To give an analogy, it's like driving a car on the road with no supervision even though you have no idea how to drive a car.
So we should have a government run licensing program, whereby you must have a government issues license before connecting to the internet? That's going to improve things how?
Give it another few hundred years and they'll standardise on something spelt similar to both (my guess would be "strate")
Is spelling still evolving the way it used to? I'd have thought the prevalence of print books, availability of dictionaries, and the prevalence of spell checkers, etc over the last hundred years would have started to impose a resistance to the previous fluidity.
the artists who aren't getting paid don't even enter into the discussion, probably because of the guilty feelings it would inspire to be reminded of the reality of the situation.
No, the artists aren't entering the discussion about getting paid because they aren't getting paid either way. Go ahead, buy the CD... the artist still doesn't get paid.
If your boss withheld your paycheck and told you that the code you wrote is now theirs free of charge because "information wants to be free," you'd sue for the wages and win. But if the code you wrote is included in a game, and the game appears on Pirate Bay, downloaders will happily pirate it and never even dream of spending a time, and they'll justify it until they're red in the face.
That's because my boss and i have this employment contract. They stop paying me, i stop writing code, its that simple.
If that code is included on something on the pirate bay, i don't really care, because I was smart enough to get paid. My business model is to get paid for writing the code, not paid for copies of it.
The business model of selling "copies" is stupid in the digital era. Find another business model. Live performances... sponsors... whatever. Make movies that can break even in theatres...put them on netflix... hell... run a free legit torrent site, and then charge for premium memberships... people will pay if there is a real value add. But its got to be a value add and not simply "less crippled". They might not pay as much as they used to for DVDs but so what... online streaming doesn't cost as much as manufacturing, transporting, warehousing, and retailing DVDs either... so it shouldn't need to.
In America, even if we only voted for one person at every level of government that would be no less than three elections (one for federal, one for state and one for local
But you don't elect every year. Do you really need a bunch of dedicated hardware for an event that only happens 3 times in 4 years or so?
And do you REALLY think the local, state, and federal governments are going to agree and cooperate enough to use the SAME voting machines at each level? They probably won't even agree on a vender, never mind a model, never mind actually using the same physical units.
And how long will the voting machines last before they need to be replaced? Will you likely get more than 2 elections out of one?
There is no way that we can physically count hundreds of votes in 45 minutes.
Meh, my parents worked in the last election, and processed more voters than you did. (Admittedly they had a school gym, and probably 8 booths going, each with 3 staff and 2 ballot boxes divided up alphabetically... (last name Aa to Be voting booth 1 ballot box 1, Bf to Ca booth 1 box 2)... (Ca-De booth 2 box one...
The station EASILY processed some 5000 voters.
each booth counted their own votes, and it didn't take all that long either. 5000 votes, 16 ballot boxes is only 300 or so votes per box. Took about half an hour to count them. Each box got counted twice, and they were out in about an hour and half.
Not a big deal.
You had 4 people doing 800, you say... that scales pretty much right in line with their 25 people doing 5000.
Now, you mention $41/hr to run the election, with say its a 12hrs day... around $500 bucks.
And the voting machine doesn't eliminate everyone... instead of 4 of you, there still needs to be at least to of you...to instruct votes and ensure the machine doesn't break or get tampered with etc... so you only eliminate half the labor cost.
The voting machine is going to have to be less than $250 per unit. And it can't break down or your fucked. And it has to sit in a warehouse for a year or so... so your pretty much gauranteed to need a bunch of technicians check each unit before each election... so there goes the rest of your savings.
Seriously... paper processes get it down to around $2 per vote to count after materials and labour and training. You aren't going to get a machine anywhere near that anytime soon.
Maybe the execution there is a bit over the top, but its real enough all the same. Many people have lost their phone like that, from the front pockets of hood and jackets. Or off of belt clips and holsters... you undo the belt and gravity takes over from there... the belt just provides a nice rail for it to slide along rigth at the toilet... at least for people who wear the holder on the non-buckle side...
Fire increases entropy all around. When a log burns in a room, the entropy of the ashes left over is greater than the entropy of the unburned wood, the entropy of the carbon oxides and water vapor in the air is greater than the unbound oxygen, and as a result there is a lot more heat everywhere.
Except that there are easy counter examples. One would be a hot fire on a beach that creates glass which has less entropy than the sand that was there originally. That local decrease in entropy is hardly anything to get excited about though.
