Telephones? The wheel? Electric lighting? Indoor plumbing? VCRs? Lots of things weren't militarily applicable at first, like automobiles and airplanes. Others have no military applications but came from military applications, like microwave ovens.
You sound like a Catholic Spock. "People spend too much sex worrying about how stuff feels rather than what that stuff does to their body. Forget about feelings. It is reproduction."
Man cannot live by bread alone. If you're starving then taste is unimportant, but good food makes for a better life.
What is our purpose of existence, if not to compete?
Unless you're religious, life has no meaning at all. Even competition is futile. Nothing you gain will you keep, nothing you create will last very long in a geological sense. The only logical purpose is to be happy, and competition only makes YOU happy while making someone else miserable. Competition is for the greedy narcisistic species, not social species like homo sapiens.
A species becomes extinct when it can't survive in the environment it inhabits. Environments change. If a species lives on walnuts and a fungal disease kills all the walnut trees, the species becomes extinct, as do the species that only feed on the walnut eaters. The walnut disease dies after it's killed the trees, and when walnuts come back the extinct species would again be fit for its environment, but it no longer exists, although it may have a descendant that adapted to a different food source.
No, YOU missed the point. What is a DVD's value to a movie studio? Its only reason for existance is to be sold for money. You can sell the DVD you buy at the store but nobody's going to knowingly pay you for a copy of that DVD. The "value" they refer to isn't the value to the customer, it's the value to the manufacturer.
There is no right or wrong way in evolution. It simply is the successful result of change.
"Successful" needs expanding -- in this context "sucessful" means not dying before you breed. A change that makes breeding or staying alive easier is exceptionally successful.
How does flooding your boss with water help with the coffee?
If some dimwit puts five scoops of grounds in it instead of three, it's going to be way too strong and taste like shit. Adding water will make it taste better, but not as good as if it were properly prepared in the first place.
Coffee made in a dirty pot tastes bad, coffee that's been sitting on the heater boiling down for hours tastes bad, coffee made too weak or too strong tastes bad, coffee that has chicory in it tastes bad (chicory is a cheap filler used in really cheap coffee). Properly brewed coffee is both inexpensive and delicious.
A digital bit-for-bit copy of a movie has almost the same value as the original dvd/bluray/stream.
It has the same recreational/educational value (depending on the DVD) but your original DVD can be resold. It has monetary value. A digital copy, whether iTunes or Pirate Bay, has no monetary value at all, just like a photocopy of a five dollar bill.
I've been drinking coffee for 50 years. No grandchildren yet, and I intend to be around to watch them grow up.
Then you should start drinking coffee. It has a lot of health benefits, including warding off dementia and slowing the brain's aging process. Of course, if you have a medical condition that precludes it, you shouldn't drink it, but barring that, coffee is good for you.
Cancer. Coffee might have anti-cancer properties. Last year, researchers found that coffee drinkers were 50% less likely to get liver cancer than nondrinkers. A few studies have found ties to lower rates of colon, breast, and rectal cancers. Several studies have shown that caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee have different health effects (see chart).
Cholesterol. Two substances in coffee â" kahweol and cafestol â" raise cholesterol levels. Paper filters capture these substances, but that doesnâ(TM)t help the many people who now drink non-filtered coffee drinks, such as lattes. Researchers have also found a link between cholesterol increases and decaffeinated coffee, possibly because of the type of bean used to make certain decaffeinated coffees.
Diabetes. Heavy coffee drinkers may be half as likely to get diabetes as light drinkers or nondrinkers. Coffee may contain ingredients that lower blood sugar. A coffee habit may also increase your resting metabolism rate, which could help keep diabetes at bay.
Gallstones. Coffee drinkers are less likely to suffer symptomatic gallstone disease, possibly because coffee alters the cholesterol content of the bile produced by the liver.
Parkinsonâ(TM)s disease. Coffee seems to protect men but not women against Parkinsonâ(TM)s disease. One possible explanation for the sex difference may be that estrogen and caffeine need the same enzymes to be metabolized, and estrogen captures those enzymes.
Actually it blames PCs, not MS, (it gives Grolier the same treatment as MS) but it mostly blames Britannica itself for being late to the digital party with a crappy CD. In short, Britannica failed because the folks who ran it ran it incredibly poorly.
Pretty lame for a frame. He's gonna get what.. a small fine?
