if the joke fails you'll be modded "troll" or "flamebait".
I think giving them more options will merely give them more ways to vote against their own interests.
That's illogical, Spock. For example, someone you love smokes marijuana. A friend, a son, a cousin... in your circle of people you care about, some smoke pot.
The Republicans and Democrats want your loved ones incarcerated. The Greens and Libertarians do not. Oh, and by the way, both those parties were on enough ballots last Presidential election to have a mathematical chance of winning the White House if the corporate media hadn't convinced everyone that the two wings of the Corporate Party were the only choices, and that a vote for any other party is wasted.
If a vote for a losing candidate is wasted, then everyone who voted Republican last Presidential election wasted their votes. How logical is that?
As a victim of Sony's XCP trojan, all I can say is the only thing Sony customers should do is stop being Sony customers. That company needs to die as horrible a death as possible.
He sounds exactly like the sleazeballs from the M.A.F.I.A.A. FTFS:
'These are property rights, these are basic property rights,' he said. 'There is no difference from going into a store and stealing a packet of Pringles or a handbag, and stealing something online. Right?'"
Wrong. If I steal a handbag, gles the store no longer has that handbag. If I make a copy of that handbag, the store has lost nothing. And, this comment is NOT my property, not according to the US Constitution. It belongs to everyone, I merely have a limited time monopoly on its publication, NOT ownership.
"Intellectual property" is a lie. If you have to lie in order to make your case, your case is damned weak.
Well, by the time the muggles started getting on the internet, we nerds were all already signed up.
I've been reading it since about then, too, and it affected my math similarly ;)
Like that sig you got.
If you change lanes when someone is in the lane you're changing to behind you doing 20mph faster than you, you're a moron and an asshole. It wouldn't matter a bit if a stupid asshole like that is doing the same speed as everyone else or not, he's a menace.
Heh, stoners should stay away from my science fiction then. They have stratodoobers!
Those aren't disabilities, they're minor handicaps. Not being able to pay attention makes life harder for a person but (s)he can still function. A disability means you are completely unable to do something, like walk or see. Allergies? That's not even a handicap.
For one, I had an excellent surgeon, and for two, I was lucky; my outcome was much better than average, with 20/16 vision. However, the literature says that 98% of patients who have this procedure have 20/25 or better. Still pretty damned good, you wouldn't need glasses. Far better than the 20/400 my vision has been all my life.
Come to think of it, glasses are a prosthesis of sorts. The CrystaLens, artificial joints, etc. aren't prosthetic, they're cybernetic implants.
Anything that has a display of some sort has library calls to control that display
Well, IIRC the Sinclair had a 2k rom. That would have to include the display as well as the BASIC language, keyboard detection, read/write to the cassette, etc. The tanks game I wrote for it I wrote in hand-assembled machine code was only a couple hundred bytes, not counting the display code in ROM. It read the keyboard directly, so both players could hold their keys down at the same time without conflicts. I would imagine that the screen rendering from ROM wasn't much bigger than the game itself.
I already have a defective part swapped out. I got a steroid-induced cataract in my left eye, and its lens was replaced with a CrystaLens, which sits on struts and can actually focus. After wearing thick glasses all my life I now need no corrective lenses at all, not even reading glasses -- and I'm 60.
You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile? You'll BEG to be assimilated.
I don't see any indication that spinal cord or brain injuries or birth defects will be gone in fifty years.
when you are screaming down an Interstate that goes through or around an major US city, at rush hour, doing 85 MPH to keep up with traffic
Lemming, that's really dumb. If everybody's doing 20 mph over the speed limit, set the cruise to 70 and you have a very enjoyable ride as traffic backs up behind you and you have no need to pass anyone.
But the lemmings all drive as if it's some sort of race. Jesus, in a ten mile trip that 15 mph difference doesn't make much of a time difference at all, and driving is a lot less harrowing and a lot cheaper when you don't have to keep speeding up and slowing down just because everybody else is. Yes, we have a herding instinct, being social animals, but we supposedly have the intelligence to overcome dangerous instincts.
Hell, a few years ago when gas was $4.50 and I made a hundred mile trip I'd drive 55. Half an hour more on the road, but used a lot less gas.
If cottonmouth tales away your sense of taste, then why does everything taste so much better after a big doob?
In most US states it's illegal to not wear your seatbelt as well, and the steering wheel on my American made Concorde says "SRS".
Odd, I find the stories mostly to be more interesting than they were back in the day. If fact, when I first got an account I didn't post much, and went a few years without reading it at all; went to k5 instead about 2003, came back when Pete Jongular took all the fun out of it (he was a stalking troll who was also an admin).
When I came back I'd changed residences, email, and ISPs a few times and just registered a new account. Got the old one back by emailing /. staff with my old email addresses.
You guys who complain about the posted stories should visit the firehose more often.
Uh, mods, the AC was going for "funny". You might want to think before you moderate. See how well that FPS runs if you take the memory out of the computer.
He does have a good point about the 20 mb browser. A web browser shouldn't take near that much memory. I don't remember the first browser I used, but it came on a single floppy.
I don't carry a briefcase either. Whay would one? I see people with briefcases in my building every day, my "briefcase" is a thumb drive. Other times (like in a bar) I use my little notebook.
Well, at the turn of the century the internet was mostly nobody but geeks, nerds, and PC gamers. Those were the days when folks would ask "why in the world would you need a computer at home?" and there was no such thing as internet on a cell phone. So of course slashdot would have had a higher percentage of web traffic than now. I don't know what the numbers are, but I would guess that actual visitors are up from then, even if they make a smaller percentage of total web traffic.
Over fiftten years? I thought slashdot started in 1997?