Another example would be the sun itself - its a big fusion reactor, creating heavier elements out of lighter ones. That is also a local negative entropy, since entropy through radioactive decay would have the heavier elements gradually decay into lighter ones.
Replace "house" with "car" and yes, that's pretty much exactly what happen at the moment. If you leave your car doors unlocked and someone steals it and uses it to commit crime, do you really have an expectation of a hard-cre "right to privacy" that would prevent the police from stopping searching that car - even using deadly force against it?
This is nonsense. What if you DID lock the car? What you took the wheels off too, locked it in a parking garage, and then chained it to a support pillar.
And then someone stole it and uses it to commit crime.
Would that be in the slightest bit different?
Nope. Not one bit.
So whether or not you left the car unlocked or not is: COMPLETELY FUCKING IRRELEVANT.
The police will stop it, and search it, and so on, regardless of whether you locked it or not. So why do you think its comparable to an unlocked car and more importantly how is a locked car the SLIGHTEST BIT DIFFERENT?
Just turn off your phone and give them less unencrypted information. It makes all the difference to simply STOP BROADCASTING.
So I have to decide between receiving phone calls... including emergency phones from my family, friends,and work... or submit to being tracked and identified?
That's silly.
What happens when they take your picture at the cash register and then photomatch it to facebook and other crowdsourced identification databases. What then? Walk around with a ski mask on? That'll go over well.
Your thesis is based on a reproducible bug in Win98? So they fixed one admittedly significant bug, big deal.
All I have to do to rebutt it is find a single similiarly reproducible bug in ME that didn't affect Win98SE?
Seriously? I could do that, but it would be completely meaningless...
Windows ME supported UPnP which was more of a mess than anything else especially then. Image Preview could crash the system on bad images. It was also the first iteration of system restore which didn't work well and consumed then-limited disk space like it was going out of style.
The new powermanagement features were unreliable.
The new multimedia features were buggy as all get out.
Windows Me wasn't supported on a domain, where Windows 98 was.
They also removed the Personal Web server which was used by a ton of people at the time with microsoft frontpage.
Not to mention that it did not work with a lot of older DOS games due to the removal of real mode DOS support.
I actually use win98se VMs somewhat regularly; and I don't have crashing issues. Its honestly never occurred to me to setup a Windows ME VM for those situations... and even thinking about it now makes we wonder why I ever would.
Almost NOTHING was ever truly supported on ME. There was a bunch of stuff that was supported on Win98, and it usually but not always worked in ME, but that really isn't quite the same thing.
ME had Windows 2000's networking stack plugged into Windows 98's kernel... it was the ultimate bastard operating system.
If its not 100% transparent to the user its not good enough. As far as the user is concerned deduplication isn't happening. There are no evident changes to the filesystem they are using (no case changes, no meta data issues, no links... 100% transparent to the user )
Its done at block level, below the filesystem.
Whether the data being deduplicated is a directory, an alternate stream, the file data, meta data... is irrelevant.
Say you've got a nice big 5GB Outlook.pst file. And you make a backup copy of it, and then keep using it. 3 months later you've got a 6GB Outlook.pst file in use, and still have the 5GB backup. Ideally 5 of those GB are virtually identical and if the deduplication software is doing its job well, those two files take up a total of ~6GB of actual disk space.
As far as the user and filesystem is concerned, they are two separate files. They can both be open for read/write at the same time. Its 100% transparent that nearly 100% of the backup file is physically using the same disk space as the live file. If changes are made to the live file where the files have been deduplicated, new storage will be allocated to house the modified part of the file, and those 2 blocks will no longer be duplicated... they'll have been de-deduplicated.
The #1 upshot though is that its 100% transparent.
the other says "copy freely, you must let others copy too!", which is a restriction that could have no weight or bearing in a no copyright world.
So where is the opposition? The restriction is only there to offset the restrictions enabled by copyright. Without copyrights restrictions, this counter is moot.
Its like a "restriction" that you must not kill a puppy, in a world with no puppies.
Windows ME *REALLY WAS* the most stable of the win9x's.
No, it was worse than 98 SE.
It added a lot of new stuff that didn't work great.
Windows 2000 was supposed to be released in "Professional" and "Home" editions. But the home market just wasn't ready for NT as too much stuff the home market used didn't work.
