As much as I don't want a kill switch on the internet, I also don't want that same kill switch to exist in the hands of private companies. Without some government regulation, what is to stop the media cartels (which own the majority of ISPs) from banding together against sites they dislike? Google seems pretty unpopular among media companies these days. Who is going to make sure that we can still access Youtube 5 years from now? Net neutrality is not something to scoff at.
I also wouldn't object to forcing ISPs with threat of law to actually PROVIDE what they market. If they say it's unlimited, it should be unlimited, NOT "unlimited to a point."
But government is the source of all evil, right? Hand it over to Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon... they'll take good care of your rights!/s
How about the extremely common situation that an older version of software (often firmware) allows something the company did not intend, like jailbreaking? I don't want to allow companies to legally force people to update, that gives far too much power to greedy companies like Apple, who would love nothing more than that power. What is to stop them from releasing a "new" version of something which breaks the device as soon as they have a new model ready to sell?
Nothing.
Government is fine. Keep CORPORATIONS out of my bedroom. They have no reason to be there.
IP spoofing is not impossible, but is prohibitively difficult (nigh impossible) on the internet as a whole. It would be possible to do it on smaller networks, however. ISP-level is possible, and I would be surprised if there have not been cases of people tricking ISP hardware into thinking they were someone else. There is quite a lot an "unlocked" modem can do, which is why ISPs will cut your service if they find out you're using one.
So yes, it is possible. However, the number of people sued is tiny compared to the number of people who downloaded the movies. It would not be a good way to get back at people you dislike, since more likely than not it would go totally unnoticed, and it takes an extreme effort on your part.
Now, this is Uwe Boll, so it is quite possible that more people are being sued than actually downloaded the movies. I cannot fathom more than a few hundred people being so desperate for entertainment that they would break the law to see Boll's... erm... masterpieces.
It is possible to disagree censorship AND with the military slaughter of civilians, you know. In fact, I'd say anyone who says we should ignore either of those actions has an agenda to push. I know which one you've got.
90% of everything is crap.
90% of what isn't crap must be crap as well.
Hence, 99.999...% makes a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, that happens to mean that 100% of everything is actually crap.
I suspected this all along.
Just because this censorship is not being done by the government, does not make it right. Free society is free everywhere, not just on public or government property. Facebook needs to be slammed down for this.
This right here, kids, is the problem with American politics. Anyone who does not support, with all of their being, the corporatist monopolies is Stalin reborn.
You are either a liar, or mislead by the other liars.
The vast majority of Europe would be considered communist in your eyes, yet they're currently doing much better than we are, both socially and economically. You conveniently ignore Europe, though, and act as if anything but worshiping CEOs and then bailing them out when they can't milk the system any more means we'll end up starving in a country run by a man who wears over-sized women's sunglasses. To suggest that one can not "get ahead" in a place like France or Germany is just showing your ignorance of the world, and blind love for your homeland. This is called xenophobia, and was the founding principal of far worse groups than the communists.
Look at what capitalism has gotten us. Banking deregulation destroyed our economy, and drill baby drill got us a giant spewing hole in the middle of the ocean right next to us. Capitalism is killing us. People like you, who go around yelling "give corporations more power!" while moaning about Stalin are simply detached from reality. You, sir, live in your own world. Kindly stay there, and leave the real world to the grown ups.
This is the kind of absurd attitude that allows religious leaders to convince their flocks that they are "under attack" from the secular world.
Oh really? Because they've been convincing them that just about the entire world has been out to get their "flocks" since the inception of organized religion. It used to be pagans, then it was scientists, and only recently has the secular world began to fight back. Your assertion is disproved by history. Try again.
Here's what science can never teach you: how you should live if you wish to live well. There is the domain of philosophy, of religion, of "subjectivity." But "the truth of our universe" includes truths that are not "objective" (note that the objective/subjective split comes to us courtesy of philosophers who were trying to save science from religion and vice versa, but that it is not the only way of looking at the universe).
Religion is tolerated in our society because it turns out that for most people, a strong sense of "right and wrong" is more important to functioning in society than a strong sense of "how the universe was REALLY created." Religion is not the only path to that sense, but science is emphatically not one of the alternatives.
Nice how you sidestep philosophy there, and act as if religion is the only thing that can give society a "strong sense of right and wrong." First off, that ANYTHING in our society is the sole root of those two concepts is a lie. Other species, which we are directly related to, show similar concepts of not harming one another and even helping each other. Serving the greater good is evolutionarily helpful. This is exactly why religion hates the concept of evolution: it shows they have no claim to exist.