Well, he would here in Springfield, but Texas? They'll probably hang him. But you're right, it's probably, as the Brits say, "a fair cop". Did you see his picture? He looks like a stoner. Of course the cops are going to violate his 4th amendment rights and search his propery (car) for weed.
I live in Illinois and didn't know what SXSW was, I doubt many who don't live in the area do either. Google says it's an annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin. Why the submitter and editor thought anybody not in the southwest US would have a clue what it is is beyond me.
Guys, when you submit, be careful with those acronyms, especially ones like this that are purely local. I mean, I went to almost every show at the MRF back in the '70s. Yes, it was another music festival similar to SXSW that you would likewise be clueless about.
I shouldn't have to google to find out what an anronym stands for, unless it's a common computer-related acronym like OS or RAM.
Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better".
Only "better" in the sense that humans fit their environment better than these creatures did when they died out. The only "better" in evolution is "a better fit to the environment." It doesn't mean that any one species is better than another, just that one has an easier time staying alive and breeding.
Had he not reported the stolen shotgun and the thief got caught shooting someone with it, they'll assume he sold the firearm to a convicted felon and arrested him.
Yes, if the thief is the victim of an attack, he'll certainly be a "person of interest" but do you rally think a criminal is going to call the cops because somebody beat the shit out of him? The thief won't even call the cops if your friend broke the thief's trunk open and got his phone and gun back.
Thieves generally avoid the police whenever they can.
Whatever you do, whatever happens: Don't call the police.
That's incredibly bad advice. My bank called me at work last April asking if I was missing some checks, that someone had tried to cash an obviously forged one. When I got home I found my back door broken open and a lot of stuff gone -- including an almost ful box of checks. I called the cops, who took the report, went to the bank and viewed the video, and arrested the guy half an hour later.
However, he had accomplices. Over the next year (it's still going on) I would get notices from merchants that I'd cashed checks on a closed account. Of course I cloised if after the theft! I sent all of them copies of the police report, and the fraudulent bastards, every single one, turned them into the county's State's Attorney anyway.
Had I not reported the burglary I could have wound up in prison for those damned stolen checks.
If you get in an automobile accident you had damned well better call the cops, because if you don't you're jailhouse-bound. If there is an injury you've committed a felony, and the cops are pretty damned serious about folks leaving the scene of an accident.
Now, someone attcks you in a bar? Don't call the cops, they're as likely to arrest you as your attacker.
Hell, if we're still using telephone wires in 2012, good money is on there still being cell towers in 2112.
I wouldn't bet on it. I haven't had a landline in ten years, many if not most young adults have never had land lines one moving out of their parents' houses.
I'd put my money on a more efficient method of wireless communication that needs neither cell towers nor phone companies. I also think the utility pole (most folks mistakenly call them "telephone poles") will be gone by then, solar panels will have increased in efficiency and decreased in price to the point that power plants will be completely unneeded.
Space based communication is also mentioned, and that struck me as a little more suspect.
When your lunar telescope is on the dark side of the moon (the logical place to put it) you'ld need relay stations to communicate with Earth -- or neutrino communications. If this tech matures in the next hundred years like radio tech matured in the last hundred, a neutrino beam through the moon may well be cheaper and more efficient than relay stations.
Decaffinated coffeeee--it's what they serve in Hell
A thief dies in a gun battle with police, and when he reaches hell, he's given a tour and told he has a choice of how he spends eternity.
The first place he is shown has a man with oozing sores all over hime, in agony.
The next one shown is a man chained to a wall.
The next room has a bunch of people up to their waists in raw sewage drinking coffee. The murderous thief says "I guess that's my choice." He's given a cup of coffee and wades into the cesspool.
The next thing he hears is "Ok everybody, coffee break's over. Go back to standing on your heads."
That was my first thought. The only reasons I drink coffee is it makes my mind sharper, wakes me up in the morning, and I'm addicted to it. Without caffiene, coffee is worthless. I never could understand why anyone drank decaf.
I am completely for the legalization of all non-addictive drugs.
What does addiction have to do with it? Your addiction only affects me if the price of your addiction is so high that you have to steal to feed your habit. I've never heard of anyone stealing to support their cigarette, alcohol, or caffeine addictions. Hell, I'm addicted to coffee and the addiction doesn't harm me a bit, but I'd have a serious problem if it were outlawed and cost a hundred dollars a pound (and it would likely be even more expensive than that were it illegal).