Printers, scanners, mp3 players, and so on lacked NT drivers. Too many games and utilities didn't work.
So only windows 2000 pro ever got released, and then Windows ME was created released to update Windows 98.
When XP came out the market was a lot more ready for NT at home, and we got XP Pro and XP Home.
Windows 2000 Pro had been really successful as both a business OS and had made a lot of inroads in the home market as well, so the NT driver situation was much improved, and most of the new games and utilities and hardware supported both 2000 and 98.
Plus or minus $5 sure. But plus or minus $5 kind of undermines your argument. Paperbacks tend to run $8 to $18 around here.
and if I buy one, it's because I want to read that book.
Some years back I wanted "Permutation City" by Greg Egan, but at the time the cheapest I could find it was over $50 for a used paperback, $300+ for a hardcover. So I read something else.
(Since then it got reprinted, and you could get it for $10 bucks or so... and then that print run expired too and now it appears to be around $18 or so on Amazon for a used paperback or $90 for a used hardcover.)
A discount on a book I'm not interested in is not going to seduce me away.
You are right to a point... they could set the price of a harlequinn romance at a dime and I'd still ignore them. But if I walked into a book store intending on buying The Forever War by Haldeman... and they had A Canticle for Leibowitz by Miller Jr. discounted 50%... another book on my radar as something I'd like to check out... then I'd probably walk out with Canticle.
word_list = [ remove_trailing_whitespace(line) for line in file("wordlist.txt") ]
for first_word in word_list:
for second_word in word_list:
if sorted(word_to_anagram) == sorted(first_word + second_word):
print word_to_anagram, "=", first_word, "+", second_word
That little program won a contest in writing readable code. Its still a fair bit of effort to understand what its doing without knowing exactly what problem its trying to solve.
A couple lines of comments:
Generates all two word anagrams of the word "documenting" using a word list text file as the dictionary of possible words.
Goes a long way towards making this code more readable.
Amusing, but at no point did I ever say anything in defense of the companies.
I found it amusing that the only argument you even tried to rebut here was the one in response to you calling me a hypocrite. And you did, without clarifying anything was to call me a hypocrite again.
It's immoral for the same reason it is immoral to give the finger to someone holding the door open for you
It's immoral to randomly give someone the finger regardless of whether or not they are holding a door open for you.
If someone produces a copyrighted work and expects to be compensated by anyone that wants a copy, you should respect his wishes and pay him if you want that copy
Why a "copyrighted work"? Why not any work? Copyright is a legal standing not a moral framework.
Your argument should stand without requiring there to be an established "copyright law".
In other words, in a world with no copyright, if I created a work and you wanted a copy, but I created it with the expectation of getting paid for any copies that get made then you believe that you are morally obligated to respect my wishes, and pay me for that copy? Your moral argument is strictly one of "respecting the wishes of others when benefiting from their labor"?
But we do live in such a world.
Suppose you create a chair, and declare that you expect to be paid for any copies that are made of it. I come by, admire your chair, and then go home and build my own based on what I saw. I have created a derivative work. Of course physical chairs aren't protected by copyright so this is perfectly legal and acceptable. Is this action also immoral?
Or perhaps the immorality was in demanding that noone else be allowed to create a copy of my chair, or creating their own chair inspired by my chair without paying me in the first place?
Essentially, the morality of "respecting copyright law for its own sake" hinges on the morality of copyright itself.
I personally do not think copyright laws as they stand right now are moral.
Slashdot Mirror
To give an analogy, it's like driving a car on the road with no supervision even though you have no idea how to drive a car.
So we should have a government run licensing program, whereby you must have a government issues license before connecting to the internet? That's going to improve things how?
Does this count?
http://www.amazon.com/LOLcat-Bible-beginnin-Ceiling-stuffs/dp/1569757348
"Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. ..."
Give it another few hundred years and they'll standardise on something spelt similar to both (my guess would be "strate")
Is spelling still evolving the way it used to? I'd have thought the prevalence of print books, availability of dictionaries, and the prevalence of spell checkers, etc over the last hundred years would have started to impose a resistance to the previous fluidity.
the artists who aren't getting paid don't even enter into the discussion, probably because of the guilty feelings it would inspire to be reminded of the reality of the situation.
No, the artists aren't entering the discussion about getting paid because they aren't getting paid either way. Go ahead, buy the CD... the artist still doesn't get paid.