But beyond that, philosophy answers everything religion could, and correctly. Religion is the idea that whatever some claimed higher being says should be followed. Often, that being is not entirely good, by MY moral standards. Read the bible. You'll find sections on how to treat your slaves (it involves beatings), how murdering people for god is right, and how to respond to homosexuals (more beatings!). That's only the parts I actually can think of off the top of my head.
Sometimes the religion is nothing but evil. Scientology, a number of cults and terrorist organizations, and many branches of Christianity are nothing but a blight on society. They do not offer a right and wrong, they offer a wrong painted to look like a right.
Philosophy, on the other hand, actually tries to answer the same questions as science - and here is the shocker - using many of the same methods! Indeed, science is the branch of philosophy that deals with the physical world and the quantification of it. Some branches of science, like quantum physics, even come full circle and begin answering philosophical questions.
Religion is the illusion of answers, built upon lies, followed by the weak minded.
The stigma against religion in science is not about having "faith" that your results will change even if your methods don't. The stigma is that many scientists have come to the erroneous conclusion that science is the only way to understand the world, and that belief in God or Ethics or (Aristotlean) Virtue demonstrates some kind of mental weakness, when in fact the opposite is true.
I have never heard a scientist, or anyone even remotely similar, claim that ethics are a mental weakness. Perhaps that they do not objectively exist; which is true, as few people define their morals the same way. There might be a few universal concepts of good and evil, but on the whole, ethics do not exist. However, I have yet to hear any large number of scientists claiming that to have ethics is weak-minded. Perhaps it depends on which ethics you are considering.
God, on the other hand? God is the answer when you want one, and are willing to accept the answer that makes you most happy. Believing in god is willfully buyi
I see nothing wrong with there being a stigma against religion in science. These people have been trained their entire lives to make their positions based on factual evidence and experimental certainty. Believing in a religion, which is by its nature unprovable, flies right in the face of everything science is built upon. What OTHER things do these religious "scientists" take "on faith"?
I'm not calling for a witch hunt of religious scientists, but I do not see any reason that religion should be tolerated, in science of all places. Faith has no place in determining the truth of our universe, because it is by its nature subjective. I would seriously question findings by anyone holding a religion beyond the most basic "there might be some kind of creator," because honestly, buying into dogmatic systems of mass delusion do not show you are of sound mind.
Religion is overly tolerated in our society. We need to move towards questioning and ridiculing it, not "removing stigma" surrounding it.
I'm sorry. That was just a little too close to some of the stupidity I have seen spouted off around here to actually set off my sarcasm detector. It is a testimonial on how crappy our society is, I believe, when absurdity becomes indistinguishable from some people's actual positions.
It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
So, the banking deregulation that has caused our most recent economic collapse was a good idea, because private industry knows so much better? How about the hole in the gulf of mexico, spewing oil and literally killing the environment, not to mention a number of industries. Yeah, governments are SO incompetent compared to private industry.
People like you make me angry. You're so stupid you actually believe that people whose stated goal is to make money above all else have your best interests at heart. History has proven that corporations will do anything if it will get them money. This is indisputable.
How about you get off your fat ass and get involved in the government if it's so bad. Wanting to sell parts of it off to people who are scientifically proven to be far worse, all while sitting there in your living room yelling about "American socialism" (look that word up, moron) does not strike me as the actions of someone who has the best interests of anyone but themselves in mind. Don't go claiming it's for the good of society when you know it isn't. I'd take an efficient government preventing the total collapse of society at the hands of private interests any day over your proposed corporatist kleptocracy.
It has long been known to anyone who ever tried to contribute to Wikipedia just how much off the books power Wales has. Those who spent a particularly long amount of time there might remember the whole birth date fiasco, which basically pinned Wales against himself, much to the confusion of his many disciples.
Sanger has to know Wales even better. It wouldn't be much to assume that he might have expected this sort of reaction. Indeed, this situation really threatens Wikipedia's standing as non-bias (specifically, censorship-free) and open, at least among those who didn't already know better. Could this be the straw that breaks Wikipedia? Did Sanger expect this?
Pretty sure he means that entropy is increasing, which in some sense is the loss of energy; at least, useful energy. On the other hand, we're probably just going to be sucked into black holes.