Drug use is a personal problem, not a societal one. It only becomes a societal problem when it's outlawed.
He believes in a very small federal government, like it was in 1800; that means no EPA, but it also means no DEA,
Pollution doesn't honor state lines. If Illinois and Missouri have lax or no water pollution standards, it doesn't matter how strict Kentucky and Arkansas are, the Mississipi will still be filthy. If Indiana has no air pollution controls, Ohio is going to breathe that nasty air.
And who benefits from lax environmental controls? Not you, not me, Monsanto and ADM do. Who benefits from no FDA? ADM and the drug companies. There was no radio in 1800 so no need for an FCC, but like pollution, radio waves don't respect state lines.
The DoD is in charge of the military, and the Constitution spells out the government's obligations and limitations in that respect, but I have to agree with Paul on getting rid of the military Industrial Complex and the hundreds of overseas bases. They're huge wastes of money. I'd bet that if we closed all overseas bases we could cut everyone's taxes, provide health care (and unemployment insurance to the no longer needed health insurers until they could find a more honest job) for everyone and still have a budget surplus.
The current huge deficits were mostly caused by fighting two wars.
Alcohol consumption plummeted during prohibition in the US.
That's what wikipedia says, citing a single book, but that's not what people who lived through it said and it's not what I've read, either. You have to remember that it's impossible to know how much illegal alcohol was manufactured and consumed and it's impossible to know how much meth is being manufactured and consumed. My grandfather had a beermaking kit in his barn, and none of what he made and drank was ever counted, nor were any of the countless other beermaking kits and stills. My grandmother said that before prohibition, few women in the US drank and the ones who did, did so in secret. Salloons were mens' places; women didn't go in. Prohibition closed the salloons and ushered in the speakeasy and the end of womens' sobriety. Some texts I've seen claimed alcohol use doubled during prohibition.
I don't know when grandpa stopped making beer, but likely it was long after repeal. Why buy something that's expensive when you're poor and can make it very cheaply?
From Chapter 10 of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday
The confusing effect of the [Wickersham] report was neatly satirized in Flaccus's summary of it in F. P. A.'s column in the New York World:
Prohibition is an awful flop.
We like it. It can't stop what it's meant to stop.
We like it. It's left a trail of graft and slime, It's filled our land with vice and crime, It don't prohibit worth a dime,
Nevertheless we're for it.
What? It might not be easier to get, but it certainly won't be harder... I certainly didn't have a hard time getting my hands on booze or cigarettes when I was in high school.
It's a lot easier for a kid to buy pot than it is for him to buy booze or cigarettes. Hell, when my daughters were in high school they said kids were selling drugs out of their lockers. During prohibition people would send their kids out to buy beer for them. WhenI was a kid my mother sent me to the store to buy her cigarettes, today the cops are doing a good job of running stings on places who will sell to kids. Nobody wants to lose their liquor license or get slapped with a $1000 fine for selling smoke sto kids.
People try it out a few times because they have safe easy access to it
There isn't anything safe about heroin, legal or not.
There are many people who would try heroin (and potentially become addicted) if it were legal (I'm one of those people).
You would risk addiction and death for curiosity, but not breaking the law? That makes no sense at all, but if you're dumb enough to risk it, who am I or the government to say you can't? Your addiction wouldn't affect me at all. Alcoholics' addictions don't bother me, either. That's their own problems. Rates of tobacco use are dropping despite its legality while rates of some illegal drug use are rising. Education works, incarceration doesn't.
Someone who wanted an instant backup, who wanted high quality cover art and liner notes. Someone who like to display his or her music collection on shelves. If they quadrupled the sampling rate and doubled the bit depth, audiophiles would buy them because they would truly be high fidelity if played through audiohphile quality equipment (especially speakers).
How is a download "more convinient" than unwrapping a CD, putting it in the drive, and clicking?
I can legally get as good a quality rip as an iTunes download by simply sampling the radio. The music is already free. Selling music is like selling air -- it's free and nobody needs to buy it... except scuba divers and welders and people with COPD.
As it currently stand the purchase once and give away free to everyone is not sustainable. What do you propose those industries do then?
Don't try to sell music, sell CDs and use the MP3s as advertising. Don't try to sell novels, sell books. Copyright used to only apply if a work was "fixed in a tangible medium" and I posit that bits over a wire are not tangible.