If your boss withheld your paycheck and told you that the code you wrote is now theirs free of charge because "information wants to be free," you'd sue for the wages and win. But if the code you wrote is included in a game, and the game appears on Pirate Bay, downloaders will happily pirate it and never even dream of spending a time, and they'll justify it until they're red in the face.
That's because my boss and i have this employment contract. They stop paying me, i stop writing code, its that simple.
If that code is included on something on the pirate bay, i don't really care, because I was smart enough to get paid. My business model is to get paid for writing the code, not paid for copies of it.
The business model of selling "copies" is stupid in the digital era. Find another business model. Live performances... sponsors... whatever. Make movies that can break even in theatres...put them on netflix... hell... run a free legit torrent site, and then charge for premium memberships ... people will pay if there is a real value add. But its got to be a value add and not simply "less crippled". They might not pay as much as they used to for DVDs but so what... online streaming doesn't cost as much as manufacturing, transporting, warehousing, and retailing DVDs either... so it shouldn't need to.
In America, even if we only voted for one person at every level of government that would be no less than three elections (one for federal, one for state and one for local
But you don't elect every year. Do you really need a bunch of dedicated hardware for an event that only happens 3 times in 4 years or so?
And do you REALLY think the local, state, and federal governments are going to agree and cooperate enough to use the SAME voting machines at each level? They probably won't even agree on a vender, never mind a model, never mind actually using the same physical units.
And how long will the voting machines last before they need to be replaced? Will you likely get more than 2 elections out of one?
read your policy especially the part where it says using the vehicle to commit an illegal act voids the policy.
Don't you have to be convicted of actually committing an illegal act though? Otherwise, the police just stole your car.
There is no way that we can physically count hundreds of votes in 45 minutes.
Meh, my parents worked in the last election, and processed more voters than you did. (Admittedly they had a school gym, and probably 8 booths going, each with 3 staff and 2 ballot boxes divided up alphabetically... (last name Aa to Be voting booth 1 ballot box 1, Bf to Ca booth 1 box 2)... (Ca-De booth 2 box one...
The station EASILY processed some 5000 voters.
each booth counted their own votes, and it didn't take all that long either. 5000 votes, 16 ballot boxes is only 300 or so votes per box. Took about half an hour to count them. Each box got counted twice, and they were out in about an hour and half.
Not a big deal.
You had 4 people doing 800, you say... that scales pretty much right in line with their 25 people doing 5000.
Now, you mention $41/hr to run the election, with say its a 12hrs day... around $500 bucks.
And the voting machine doesn't eliminate everyone... instead of 4 of you, there still needs to be at least to of you...to instruct votes and ensure the machine doesn't break or get tampered with etc... so you only eliminate half the labor cost.
The voting machine is going to have to be less than $250 per unit. And it can't break down or your fucked. And it has to sit in a warehouse for a year or so... so your pretty much gauranteed to need a bunch of technicians check each unit before each election... so there goes the rest of your savings.
Seriously... paper processes get it down to around $2 per vote to count after materials and labour and training. You aren't going to get a machine anywhere near that anytime soon.
I can see dropping a phone in the toilet. Of course you must then recognize that every phone you see has been used while someone wiped their arse.
Not necessesarily...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLw6FemRavs&feature=related
Maybe the execution there is a bit over the top, but its real enough all the same. Many people have lost their phone like that, from the front pockets of hood and jackets. Or off of belt clips and holsters... you undo the belt and gravity takes over from there... the belt just provides a nice rail for it to slide along rigth at the toilet... at least for people who wear the holder on the non-buckle side...
Fire increases entropy all around. When a log burns in a room, the entropy of the ashes left over is greater than the entropy of the unburned wood, the entropy of the carbon oxides and water vapor in the air is greater than the unbound oxygen, and as a result there is a lot more heat everywhere.
Except that there are easy counter examples. One would be a hot fire on a beach that creates glass which has less entropy than the sand that was there originally. That local decrease in entropy is hardly anything to get excited about though.
Another example would be the sun itself - its a big fusion reactor, creating heavier elements out of lighter ones. That is also a local negative entropy, since entropy through radioactive decay would have the heavier elements gradually decay into lighter ones.
Meh... life isn't negative entropy except with very very rose coloured glasses on, and only if you look at it from one side.
Human life is on some level just a chemical fire that needs a near continual influx of fresh fuel to burn.