"Do you think that the world would be a better place if the only thing we valued was manual labor? If any public knowledge was worthless (in a financial sense) knowledge?"
This is a false dichotomy. Just because knowledge itself is free, does not mean its creation is free. In some cases, even distribution may not be free, even without copyright (think about university tuition).
And I personally do believe that the world would be a significantly better place without copyright. Not only would it remove the arbitrary barriers to knowledge which we see in absurdly overpriced textbooks and other informative resources (which drive up the cost of becoming skilled labor in the first place), but it would also truly encourage free expression. As it stands, creating just about anything without the permission of the copyright lobby in that field (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft/Apple, etc) puts you at serious personal risk, no matter what your intentions were. We JUST SAW how this works, with Jobs threatening an open codec for no reason other than it runs counter to the interests of the moneyed, patent-owning businesses.
I'll give more examples, to try to shove it into your closed little mind just how our system actually works. Remember SCO? How much money did lawsuits filed by SCO cost businesses like Novell and IBM, which could have otherwise been funding actual development and real contribution to society with that money? What did we gain out of those lawsuits as a society? How much did they cost tax payers in court, money which could have gone to health care, education, or any number of actually beneficial expenditures?
I won't even mention the lawsuits which literally destroy the lives of families for no reason other than music piracy. I will talk about is how even internal disputes between copyright owners bleed us. Ever hear of the lawsuit between the Beastie Boys and James Newton? One must wonder what we gained from that!
How many times do these things have to happen before copyright apologists like you get a clue? The sooner we destroy "intellectual property," the sooner we can return to actually encouraging creative, social, and scientific advancement.
People complained vocally about this with UAC in Vista, even though it is a copy of sudo. Yet very little complaints like this has been delivered to sudo. Why?
Because Ubuntu is abusing sudo, which was a perfectly fine command for what it was intended, and because no other distro has followed suit in any serious fashion (for good reason.) When it comes down to it, Ubuntu is really just one tile in the Linux mosaic; one that many of the more experienced users stay away from. There should be more criticism of their idea of "security," but I as well as many others simply do not care what Ubuntu does.
I know, but Kubuntu is different from mainline Ubuntu. Just because Kubuntu is of poor quality doesn't mean mainline Ubuntu is.
Not different enough to get a pass. There is also the fact that I can list many more bad experiences, many of which were directly the cause of mainstream. I've had the Ubuntu package tree explode 3 times, requiring almost full reinstalls, and I only used it for about a year. I know well that this is fairly common in highly used Linux installs, but the fact remains that neither Ubuntu nor Fedora have given me anywhere near the number of package database problems as Ubuntu has. There are also a number of other complaints, though I forgot my specific ones. It has been about a year since I used Ubuntu seriously.
Here's a shocker: if the government handed out billions to movie production companies, we could have even "BETTER" movies than Avatar!...
This is more or less what copyright does, except less obviously. Instead of handing out money, it hands out little monopolies which get used to abuse others to the point of extortion. In neither case is it right simply because the product you get out of it has some sort of perceived value.
Also, expectations increase as the products increase. When it was released, Star Wars has the best special effects anyone ever saw - now it is almost laughable. You aren't getting anything better, just a new coat of paint and a vague feeling of progress, which I find hardly worth sacrificing the possibilities of true freedom of communication for.
Not to mention, you don't know that those projects are actually impossible without copyright. Equally impressive works of art (in terms of difficulty) were created long before copyright existed. Architecture, for one, has been around a very long time, and media is becoming more and more like it every day. You simply cannot know what is and is not possible without copyright; claiming you do just shows you are full of shit.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I don't want a kill switch on the internet, I also don't want that same kill switch to exist in the hands of private companies. Without some government regulation, what is to stop the media cartels (which own the majority of ISPs) from banding together against sites they dislike? Google seems pretty unpopular among media companies these days. Who is going to make sure that we can still access Youtube 5 years from now? Net neutrality is not something to scoff at.
/s
I also wouldn't object to forcing ISPs with threat of law to actually PROVIDE what they market. If they say it's unlimited, it should be unlimited, NOT "unlimited to a point."
But government is the source of all evil, right? Hand it over to Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon... they'll take good care of your rights!
How about the extremely common situation that an older version of software (often firmware) allows something the company did not intend, like jailbreaking? I don't want to allow companies to legally force people to update, that gives far too much power to greedy companies like Apple, who would love nothing more than that power. What is to stop them from releasing a "new" version of something which breaks the device as soon as they have a new model ready to sell?