Read Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the matter, it's in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom iinm (either the preface or afterword). You can read it for FREE, just visit your local public library or download it from boingboing. Doctorow credits his success and status as a NYT best seller to the fact that he puts his work on the internet for free. It works for him, it could work for music or movies, too.
The problem is that the publishers' own greed is killing them. The RIAA would have embraced Napster if they didn't already have radio. Most indies love to have their stuff shared.
As Doctorow points out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.
You can't make piracy go away, but you can use it to sell goods.
Slashdot Mirror
Telephones? The wheel? Electric lighting? Indoor plumbing? VCRs? Lots of things weren't militarily applicable at first, like automobiles and airplanes. Others have no military applications but came from military applications, like microwave ovens.
You sound like a Catholic Spock. "People spend too much sex worrying about how stuff feels rather than what that stuff does to their body. Forget about feelings. It is reproduction."
Man cannot live by bread alone. If you're starving then taste is unimportant, but good food makes for a better life.
What is our purpose of existence, if not to compete?
Unless you're religious, life has no meaning at all. Even competition is futile. Nothing you gain will you keep, nothing you create will last very long in a geological sense. The only logical purpose is to be happy, and competition only makes YOU happy while making someone else miserable. Competition is for the greedy narcisistic species, not social species like homo sapiens.
A species becomes extinct when it can't survive in the environment it inhabits. Environments change. If a species lives on walnuts and a fungal disease kills all the walnut trees, the species becomes extinct, as do the species that only feed on the walnut eaters. The walnut disease dies after it's killed the trees, and when walnuts come back the extinct species would again be fit for its environment, but it no longer exists, although it may have a descendant that adapted to a different food source.
Except that he never actually said that. Once again people are "remembering" something that never actually happened.
He denies saying, true, but it had to have started somewhere and it's as likely Gates is lying as it is that he never really said it.
No, YOU missed the point. What is a DVD's value to a movie studio? Its only reason for existance is to be sold for money. You can sell the DVD you buy at the store but nobody's going to knowingly pay you for a copy of that DVD. The "value" they refer to isn't the value to the customer, it's the value to the manufacturer.
There is no right or wrong way in evolution. It simply is the successful result of change.
"Successful" needs expanding -- in this context "sucessful" means not dying before you breed. A change that makes breeding or staying alive easier is exceptionally successful.
How does flooding your boss with water help with the coffee?
If some dimwit puts five scoops of grounds in it instead of three, it's going to be way too strong and taste like shit. Adding water will make it taste better, but not as good as if it were properly prepared in the first place.
Coffee made in a dirty pot tastes bad, coffee that's been sitting on the heater boiling down for hours tastes bad, coffee made too weak or too strong tastes bad, coffee that has chicory in it tastes bad (chicory is a cheap filler used in really cheap coffee). Properly brewed coffee is both inexpensive and delicious.
A digital bit-for-bit copy of a movie has almost the same value as the original dvd/bluray/stream.
It has the same recreational/educational value (depending on the DVD) but your original DVD can be resold. It has monetary value. A digital copy, whether iTunes or Pirate Bay, has no monetary value at all, just like a photocopy of a five dollar bill.
I've been drinking coffee for 50 years. No grandchildren yet, and I intend to be around to watch them grow up.
Then you should start drinking coffee. It has a lot of health benefits, including warding off dementia and slowing the brain's aging process. Of course, if you have a medical condition that precludes it, you shouldn't drink it, but barring that, coffee is good for you.
Actually it blames PCs, not MS, (it gives Grolier the same treatment as MS) but it mostly blames Britannica itself for being late to the digital party with a crappy CD. In short, Britannica failed because the folks who ran it ran it incredibly poorly.
Pretty lame for a frame. He's gonna get what.. a small fine?
Well, he would here in Springfield, but Texas? They'll probably hang him. But you're right, it's probably, as the Brits say, "a fair cop". Did you see his picture? He looks like a stoner. Of course the cops are going to violate his 4th amendment rights and search his propery (car) for weed.
I live in Illinois and didn't know what SXSW was, I doubt many who don't live in the area do either. Google says it's an annual music, film, and interactive conference and festival held in Austin. Why the submitter and editor thought anybody not in the southwest US would have a clue what it is is beyond me.