Replace "house" with "car" and yes, that's pretty much exactly what happen at the moment. If you leave your car doors unlocked and someone steals it and uses it to commit crime, do you really have an expectation of a hard-cre "right to privacy" that would prevent the police from stopping searching that car - even using deadly force against it?
This is nonsense. What if you DID lock the car? What you took the wheels off too, locked it in a parking garage, and then chained it to a support pillar.
And then someone stole it and uses it to commit crime.
Would that be in the slightest bit different?
Nope. Not one bit.
So whether or not you left the car unlocked or not is: COMPLETELY FUCKING IRRELEVANT.
The police will stop it, and search it, and so on, regardless of whether you locked it or not. So why do you think its comparable to an unlocked car and more importantly how is a locked car the SLIGHTEST BIT DIFFERENT?
So what is your point?
Just one point. Violating "patent law" isn't a criminal offense
Perhaps not; its worse, it makes me suspect you are a terrorist.
And that's way better than a criminal offense... as a criminal you still have rights... as terrorist suspect... you don't.
Aha... I saw you roll your eyes at this post... and then I felt a bit queasy... so you are cleary a witch too...
Just turn off your phone and give them less unencrypted information. It makes all the difference to simply STOP BROADCASTING.
So I have to decide between receiving phone calls... including emergency phones from my family, friends,and work ... or submit to being tracked and identified?
That's silly.
What happens when they take your picture at the cash register and then photomatch it to facebook and other crowdsourced identification databases. What then? Walk around with a ski mask on? That'll go over well.
It was a contest in *readability*.
The judge spoke English and were not programmers.
Do you think your mom knows what "rstrip" does?
yeah... i assumed foo was the programming foo... this being slashdot... didn't think you'd done it on purpose though. :)
Your thesis is based on a reproducible bug in Win98? So they fixed one admittedly significant bug, big deal.
All I have to do to rebutt it is find a single similiarly reproducible bug in ME that didn't affect Win98SE?
Seriously? I could do that, but it would be completely meaningless...
Windows ME supported UPnP which was more of a mess than anything else especially then. Image Preview could crash the system on bad images. It was also the first iteration of system restore which didn't work well and consumed then-limited disk space like it was going out of style.
The new powermanagement features were unreliable.
The new multimedia features were buggy as all get out.
Windows Me wasn't supported on a domain, where Windows 98 was.
They also removed the Personal Web server which was used by a ton of people at the time with microsoft frontpage.
Not to mention that it did not work with a lot of older DOS games due to the removal of real mode DOS support.
I actually use win98se VMs somewhat regularly; and I don't have crashing issues. Its honestly never occurred to me to setup a Windows ME VM for those situations... and even thinking about it now makes we wonder why I ever would.
Almost NOTHING was ever truly supported on ME. There was a bunch of stuff that was supported on Win98, and it usually but not always worked in ME, but that really isn't quite the same thing.
ME had Windows 2000's networking stack plugged into Windows 98's kernel... it was the ultimate bastard operating system.
The kim jong il one is photoshopped so bad its obvious with the naked eye.
If its not 100% transparent to the user its not good enough. As far as the user is concerned deduplication isn't happening. There are no evident changes to the filesystem they are using (no case changes, no meta data issues, no links ... 100% transparent to the user )
Its done at block level, below the filesystem.
Whether the data being deduplicated is a directory, an alternate stream, the file data, meta data... is irrelevant.
Say you've got a nice big 5GB Outlook.pst file. And you make a backup copy of it, and then keep using it. 3 months later you've got a 6GB Outlook.pst file in use, and still have the 5GB backup. Ideally 5 of those GB are virtually identical and if the deduplication software is doing its job well, those two files take up a total of ~6GB of actual disk space.
As far as the user and filesystem is concerned, they are two separate files. They can both be open for read/write at the same time. Its 100% transparent that nearly 100% of the backup file is physically using the same disk space as the live file. If changes are made to the live file where the files have been deduplicated, new storage will be allocated to house the modified part of the file, and those 2 blocks will no longer be duplicated... they'll have been de-deduplicated.
The #1 upshot though is that its 100% transparent.
Not to nitpick, but "Google-foo" should be "Google-fu"
As you evidently know xxxx-fu words refers to one's mastery at something. The -fu suffix is borrowed from from kung-fu.
"Your kung-fu is better than mine"...
becomes...