Nothing.
Government is fine. Keep CORPORATIONS out of my bedroom. They have no reason to be there.
Simple answer is, it depends.
IP spoofing is not impossible, but is prohibitively difficult (nigh impossible) on the internet as a whole. It would be possible to do it on smaller networks, however. ISP-level is possible, and I would be surprised if there have not been cases of people tricking ISP hardware into thinking they were someone else. There is quite a lot an "unlocked" modem can do, which is why ISPs will cut your service if they find out you're using one.
So yes, it is possible. However, the number of people sued is tiny compared to the number of people who downloaded the movies. It would not be a good way to get back at people you dislike, since more likely than not it would go totally unnoticed, and it takes an extreme effort on your part.
Now, this is Uwe Boll, so it is quite possible that more people are being sued than actually downloaded the movies. I cannot fathom more than a few hundred people being so desperate for entertainment that they would break the law to see Boll's... erm... masterpieces.
Given the "evidence" amounts to text files and screenshots collected by the plaintiff, you're insane if you think that it has any bearing on reality.
Hey, look, it seems 0.0.0.0 is downloading a movie!
Don't be silly. It requires the bandwidth used now, times the square root of it.
Just wait until comcast hears about this!
It is possible to disagree censorship AND with the military slaughter of civilians, you know. In fact, I'd say anyone who says we should ignore either of those actions has an agenda to push. I know which one you've got.
Come on! Everyone knows that isn't true.
You forgot the governors, CEOs, religious leaders, military, and people from countries we like (not our own).
90% of everything is crap.
90% of what isn't crap must be crap as well.
Hence, 99.999...% makes a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, that happens to mean that 100% of everything is actually crap.
I suspected this all along.
The reality distortion field that Jobs invented works well. Too bad Microsoft never got one.
That's alright, it's unlikely he was expecting a change.
Everyone knows the universe was created on Oct 23, 4004 BC! This is obviously just an atheist/communist/nazi plot to mislead us.
Don't fall for it, bothers!
Just because this censorship is not being done by the government, does not make it right. Free society is free everywhere, not just on public or government property. Facebook needs to be slammed down for this.
This right here, kids, is the problem with American politics. Anyone who does not support, with all of their being, the corporatist monopolies is Stalin reborn.
You are either a liar, or mislead by the other liars.
The vast majority of Europe would be considered communist in your eyes, yet they're currently doing much better than we are, both socially and economically. You conveniently ignore Europe, though, and act as if anything but worshiping CEOs and then bailing them out when they can't milk the system any more means we'll end up starving in a country run by a man who wears over-sized women's sunglasses. To suggest that one can not "get ahead" in a place like France or Germany is just showing your ignorance of the world, and blind love for your homeland. This is called xenophobia, and was the founding principal of far worse groups than the communists.
Look at what capitalism has gotten us. Banking deregulation destroyed our economy, and drill baby drill got us a giant spewing hole in the middle of the ocean right next to us. Capitalism is killing us. People like you, who go around yelling "give corporations more power!" while moaning about Stalin are simply detached from reality. You, sir, live in your own world. Kindly stay there, and leave the real world to the grown ups.
This is the kind of absurd attitude that allows religious leaders to convince their flocks that they are "under attack" from the secular world.
Oh really? Because they've been convincing them that just about the entire world has been out to get their "flocks" since the inception of organized religion. It used to be pagans, then it was scientists, and only recently has the secular world began to fight back. Your assertion is disproved by history. Try again.
Here's what science can never teach you: how you should live if you wish to live well. There is the domain of philosophy, of religion, of "subjectivity." But "the truth of our universe" includes truths that are not "objective" (note that the objective/subjective split comes to us courtesy of philosophers who were trying to save science from religion and vice versa, but that it is not the only way of looking at the universe). Religion is tolerated in our society because it turns out that for most people, a strong sense of "right and wrong" is more important to functioning in society than a strong sense of "how the universe was REALLY created." Religion is not the only path to that sense, but science is emphatically not one of the alternatives.
Nice how you sidestep philosophy there, and act as if religion is the only thing that can give society a "strong sense of right and wrong." First off, that ANYTHING in our society is the sole root of those two concepts is a lie. Other species, which we are directly related to, show similar concepts of not harming one another and even helping each other. Serving the greater good is evolutionarily helpful. This is exactly why religion hates the concept of evolution: it shows they have no claim to exist.