Guys, when you submit, be careful with those acronyms, especially ones like this that are purely local. I mean, I went to almost every show at the MRF back in the '70s. Yes, it was another music festival similar to SXSW that you would likewise be clueless about.
I shouldn't have to google to find out what an anronym stands for, unless it's a common computer-related acronym like OS or RAM.
Unless they were wiped out by a freak event, it means we're genetically "better".
Only "better" in the sense that humans fit their environment better than these creatures did when they died out. The only "better" in evolution is "a better fit to the environment." It doesn't mean that any one species is better than another, just that one has an easier time staying alive and breeding.
Had he not reported the stolen shotgun and the thief got caught shooting someone with it, they'll assume he sold the firearm to a convicted felon and arrested him.
Yes, if the thief is the victim of an attack, he'll certainly be a "person of interest" but do you rally think a criminal is going to call the cops because somebody beat the shit out of him? The thief won't even call the cops if your friend broke the thief's trunk open and got his phone and gun back.
Thieves generally avoid the police whenever they can.
Whatever you do, whatever happens: Don't call the police.
That's incredibly bad advice. My bank called me at work last April asking if I was missing some checks, that someone had tried to cash an obviously forged one. When I got home I found my back door broken open and a lot of stuff gone -- including an almost ful box of checks. I called the cops, who took the report, went to the bank and viewed the video, and arrested the guy half an hour later.
However, he had accomplices. Over the next year (it's still going on) I would get notices from merchants that I'd cashed checks on a closed account. Of course I cloised if after the theft! I sent all of them copies of the police report, and the fraudulent bastards, every single one, turned them into the county's State's Attorney anyway.
Had I not reported the burglary I could have wound up in prison for those damned stolen checks.
If you get in an automobile accident you had damned well better call the cops, because if you don't you're jailhouse-bound. If there is an injury you've committed a felony, and the cops are pretty damned serious about folks leaving the scene of an accident.
Now, someone attcks you in a bar? Don't call the cops, they're as likely to arrest you as your attacker.
Hell, if we're still using telephone wires in 2012, good money is on there still being cell towers in 2112.
I wouldn't bet on it. I haven't had a landline in ten years, many if not most young adults have never had land lines one moving out of their parents' houses.
I'd put my money on a more efficient method of wireless communication that needs neither cell towers nor phone companies. I also think the utility pole (most folks mistakenly call them "telephone poles") will be gone by then, solar panels will have increased in efficiency and decreased in price to the point that power plants will be completely unneeded.
Space based communication is also mentioned, and that struck me as a little more suspect.
When your lunar telescope is on the dark side of the moon (the logical place to put it) you'ld need relay stations to communicate with Earth -- or neutrino communications. If this tech matures in the next hundred years like radio tech matured in the last hundred, a neutrino beam through the moon may well be cheaper and more efficient than relay stations.
Decaffinated coffeeee--it's what they serve in Hell
A thief dies in a gun battle with police, and when he reaches hell, he's given a tour and told he has a choice of how he spends eternity.
The first place he is shown has a man with oozing sores all over hime, in agony.
The next one shown is a man chained to a wall.
The next room has a bunch of people up to their waists in raw sewage drinking coffee. The murderous thief says "I guess that's my choice." He's given a cup of coffee and wades into the cesspool.
The next thing he hears is "Ok everybody, coffee break's over. Go back to standing on your heads."
That was my first thought. The only reasons I drink coffee is it makes my mind sharper, wakes me up in the morning, and I'm addicted to it. Without caffiene, coffee is worthless. I never could understand why anyone drank decaf.
Now we know where Captain Obvious went to school -- undergrad at University of Colorado and grad studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
People who know each other play as a team better than complete strangers? Whoda thunkit?
Ah, well, as he's an AC sitting at zero I didn't see his post.
I am completely for the legalization of all non-addictive drugs.
What does addiction have to do with it? Your addiction only affects me if the price of your addiction is so high that you have to steal to feed your habit. I've never heard of anyone stealing to support their cigarette, alcohol, or caffeine addictions. Hell, I'm addicted to coffee and the addiction doesn't harm me a bit, but I'd have a serious problem if it were outlawed and cost a hundred dollars a pound (and it would likely be even more expensive than that were it illegal).
Drug use is a personal problem, not a societal one. It only becomes a societal problem when it's outlawed.