"Your google-fu is better than mine"...
the other says "copy freely, you must let others copy too!", which is a restriction that could have no weight or bearing in a no copyright world.
So where is the opposition? The restriction is only there to offset the restrictions enabled by copyright. Without copyrights restrictions, this counter is moot.
Its like a "restriction" that you must not kill a puppy, in a world with no puppies.
Windows ME *REALLY WAS* the most stable of the win9x's.
No, it was worse than 98 SE.
It added a lot of new stuff that didn't work great.
Windows 2000 was supposed to be released in "Professional" and "Home" editions. But the home market just wasn't ready for NT as too much stuff the home market used didn't work.
Printers, scanners, mp3 players, and so on lacked NT drivers. Too many games and utilities didn't work.
So only windows 2000 pro ever got released, and then Windows ME was created released to update Windows 98.
When XP came out the market was a lot more ready for NT at home, and we got XP Pro and XP Home.
Windows 2000 Pro had been really successful as both a business OS and had made a lot of inroads in the home market as well, so the NT driver situation was much improved, and most of the new games and utilities and hardware supported both 2000 and 98.
Pretty much all paperbacks are the same price
Plus or minus $5 sure. But plus or minus $5 kind of undermines your argument. Paperbacks tend to run $8 to $18 around here.
and if I buy one, it's because I want to read that book.
Some years back I wanted "Permutation City" by Greg Egan, but at the time the cheapest I could find it was over $50 for a used paperback, $300+ for a hardcover. So I read something else.
(Since then it got reprinted, and you could get it for $10 bucks or so... and then that print run expired too and now it appears to be around $18 or so on Amazon for a used paperback or $90 for a used hardcover.)
A discount on a book I'm not interested in is not going to seduce me away.
You are right to a point... they could set the price of a harlequinn romance at a dime and I'd still ignore them. But if I walked into a book store intending on buying The Forever War by Haldeman... and they had A Canticle for Leibowitz by Miller Jr. discounted 50%... another book on my radar as something I'd like to check out... then I'd probably walk out with Canticle.
I prefer code possessing such clarity that it is self-commenting.
Yeah, me too... but you still need comments to describe what block level elements are doing, or some explanation of why you are doing things.
word_to_anagram = "documenting"
def remove_trailing_whitespace(text):
return text.rstrip()
word_list = [ remove_trailing_whitespace(line) for line in file("wordlist.txt") ]
for first_word in word_list:
for second_word in word_list:
if sorted(word_to_anagram) == sorted(first_word + second_word):
print word_to_anagram, "=", first_word, "+", second_word
That little program won a contest in writing readable code. Its still a fair bit of effort to understand what its doing without knowing exactly what problem its trying to solve.
A couple lines of comments:
Generates all two word anagrams of the word "documenting" using a word list text file as the dictionary of possible words.
Goes a long way towards making this code more readable.
Amusing, but at no point did I ever say anything in defense of the companies.
I found it amusing that the only argument you even tried to rebut here was the one in response to you calling me a hypocrite. And you did, without clarifying anything was to call me a hypocrite again.
"Fuck it" is about right.
It's immoral for the same reason it is immoral to give the finger to someone holding the door open for you
It's immoral to randomly give someone the finger regardless of whether or not they are holding a door open for you.
If someone produces a copyrighted work and expects to be compensated by anyone that wants a copy, you should respect his wishes and pay him if you want that copy
Why a "copyrighted work"? Why not any work? Copyright is a legal standing not a moral framework.
Your argument should stand without requiring there to be an established "copyright law".
In other words, in a world with no copyright, if I created a work and you wanted a copy, but I created it with the expectation of getting paid for any copies that get made then you believe that you are morally obligated to respect my wishes, and pay me for that copy? Your moral argument is strictly one of "respecting the wishes of others when benefiting from their labor"?
But we do live in such a world.
Suppose you create a chair, and declare that you expect to be paid for any copies that are made of it. I come by, admire your chair, and then go home and build my own based on what I saw. I have created a derivative work. Of course physical chairs aren't protected by copyright so this is perfectly legal and acceptable. Is this action also immoral?
Or perhaps the immorality was in demanding that noone else be allowed to create a copy of my chair, or creating their own chair inspired by my chair without paying me in the first place?
Essentially, the morality of "respecting copyright law for its own sake" hinges on the morality of copyright itself.
I personally do not think copyright laws as they stand right now are moral.