But beyond that, philosophy answers everything religion could, and correctly. Religion is the idea that whatever some claimed higher being says should be followed. Often, that being is not entirely good, by MY moral standards. Read the bible. You'll find sections on how to treat your slaves (it involves beatings), how murdering people for god is right, and how to respond to homosexuals (more beatings!). That's only the parts I actually can think of off the top of my head.
Sometimes the religion is nothing but evil. Scientology, a number of cults and terrorist organizations, and many branches of Christianity are nothing but a blight on society. They do not offer a right and wrong, they offer a wrong painted to look like a right.
Philosophy, on the other hand, actually tries to answer the same questions as science - and here is the shocker - using many of the same methods! Indeed, science is the branch of philosophy that deals with the physical world and the quantification of it. Some branches of science, like quantum physics, even come full circle and begin answering philosophical questions.
Religion is the illusion of answers, built upon lies, followed by the weak minded.
The stigma against religion in science is not about having "faith" that your results will change even if your methods don't. The stigma is that many scientists have come to the erroneous conclusion that science is the only way to understand the world, and that belief in God or Ethics or (Aristotlean) Virtue demonstrates some kind of mental weakness, when in fact the opposite is true.
I have never heard a scientist, or anyone even remotely similar, claim that ethics are a mental weakness. Perhaps that they do not objectively exist; which is true, as few people define their morals the same way. There might be a few universal concepts of good and evil, but on the whole, ethics do not exist. However, I have yet to hear any large number of scientists claiming that to have ethics is weak-minded. Perhaps it depends on which ethics you are considering.
God, on the other hand? God is the answer when you want one, and are willing to accept the answer that makes you most happy. Believing in god is willfully buyi
I see nothing wrong with there being a stigma against religion in science. These people have been trained their entire lives to make their positions based on factual evidence and experimental certainty. Believing in a religion, which is by its nature unprovable, flies right in the face of everything science is built upon. What OTHER things do these religious "scientists" take "on faith"?
I'm not calling for a witch hunt of religious scientists, but I do not see any reason that religion should be tolerated, in science of all places. Faith has no place in determining the truth of our universe, because it is by its nature subjective. I would seriously question findings by anyone holding a religion beyond the most basic "there might be some kind of creator," because honestly, buying into dogmatic systems of mass delusion do not show you are of sound mind.
Religion is overly tolerated in our society. We need to move towards questioning and ridiculing it, not "removing stigma" surrounding it.
Just my two cents.
I'm sorry. That was just a little too close to some of the stupidity I have seen spouted off around here to actually set off my sarcasm detector. It is a testimonial on how crappy our society is, I believe, when absurdity becomes indistinguishable from some people's actual positions.
It's just good common sense. Everybody knows it. It's been scientifically, irrefutably proven, so anybody who tells you differently has an agenda: there is no such thing as a government ever producing anything better than private industry, and the sooner we learn that, the sooner we'll be free of all the problems we've got here in modern socialist America -- and particularly free to ignore or simply be amused by obvious fictions like this article.
So, the banking deregulation that has caused our most recent economic collapse was a good idea, because private industry knows so much better? How about the hole in the gulf of mexico, spewing oil and literally killing the environment, not to mention a number of industries. Yeah, governments are SO incompetent compared to private industry.
People like you make me angry. You're so stupid you actually believe that people whose stated goal is to make money above all else have your best interests at heart. History has proven that corporations will do anything if it will get them money. This is indisputable.
How about you get off your fat ass and get involved in the government if it's so bad. Wanting to sell parts of it off to people who are scientifically proven to be far worse, all while sitting there in your living room yelling about "American socialism" (look that word up, moron) does not strike me as the actions of someone who has the best interests of anyone but themselves in mind. Don't go claiming it's for the good of society when you know it isn't. I'd take an efficient government preventing the total collapse of society at the hands of private interests any day over your proposed corporatist kleptocracy.
"Be prepared for another "Firefox vs the World" with this, however: Vorbis vs MP3/AAC."
We beat Microsoft and Apple once before. Open Source can do it again.
... if Sanger saw this sort of thing coming.
It has long been known to anyone who ever tried to contribute to Wikipedia just how much off the books power Wales has. Those who spent a particularly long amount of time there might remember the whole birth date fiasco, which basically pinned Wales against himself, much to the confusion of his many disciples.
Sanger has to know Wales even better. It wouldn't be much to assume that he might have expected this sort of reaction. Indeed, this situation really threatens Wikipedia's standing as non-bias (specifically, censorship-free) and open, at least among those who didn't already know better. Could this be the straw that breaks Wikipedia? Did Sanger expect this?
Most people buy cutlery sets. A single knife is of zero use to anyone who actually cooks.
Apple is selling a knife they claim can cut anything, but when you try to chop garlic, it suggests onions instead.
Pretty sure he means that entropy is increasing, which in some sense is the loss of energy; at least, useful energy. On the other hand, we're probably just going to be sucked into black holes.
Oh yeah? Well, our country's national debt is 10^2000 dollars!
"Do you think that the world would be a better place if the only thing we valued was manual labor? If any public knowledge was worthless (in a financial sense) knowledge?"
This is a false dichotomy. Just because knowledge itself is free, does not mean its creation is free. In some cases, even distribution may not be free, even without copyright (think about university tuition).
And I personally do believe that the world would be a significantly better place without copyright. Not only would it remove the arbitrary barriers to knowledge which we see in absurdly overpriced textbooks and other informative resources (which drive up the cost of becoming skilled labor in the first place), but it would also truly encourage free expression. As it stands, creating just about anything without the permission of the copyright lobby in that field (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft/Apple, etc) puts you at serious personal risk, no matter what your intentions were. We JUST SAW how this works, with Jobs threatening an open codec for no reason other than it runs counter to the interests of the moneyed, patent-owning businesses. I'll give more examples, to try to shove it into your closed little mind just how our system actually works. Remember SCO? How much money did lawsuits filed by SCO cost businesses like Novell and IBM, which could have otherwise been funding actual development and real contribution to society with that money? What did we gain out of those lawsuits as a society? How much did they cost tax payers in court, money which could have gone to health care, education, or any number of actually beneficial expenditures?
I won't even mention the lawsuits which literally destroy the lives of families for no reason other than music piracy. I will talk about is how even internal disputes between copyright owners bleed us. Ever hear of the lawsuit between the Beastie Boys and James Newton? One must wonder what we gained from that!
How many times do these things have to happen before copyright apologists like you get a clue? The sooner we destroy "intellectual property," the sooner we can return to actually encouraging creative, social, and scientific advancement.
People complained vocally about this with UAC in Vista, even though it is a copy of sudo. Yet very little complaints like this has been delivered to sudo. Why?
Because Ubuntu is abusing sudo, which was a perfectly fine command for what it was intended, and because no other distro has followed suit in any serious fashion (for good reason.) When it comes down to it, Ubuntu is really just one tile in the Linux mosaic; one that many of the more experienced users stay away from. There should be more criticism of their idea of "security," but I as well as many others simply do not care what Ubuntu does.
I know, but Kubuntu is different from mainline Ubuntu. Just because Kubuntu is of poor quality doesn't mean mainline Ubuntu is.
Not different enough to get a pass. There is also the fact that I can list many more bad experiences, many of which were directly the cause of mainstream. I've had the Ubuntu package tree explode 3 times, requiring almost full reinstalls, and I only used it for about a year. I know well that this is fairly common in highly used Linux installs, but the fact remains that neither Ubuntu nor Fedora have given me anywhere near the number of package database problems as Ubuntu has. There are also a number of other complaints, though I forgot my specific ones. It has been about a year since I used Ubuntu seriously.
Here's a shocker: if the government handed out billions to movie production companies, we could have even "BETTER" movies than Avatar!...
This is more or less what copyright does, except less obviously. Instead of handing out money, it hands out little monopolies which get used to abuse others to the point of extortion. In neither case is it right simply because the product you get out of it has some sort of perceived value.
Also, expectations increase as the products increase. When it was released, Star Wars has the best special effects anyone ever saw - now it is almost laughable. You aren't getting anything better, just a new coat of paint and a vague feeling of progress, which I find hardly worth sacrificing the possibilities of true freedom of communication for.
Not to mention, you don't know that those projects are actually impossible without copyright. Equally impressive works of art (in terms of difficulty) were created long before copyright existed. Architecture, for one, has been around a very long time, and media is becoming more and more like it every day. You simply cannot know what is and is not possible without copyright; claiming you do just shows you are full of shit.