Comment Go to the f-ing library (Score 5, Insightful) 561
GO TO THE F-ING LIBRARY!
[The one-child policy] restricts urban couples to only one child, while allowing additional children in several cases, including twins, rural couples, ethnic minorities, and couples who are both only children themselves. In 2007, according to a spokesperson of the Committee on the One-Child Policy, approximately 35.9% of China's population was subject to a one-child restriction.(wikipedia)
Granted, when the population is in the billions, 35.9% is a lot of people, but still it's not as far reaching as you are thinking. I'm too lazy to look up the numbers, but it wouldn't surprise me if 35.9% didn't equate to the number of one (or no) child households in western countries.
There's a tort called vexatious litigation. It's common law.
That's nice and might have baring were this a law of the land and not law of a company.
There is also a possible penalty under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 11, for signing your name to a legal declaration that you have not investigated and, thus, do not have good reason to believe that it is true. The judge, essentially, gets to make up any penalty they think is appropriate (within reason).
What judge? What Federal Rules? Those don't matter in the slightest here. This is about a private entity making up misguided rules when they should be dumb pipes.
I spent many hours organizing my files and making playlists so I could listen to an album (I like filler TYVM). The iPod for me was "Hey! It works with iTunes!" more than anything.
You'll find that many serious psychological disorders stem from not being able to forget.
Okay. List them. "Serious psychological disorders"? Go ahead and list them out of the DSMIV or whatever you can find. I'd be curious because GMail and GChat have made my life a thousand times better with their impeccable recording and recall abilities. "Remember when I suggested The Naked and Famous to you like three years ago? Oh, you don't? That's funny, this e-mail says otherwise."
Thank you for proving the OP's post. It seems you suffer from self-righteous assholism. I would look into counseling.
That's where you're wrong or it's impossible to prove that no one will ever want to see it. I would absolutely love to see the world through my grandfather's eyes.
One time I went to a thrift store and they had random family effects. One of them was this ancient black leather flip book with about 50 black and white plate photographs in it and as I flipped through them I saw settlers on the plains. Standing next to Native Americans. Standing next to mud huts that they had cut with sod. Standing next to oxen tied to a manual plow. On and on they went. [...]
[...]
So, I think you're wrong. And I think that those handful of black and white photos have expanded to stacks of color photos and now long videos of family gatherings from VHS to CCD. Is it really that absurd to think that someday your offspring will wonder what life is like? Or 200 years from now any random person just curious about life was like in our time?
The only problem is, those videos will be just as revealing as those photos were. Just because something moves doesn't mean you'll glean insight. something like this is so much better, and the best thing is, you can find something like that in the time period in which you're interested.
But all this has a cost.
You need to pay a small tax in every empty CD, DVD, HDD, SSD and now on memory sticks as well. It is about 15 euros from HDD what is bigger than 750GB
About a 15 cent on empty DVD and about 10 cent on empty CD.
This is where the law COMPLETELY falls apart. This is absolutely and completely unacceptable. Who decides the breakdown of this collected tax? What about artists not in the golden tax guild, how do they get their share? How do we know it's going to the copyright holders period?
Damn right people are mad about it. I'd be pissed, too. America had that tax on blank tapes, too. There are special "music" blank cds that are more expensive because they have that tax as well, but in all frankness, fuck them if they want to tax my HDDs and SD cards because the might store backups of music I paid for.
We've let RIA* groups distort the conversation so much it almost physically hurts me. We should be debating how much jail time some dumbass gets for downloading some shit song that will be forgotten in two years, we should be debating how many years we need to shorten copyright to reign it back in to sane levels. Make copyright reasonable, say less than 15 years, hell make it single digit, and I'll join the line demanding infringers to serve time. While it's in the three digits, fuck off with your $15 tax so I can "share with my family". Song recorded before I was born will still be under copyright when I'm dead.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire