You mention this as a troll/joke, but quite honestly I would find it informative and refreshing to get a good feel for which companies treat their employees fair and equitably, and show respect and loyalty to their workers, and which shaft them. I am not anti-globalization whatsoever, but I am anti-exploitation, and the treatment of some employees by some organizations is simply dispicable. It will affect the computers I buy, the software I recommend, and the partners I work with. If a firm fires hundreds of longstanding loyal employees unfairly (i.e. pink slip and a security escort) to open a shop overseas, then I'll do everything I can to stick it to them. Let's start getting a scorecard folks and let's weed these miscreants from among us. BTW: For those who will offer up that these firms are just trying to stay alive, in virtually all cases you'll find a top-heavy structure with CEOs and executives making, as single individuals, more than they saved by firing several hundred loyal employees. The greed and excess of the upper realms of corporate America reaches to such an extent that I truly am not suprized a revolution doesn't break out (isn't it amazing that even in the West where we're all "Rich", the overwhelming percentage of the wealth in held by a couple of percent? For this you spend your life struggling worried that a new corporate fad will put you out of business).
As another point, really all of this is a passing fad that happens every single time there is a downturn. To the younguns this is the hammers and chains of the inevitable decline of Western society, but to anyone else with a bit more experience this is just another economic cycle with the exact same behaviours each time: The US dollar crested making foreign labour "cheap" (while giving the US massive ability to absorb foreign companies), however the US $ is already cycling down again, and soon this will all be just another "how to sell newspapers" bunch of BS.
OK, everyone is saying this but it makes absolutely no sense. Who in a purchasing decision right now is thinking "Gee, I'd like a processor but I'd really like to know how a classic Athlon 1.8Ghz would fare...". Absolutely ridiculous, and I'd say that anyone who bought into that line it snared hook line and sinker. The XP model number scheme came about specifically to counter Intel's insistence on using extremely high clockspeed processors, which could fool the public into thinking that was a real metric of overall performance. Hence we have AMD Athlons with a real clockspeed that many of us simply don't know, and a fairly good comparison when price shopping (i.e. the Athlon XP 2800+ and the P4 2.8Ghz).
The XP lines "model number" indicates the equivalent Intel P4 processor speed (because, as well know, the Athlon, like the P3, achiees more per cycle than the P4 does. A 3Ghz P3 would absolutely stomp a 3Ghz P4), so if they effectively upped the speed by adding more cache, then it's entirely the right thing to do given the philosophy of the model number.
One thing I really respect AMD for is how conservative they actually are with their "model numbers" : The XP 2800 actually trounces the P4 2.8 on most benchmarks, and slaps the 3.0Ghz around on several. If they took the Cyrix tact they would have called in the XP 8200+.
SLASHDOT NOTE: This is a repost because Slashdot lost track of my last comment. What the hell is going on with Slashdot? Not only has it slowed to an absolute crawl, but every couple of days some other poorly thought out alteration to the UI appears and then disappears, comments are being lost after they are posted, etc. The whole editors-not-reading-their-own-site-and-posting-bla tant-dupes is bad enough, but these technical issues are just astoundingly amateur for what is one of the larger websites out there.
The XP lines "model number" indicates the equivalent Intel P4 processor speed (because, as well know, the Athlon, like the P3, achiees more per cycle than the P4 does. A 3Ghz P3 would absolutely stomp a 3Ghz P4), so if they effectively upped the speed by adding more cache, then it's entirely the right thing to do given the philosophy of the model number.
One thing I really respect AMD for is how conservative they actually are with their "model numbers" : The XP 2800 actually trounces the P4 2.8 on most benchmarks, and slaps the 3.0Ghz around on several. If they took the Cyrix tact they would have called in the XP 8200+.
there's enough ingenuity in people that want to do wrong that they'll never be shut down completely.
Who said anything about "completely"? The point is that they tracked down someone who thought they were anonymous, and there's a message there for every other script kiddie (as a sidenote: I found this story overstated the capabilities of this worm which is something that security people usually do basically as a roundabout way of patting themselves on the back). Personally I think that the Internet should become a UN-style governed entity and any country that doesn't actively pursue computer criminals should be barred from the global internet.
I've been studying economic theory for over a decade. I work with economists every day.
With all due respect to your extensive experience: Are you intentionally trying to be obtuse? Is your method of trolling to say as much as possible without actually saying anything? Let's get to the core of this.
Your version of Apache webserver is not equivalent to the original; it is not fungible. If it is not fungible, it is not a commodity.
Have you really managed to miss the point so entirely? My original point was that the value of a derivative of a free software work is in the change (because the original is still freely available), and here you are to claim that the value is the change. Huh?
that there is no "open market" for GPL'd code
Sure there is: The authors and creators have openly made these products available, for $0.00, with no usage limitations. Here's the open market for Apache.
The going price for Apache is not zero, it is what the market will bear.
Sigh. And the market will bear $0.00 because the authors and creators have released these products freely.
Believing that the ability to download a piece of software for "free" makes the "market value" zero shows a complete lacking of understanding of the words "free" (as in beer) and "market value."
Market value - The amount that a seller may expect to obtain for merchandise, services, or securities in the open market.
Value - Monetary or material worth: the fluctuating value of gold and silver.
Is this really that difficult to understand, or have you dug yourself so far into your little hole of blinding arrogance that you can't see something so brutally obvious? Firstly, I never said "the ability to download": We're specifically talking about GPL software where one has the full ability to download, modify, and redistribute. Don't try to make my claims any more generic than they are in an attempt to weasle under the actual point.
The market value, or value, of GPLd, freely avaialable and redistributable software is $0.00. Now maybe someone put said software on a CD and is selling it for a convenience price, but they are not making money on the value of the software, but rather the convenience/medium. The going price for Gentoo linux is $0.00. The going price for Apache is $0.00. The going price for GCC is $0.00. If someone charges, clearly the market will only bear what they have added above and beyond the market value of that which they've built upon.
Please feel free to repeat your blindingly ridiculous claim that I'm misunderstanding what market value is.
Sophmoronic...cute. Was that the Troll Word of the Week?
Value in the context of this discussion is in regards to monetary value: How much someone is willing to pay for something. If someone takes the Apache, which I can freely download for $0, and sells it, clearly they must be providing an additional service (such as CD-ROM distribution), otherwise they will have, oh, about 0 sales.
You and I could sell the same GPL'd code, and I guarantee that I could fetch a higher price. Explain that.
Because you have an incredibly degree of arrogance and an overwhelming self-confidence that leads you to make absurd boasts to people you know nothing about?
It's completely clear. If I took the Apache source and added a bit of functionality to reverse the output (It'll be the new LMTH server), the Apache source is no less available than it was before, and the only marketable aspect of my project is what is above and beyond Apache. Indeed, not only does this prove that the delta is all that has value, but it disproves that someone is making money on someone else's work because that person's work is still available: Its net value is $0. Clearly the value is what is above and beyond it.
This has been covered so many times. This particular defense of the GPL is so unbelievably inane and thoughtless that it really begs if people are thinking or if they're just parroting what Richard Stallman et. all tells them.
If someone took a freely available program and modified it and sold it, clearly they are selling the value of the delta/changes, NOT the value of the program which is no less freely avaiable to any and all.
Re:Linux games vs. shareware stuff for Win
on
25 Best Linux Games
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· Score: 1
Why is it that when people think of Linux, or any other OpenSource project, they immediately think "free"?
Claiming that open source (in the GPL sense)!= free is absolutely ridiculous: Show me an open source (in the GPL sense) product where they successfully maintain a commercial product? Redhat you say? Oh right, there's one user of Slashdot who might have commercially bought Redhat. The other 74 users downloaded it (despite the fact that Redhat has been trying to make it more difficult...soon it'll be 40 CDs with the core installation items being hidden among all of them, and the distribution copy hosted on a brutally slow server).
However you are right that there is commercial software that runs on open source software such as Linux, such as Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, etc. So why are people focusing on free software? Well...let's see....1/2 of these awards are specifically dedicated to free software (indeed that was there major partitioning point). Apart from that we all know that "free as in beer" is far more important to most Linux enthusiasts. Indeed, if it weren't for the Corporate copy of XP Pro, Windows Activation would have sent even more of these free as in beer'ers clustering to Linux, whereupon they would immediately absorb the advocacy and then proclaim that they're really about digital rights, etc.
Is IFF still in use? I was playing around with a realism patch for Falcon 4 and one of the modifications was the removal of IFF because it is "no longer in use".
I can verify that people who think installing hotfixes/patches on SQL is just click on the link and hit your forehead on the space bar till it tells you to reboot are lost in some fog.
I would say that the evidence shows that people who think that it's an automated process now are absolutely correct: It's an entirely automated no-brainer process. Previously hotfixes may have been more complex, however the reality is that there have been very few on SQL Server: It hasn't been a lot to keep up with.
I would verify but the hotfix in question has an auto-extraing exe that as a part of the extraction process first checks if there is a compatible instance of SQL Server. There isn't even a readme with this file I noticed, and my presumption is that the exe automatically installs the hotfix (given that it has the brains to check that there is a compatible version as a first step), though I can't verify that as my instance is already SP3. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am curious how the hotfix experience is for anyone else who grabbed that file.
Well..sort of. SQL Server 2000 SP3, which fixes this problem, comes in a self-extracting exe which asks you for the target directory. You then go to that target directory and run setup.bat: The installer automatically shuts down SQL Server for the initial part, installs the patches (you copy over absolutely no dlls or binaries), restarts SQL Server for the final part where it then runs the update SQL scripts. It really is a trivial process. As far as backing up your data you should be doing that regularly anyways. This process is the same for MSDE installations.
I don't know where this myth of hyper-complex SQL Server updates came from. Admittingly it is a bit more complex if you have multiple instances, but generally that goes along with more advanced administrators anyways.
IMHO mono has been a great asset for.NET adoption: Previously, one of the primary "sales" problems in encouraging.NET adoption was the fear that it ties the customer to a single vendor solution (and this is often heavily played up when it goes against Java, for instance). Mono offers one the ability to offer a rapidly developing alternative in case of ridiculous FUD circumstances often imagined in efforts to detract from Microsoft products (i.e. "What if they withdraw all their products and you have to give your firstborn to use it! Then what!").
Most insurance companies here in Ontario will compensate for stolen CDs up to a certain number (and it's rather low...like 6). The reason is that beyond that and the CDs represent a visual inducement to crime that greatly increases the chance that the breakin will occur in the first place..sorta like leaving money in plain sight, and they know that the recovery rate for that is about 0%.
If they didn't pay for the car radio then what's the point of having theft insurance in the first place?
Ripping songs is not a matter of one or two clicks. You have to enter a lot of the song information by hand, if you want it to be worth having.
While I'm perhaps an oddball in that I actually use digital music legally, I "rip" with Media Player and it nicely includes all of the pertinent information. Pretty much all ripping software does. The "it's an ease of use thing" is one of the weakest excuses out there.
All of those theft victims still own the rights to that music.
Interesting quandary there. Of course if Bob collected from his insurance company for the value of the CDs, is Bob guilty of insurance fraud because he supposedly maintains intellectual rights over it? That one sounds like a "doubt it" scenario as there is no way that law enforcement could prove that Bob really ever did own the CDs, or hasn't sold them, if he no longer has possession of them.
Funny you mention that. I've lived in two Southern Ontario towns debating pesticide constraints/bans (London and Burlington), and in both cases the local newspapers had an endless stream of very oddly motivated letters to the editor decrying the anti-pesticide camp, yet they all seemed oddly connnected and without a good motivation (i.e. someone might not want pesticides because they think it causes cancer, yet on the flip side these people weren't arguing for pesticide for perceived goods such as maybe easier lawn care, but rather just that they didn't believe it caused cancer. There was a lack of a rational and logical motivatoin).
Indeed I thought the same thing: Gee now I can carry a bunch of MiniDV cassets, each holding an hour of 25Mbps data (or 90000 Mb, or about 11.25GB), each costing some $4 or so, swapping to a new one whenever I'd like to effectively having a limited storage space, or I can use a volatile hard drive with a prescribed maximum limit (and to fit on a 1.5GB drive for an hour they must be using some extreme compression) that requires me to do a PC download once it's full. No thanks.
What in the world are you talking about? Windows basically brought 2D acceleration to the market (I remember getting a shiny new Diamond Speedstar 24x to run winbench and friends to see thousands of rectangles being drawn per second) and virtually ever GDI call has hardware acceleration.
Mostly 2d performance has been "Ok" scince the ATI Rage Pro.
Have you tried out SimCity 3000? With a GF4 4400 with an Athlon 2000+/512MB it starts chugging HORRIBLY for mercy once you hit a half decent sized city.
Okay you've established that you're an elitist contrarian that burrows his brows at the dullard, brainless mobs. Are you a 17-year old "goth"? (Of course it's oft laughable: These "Contrarians" are usually just as brainless as they shun everything that's popular just because it's popular. That is absolutely no different, or deserving of more merit, than those who follow what's popular just because it's popular).
However my point was that Kazaa et. all thrive almost entirely upon mainstream movies and music contrary to the delusional claims to the contrary. Are there people sharing freeware/garage band music and homemade movies? Maybe a couple. However they are overwhelmingly outnumbed by those who are copying the mainstream.
The whole argument is supposed to be that most people are all for file sharing. That's the justification for the DMCA and all the rest of it. It's the reason why they would be suing people at all. If you believe that it's a minority who are sharing files and that the majority are shocked by this then there's no need for any of this.
File sharing, just like piracy, is a prisoner's dilemma type of circumstance: Most people know that it's wrong, but they do it only because they feel that everyone else is doing it and they don't want to be left behind (sort of like pirate satellite theft): If there was enforcement these people would all wrap up their activities as a "well I knew they'd stop it some day" and wouldn't disagree or go against enforcement whatsoever. Did you know that something like 80% of the wealth is held by 15% of the people in North America? Surely that other 85% wants it though, right? Let's go get it then because out gang mentality and thuggery can get our way, right? Of course not. Thankfully most people don't think that way.
Bullshit. That is so much bullshit. That kind of music would not be missed. Anybody can produce music, and without the help of conglomerates.
What exactly is your point? My point is that right now anybody can produce music, and without the help of the conglomerates, yet overwhelmingly P2P is full of the conglomerates music!
Slashdot Mirror
You mention this as a troll/joke, but quite honestly I would find it informative and refreshing to get a good feel for which companies treat their employees fair and equitably, and show respect and loyalty to their workers, and which shaft them. I am not anti-globalization whatsoever, but I am anti-exploitation, and the treatment of some employees by some organizations is simply dispicable. It will affect the computers I buy, the software I recommend, and the partners I work with. If a firm fires hundreds of longstanding loyal employees unfairly (i.e. pink slip and a security escort) to open a shop overseas, then I'll do everything I can to stick it to them. Let's start getting a scorecard folks and let's weed these miscreants from among us. BTW: For those who will offer up that these firms are just trying to stay alive, in virtually all cases you'll find a top-heavy structure with CEOs and executives making, as single individuals, more than they saved by firing several hundred loyal employees. The greed and excess of the upper realms of corporate America reaches to such an extent that I truly am not suprized a revolution doesn't break out (isn't it amazing that even in the West where we're all "Rich", the overwhelming percentage of the wealth in held by a couple of percent? For this you spend your life struggling worried that a new corporate fad will put you out of business).
As another point, really all of this is a passing fad that happens every single time there is a downturn. To the younguns this is the hammers and chains of the inevitable decline of Western society, but to anyone else with a bit more experience this is just another economic cycle with the exact same behaviours each time: The US dollar crested making foreign labour "cheap" (while giving the US massive ability to absorb foreign companies), however the US $ is already cycling down again, and soon this will all be just another "how to sell newspapers" bunch of BS.
OK, everyone is saying this but it makes absolutely no sense. Who in a purchasing decision right now is thinking "Gee, I'd like a processor but I'd really like to know how a classic Athlon 1.8Ghz would fare...". Absolutely ridiculous, and I'd say that anyone who bought into that line it snared hook line and sinker. The XP model number scheme came about specifically to counter Intel's insistence on using extremely high clockspeed processors, which could fool the public into thinking that was a real metric of overall performance. Hence we have AMD Athlons with a real clockspeed that many of us simply don't know, and a fairly good comparison when price shopping (i.e. the Athlon XP 2800+ and the P4 2.8Ghz).
The XP lines "model number" indicates the equivalent Intel P4 processor speed (because, as well know, the Athlon, like the P3, achiees more per cycle than the P4 does. A 3Ghz P3 would absolutely stomp a 3Ghz P4), so if they effectively upped the speed by adding more cache, then it's entirely the right thing to do given the philosophy of the model number.
a tant-dupes is bad enough, but these technical issues are just astoundingly amateur for what is one of the larger websites out there.
One thing I really respect AMD for is how conservative they actually are with their "model numbers" : The XP 2800 actually trounces the P4 2.8 on most benchmarks, and slaps the 3.0Ghz around on several. If they took the Cyrix tact they would have called in the XP 8200+.
SLASHDOT NOTE: This is a repost because Slashdot lost track of my last comment. What the hell is going on with Slashdot? Not only has it slowed to an absolute crawl, but every couple of days some other poorly thought out alteration to the UI appears and then disappears, comments are being lost after they are posted, etc. The whole editors-not-reading-their-own-site-and-posting-bl
The XP lines "model number" indicates the equivalent Intel P4 processor speed (because, as well know, the Athlon, like the P3, achiees more per cycle than the P4 does. A 3Ghz P3 would absolutely stomp a 3Ghz P4), so if they effectively upped the speed by adding more cache, then it's entirely the right thing to do given the philosophy of the model number.
One thing I really respect AMD for is how conservative they actually are with their "model numbers" : The XP 2800 actually trounces the P4 2.8 on most benchmarks, and slaps the 3.0Ghz around on several. If they took the Cyrix tact they would have called in the XP 8200+.
This would almost make some sense if I were American.
It's all over, people! We don't have a prayer, argh...
there's enough ingenuity in people that want to do wrong that they'll never be shut down completely.
Who said anything about "completely"? The point is that they tracked down someone who thought they were anonymous, and there's a message there for every other script kiddie (as a sidenote: I found this story overstated the capabilities of this worm which is something that security people usually do basically as a roundabout way of patting themselves on the back). Personally I think that the Internet should become a UN-style governed entity and any country that doesn't actively pursue computer criminals should be barred from the global internet.
I've been studying economic theory for over a decade. I work with economists every day.
With all due respect to your extensive experience: Are you intentionally trying to be obtuse? Is your method of trolling to say as much as possible without actually saying anything? Let's get to the core of this.
Your version of Apache webserver is not equivalent to the original; it is not fungible. If it is not fungible, it is not a commodity.
Have you really managed to miss the point so entirely? My original point was that the value of a derivative of a free software work is in the change (because the original is still freely available), and here you are to claim that the value is the change. Huh?
that there is no "open market" for GPL'd code
Sure there is: The authors and creators have openly made these products available, for $0.00, with no usage limitations. Here's the open market for Apache.
The going price for Apache is not zero, it is what the market will bear.
Sigh. And the market will bear $0.00 because the authors and creators have released these products freely.
Believing that the ability to download a piece of software for "free" makes the "market value" zero shows a complete lacking of understanding of the words "free" (as in beer) and "market value."
Market value - The amount that a seller may expect to obtain for merchandise, services, or securities in the open market.
Value - Monetary or material worth: the fluctuating value of gold and silver.
Is this really that difficult to understand, or have you dug yourself so far into your little hole of blinding arrogance that you can't see something so brutally obvious? Firstly, I never said "the ability to download": We're specifically talking about GPL software where one has the full ability to download, modify, and redistribute. Don't try to make my claims any more generic than they are in an attempt to weasle under the actual point.
The market value, or value, of GPLd, freely avaialable and redistributable software is $0.00. Now maybe someone put said software on a CD and is selling it for a convenience price, but they are not making money on the value of the software, but rather the convenience/medium. The going price for Gentoo linux is $0.00. The going price for Apache is $0.00. The going price for GCC is $0.00. If someone charges, clearly the market will only bear what they have added above and beyond the market value of that which they've built upon.
Please feel free to repeat your blindingly ridiculous claim that I'm misunderstanding what market value is.
Sophmoronic...cute. Was that the Troll Word of the Week?
Value in the context of this discussion is in regards to monetary value: How much someone is willing to pay for something. If someone takes the Apache, which I can freely download for $0, and sells it, clearly they must be providing an additional service (such as CD-ROM distribution), otherwise they will have, oh, about 0 sales.
You and I could sell the same GPL'd code, and I guarantee that I could fetch a higher price. Explain that.
Because you have an incredibly degree of arrogance and an overwhelming self-confidence that leads you to make absurd boasts to people you know nothing about?
It's completely clear. If I took the Apache source and added a bit of functionality to reverse the output (It'll be the new LMTH server), the Apache source is no less available than it was before, and the only marketable aspect of my project is what is above and beyond Apache. Indeed, not only does this prove that the delta is all that has value, but it disproves that someone is making money on someone else's work because that person's work is still available: Its net value is $0. Clearly the value is what is above and beyond it.
This has been covered so many times. This particular defense of the GPL is so unbelievably inane and thoughtless that it really begs if people are thinking or if they're just parroting what Richard Stallman et. all tells them.
If someone took a freely available program and modified it and sold it, clearly they are selling the value of the delta/changes, NOT the value of the program which is no less freely avaiable to any and all.
Why is it that when people think of Linux, or any other OpenSource project, they immediately think "free"?
Claiming that open source (in the GPL sense)!= free is absolutely ridiculous: Show me an open source (in the GPL sense) product where they successfully maintain a commercial product? Redhat you say? Oh right, there's one user of Slashdot who might have commercially bought Redhat. The other 74 users downloaded it (despite the fact that Redhat has been trying to make it more difficult...soon it'll be 40 CDs with the core installation items being hidden among all of them, and the distribution copy hosted on a brutally slow server).
However you are right that there is commercial software that runs on open source software such as Linux, such as Unreal Tournament, Quake 3, etc. So why are people focusing on free software? Well...let's see....1/2 of these awards are specifically dedicated to free software (indeed that was there major partitioning point). Apart from that we all know that "free as in beer" is far more important to most Linux enthusiasts. Indeed, if it weren't for the Corporate copy of XP Pro, Windows Activation would have sent even more of these free as in beer'ers clustering to Linux, whereupon they would immediately absorb the advocacy and then proclaim that they're really about digital rights, etc.
because our aircraft transmit a signal
Is IFF still in use? I was playing around with a realism patch for Falcon 4 and one of the modifications was the removal of IFF because it is "no longer in use".
I can verify that people who think installing hotfixes/patches on SQL is just click on the link and hit your forehead on the space bar till it tells you to reboot are lost in some fog.
I would say that the evidence shows that people who think that it's an automated process now are absolutely correct: It's an entirely automated no-brainer process. Previously hotfixes may have been more complex, however the reality is that there have been very few on SQL Server: It hasn't been a lot to keep up with.
I would verify but the hotfix in question has an auto-extraing exe that as a part of the extraction process first checks if there is a compatible instance of SQL Server. There isn't even a readme with this file I noticed, and my presumption is that the exe automatically installs the hotfix (given that it has the brains to check that there is a compatible version as a first step), though I can't verify that as my instance is already SP3. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am curious how the hotfix experience is for anyone else who grabbed that file.
Well..sort of. SQL Server 2000 SP3, which fixes this problem, comes in a self-extracting exe which asks you for the target directory. You then go to that target directory and run setup.bat: The installer automatically shuts down SQL Server for the initial part, installs the patches (you copy over absolutely no dlls or binaries), restarts SQL Server for the final part where it then runs the update SQL scripts. It really is a trivial process. As far as backing up your data you should be doing that regularly anyways. This process is the same for MSDE installations.
I don't know where this myth of hyper-complex SQL Server updates came from. Admittingly it is a bit more complex if you have multiple instances, but generally that goes along with more advanced administrators anyways.
IMHO mono has been a great asset for .NET adoption: Previously, one of the primary "sales" problems in encouraging .NET adoption was the fear that it ties the customer to a single vendor solution (and this is often heavily played up when it goes against Java, for instance). Mono offers one the ability to offer a rapidly developing alternative in case of ridiculous FUD circumstances often imagined in efforts to detract from Microsoft products (i.e. "What if they withdraw all their products and you have to give your firstborn to use it! Then what!").
Most insurance companies here in Ontario will compensate for stolen CDs up to a certain number (and it's rather low...like 6). The reason is that beyond that and the CDs represent a visual inducement to crime that greatly increases the chance that the breakin will occur in the first place..sorta like leaving money in plain sight, and they know that the recovery rate for that is about 0%.
If they didn't pay for the car radio then what's the point of having theft insurance in the first place?
Ripping songs is not a matter of one or two clicks. You have to enter a lot of the song information by hand, if you want it to be worth having.
While I'm perhaps an oddball in that I actually use digital music legally, I "rip" with Media Player and it nicely includes all of the pertinent information. Pretty much all ripping software does. The "it's an ease of use thing" is one of the weakest excuses out there.
All of those theft victims still own the rights to that music.
Interesting quandary there. Of course if Bob collected from his insurance company for the value of the CDs, is Bob guilty of insurance fraud because he supposedly maintains intellectual rights over it? That one sounds like a "doubt it" scenario as there is no way that law enforcement could prove that Bob really ever did own the CDs, or hasn't sold them, if he no longer has possession of them.
Funny you mention that. I've lived in two Southern Ontario towns debating pesticide constraints/bans (London and Burlington), and in both cases the local newspapers had an endless stream of very oddly motivated letters to the editor decrying the anti-pesticide camp, yet they all seemed oddly connnected and without a good motivation (i.e. someone might not want pesticides because they think it causes cancer, yet on the flip side these people weren't arguing for pesticide for perceived goods such as maybe easier lawn care, but rather just that they didn't believe it caused cancer. There was a lack of a rational and logical motivatoin).
Indeed I thought the same thing: Gee now I can carry a bunch of MiniDV cassets, each holding an hour of 25Mbps data (or 90000 Mb, or about 11.25GB), each costing some $4 or so, swapping to a new one whenever I'd like to effectively having a limited storage space, or I can use a volatile hard drive with a prescribed maximum limit (and to fit on a 1.5GB drive for an hour they must be using some extreme compression) that requires me to do a PC download once it's full. No thanks.
Windows doesn't really use 2d accelleration
What in the world are you talking about? Windows basically brought 2D acceleration to the market (I remember getting a shiny new Diamond Speedstar 24x to run winbench and friends to see thousands of rectangles being drawn per second) and virtually ever GDI call has hardware acceleration.
Mostly 2d performance has been "Ok" scince the ATI Rage Pro.
Have you tried out SimCity 3000? With a GF4 4400 with an Athlon 2000+/512MB it starts chugging HORRIBLY for mercy once you hit a half decent sized city.
Okay you've established that you're an elitist contrarian that burrows his brows at the dullard, brainless mobs. Are you a 17-year old "goth"? (Of course it's oft laughable: These "Contrarians" are usually just as brainless as they shun everything that's popular just because it's popular. That is absolutely no different, or deserving of more merit, than those who follow what's popular just because it's popular).
However my point was that Kazaa et. all thrive almost entirely upon mainstream movies and music contrary to the delusional claims to the contrary. Are there people sharing freeware/garage band music and homemade movies? Maybe a couple. However they are overwhelmingly outnumbed by those who are copying the mainstream.
The whole argument is supposed to be that most people are all for file sharing. That's the justification for the DMCA and all the rest of it. It's the reason why they would be suing people at all. If you believe that it's a minority who are sharing files and that the majority are shocked by this then there's no need for any of this.
File sharing, just like piracy, is a prisoner's dilemma type of circumstance: Most people know that it's wrong, but they do it only because they feel that everyone else is doing it and they don't want to be left behind (sort of like pirate satellite theft): If there was enforcement these people would all wrap up their activities as a "well I knew they'd stop it some day" and wouldn't disagree or go against enforcement whatsoever. Did you know that something like 80% of the wealth is held by 15% of the people in North America? Surely that other 85% wants it though, right? Let's go get it then because out gang mentality and thuggery can get our way, right? Of course not. Thankfully most people don't think that way.
Bullshit. That is so much bullshit. That kind of music would not be missed. Anybody can produce music, and without the help of conglomerates.
What exactly is your point? My point is that right now anybody can produce music, and without the help of the conglomerates, yet overwhelmingly P2P is full of the conglomerates music!