He believes in a very small federal government, like it was in 1800; that means no EPA, but it also means no DEA,
Pollution doesn't honor state lines. If Illinois and Missouri have lax or no water pollution standards, it doesn't matter how strict Kentucky and Arkansas are, the Mississipi will still be filthy. If Indiana has no air pollution controls, Ohio is going to breathe that nasty air.
And who benefits from lax environmental controls? Not you, not me, Monsanto and ADM do. Who benefits from no FDA? ADM and the drug companies. There was no radio in 1800 so no need for an FCC, but like pollution, radio waves don't respect state lines.
The DoD is in charge of the military, and the Constitution spells out the government's obligations and limitations in that respect, but I have to agree with Paul on getting rid of the military Industrial Complex and the hundreds of overseas bases. They're huge wastes of money. I'd bet that if we closed all overseas bases we could cut everyone's taxes, provide health care (and unemployment insurance to the no longer needed health insurers until they could find a more honest job) for everyone and still have a budget surplus.
The current huge deficits were mostly caused by fighting two wars.
Alcohol consumption plummeted during prohibition in the US.
That's what wikipedia says, citing a single book, but that's not what people who lived through it said and it's not what I've read, either. You have to remember that it's impossible to know how much illegal alcohol was manufactured and consumed and it's impossible to know how much meth is being manufactured and consumed. My grandfather had a beermaking kit in his barn, and none of what he made and drank was ever counted, nor were any of the countless other beermaking kits and stills. My grandmother said that before prohibition, few women in the US drank and the ones who did, did so in secret. Salloons were mens' places; women didn't go in. Prohibition closed the salloons and ushered in the speakeasy and the end of womens' sobriety. Some texts I've seen claimed alcohol use doubled during prohibition.
I don't know when grandpa stopped making beer, but likely it was long after repeal. Why buy something that's expensive when you're poor and can make it very cheaply?
From Chapter 10 of Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday
What? It might not be easier to get, but it certainly won't be harder... I certainly didn't have a hard time getting my hands on booze or cigarettes when I was in high school.
It's a lot easier for a kid to buy pot than it is for him to buy booze or cigarettes. Hell, when my daughters were in high school they said kids were selling drugs out of their lockers. During prohibition people would send their kids out to buy beer for them. WhenI was a kid my mother sent me to the store to buy her cigarettes, today the cops are doing a good job of running stings on places who will sell to kids. Nobody wants to lose their liquor license or get slapped with a $1000 fine for selling smoke sto kids.
People try it out a few times because they have safe easy access to it
There isn't anything safe about heroin, legal or not.
There are many people who would try heroin (and potentially become addicted) if it were legal (I'm one of those people).
You would risk addiction and death for curiosity, but not breaking the law? That makes no sense at all, but if you're dumb enough to risk it, who am I or the government to say you can't? Your addiction wouldn't affect me at all. Alcoholics' addictions don't bother me, either. That's their own problems. Rates of tobacco use are dropping despite its legality while rates of some illegal drug use are rising. Education works, incarceration doesn't.
Someone who wanted an instant backup, who wanted high quality cover art and liner notes. Someone who like to display his or her music collection on shelves. If they quadrupled the sampling rate and doubled the bit depth, audiophiles would buy them because they would truly be high fidelity if played through audiohphile quality equipment (especially speakers).
How is a download "more convinient" than unwrapping a CD, putting it in the drive, and clicking?
I can legally get as good a quality rip as an iTunes download by simply sampling the radio. The music is already free. Selling music is like selling air -- it's free and nobody needs to buy it... except scuba divers and welders and people with COPD.
As it currently stand the purchase once and give away free to everyone is not sustainable. What do you propose those industries do then?
Don't try to sell music, sell CDs and use the MP3s as advertising. Don't try to sell novels, sell books. Copyright used to only apply if a work was "fixed in a tangible medium" and I posit that bits over a wire are not tangible.
Read Cory Doctorow's thoughts on the matter, it's in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom iinm (either the preface or afterword). You can read it for FREE, just visit your local public library or download it from boingboing. Doctorow credits his success and status as a NYT best seller to the fact that he puts his work on the internet for free. It works for him, it could work for music or movies, too.
The problem is that the publishers' own greed is killing them. The RIAA would have embraced Napster if they didn't already have radio. Most indies love to have their stuff shared.
As Doctorow points out, nobody ever went broke from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity.
You can't make piracy go away, but you can use it to sell goods.