I would say that any automatic mechanical device that is controlled be electronics could be considered a "robot". Tha't a pretty broad category though and would include many everyday things like a microwave oven, a washing machine, a hard disk drive etc.
I have a home built CNC machine, I'd consider that to be a robot.
The market exists because most people don't realise what they're being sold until it bites them and that's the problem. They've changed the game without changing the advertising and they need to be more transparent to customers as to what they are offering. They won't do this though because they know people wouldn't buy then.
Buy has historically meant buy to keep. The buttons on sites peddling a lot of DRM content say buy, not rent, yet really it's a rental. That's the problem.
As you have alluded to a part of the problem is that people don't read the terms of the service or product they are paying for. That I don't understand other than to attribute it to apathy. I read all licenses I agree to (unless I've read it before), and I won't trade with companies on terms I don't agree to.
You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce. I don't and never did.
Fair enough, i can agree with this. But the copies of the content other people produce are different story.
Sure - because I don't have a contract with anyone with regards to the content. No-one should be able to tell me what bits I can have sitting in my computer (unless I specifically agree with someone not to have their particular sequence of bits).
Do you ever sing happy birthday to your kids? In a McDonalds maybe? Well what you did was create a public performance of a copyrighted song. How dare you. The original owner of the song didn't give you permission to do that.
I have no formal contract agreement with the holder of that copyright. They cannot control what I sing. I couldn't care less about copyright law - my point is about contract law.
What about singing this most famous song in a movie? Well that will cost you $10000
How about a band taking a 10 second snip of a symphonic rendition of a rock song and using it as a riff in their own song? Sorry 100% of all income and royalties now go to the original creator of the song, not even the people who originally performed the symphonic piece.
This is the sad reality of copyright law today. I don't have the rights to other's content, but they sure as heck shouldn't have the rights they do either. Don't argue that this doesn't affect culture either.
Copyright law should be scrapped. The state, via the government, should not be able to prevent otherwise free people from saying whatever they like. But if I buy a song on iTunes and as a part of that purchase I have agreed not to copy it to another device, then I should honour that agreement.
> You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce.
Yeah, you do, we all do, once a work is performed/released it is in the public domain, that is what the term _means_ "in the domain of the public"
Allowing a song to be purchased on iTunes does not mean it's in the public domain.
Copyright is an abrogation of that basic right in limited circumstance and for limited time because the _default_ is and will always be public domain.
The purpose of Copyright is to make sure that works are produced because it recognizes the value they provide to our culture. Those works contribute to and inform our culture, they become a part of it much like we do. Copyright is nothing more than a tool to further the _base_ function of enriching our culture. The relationship between the work and or culture _is_ the most important part otherwise Copyright wouldn't exist.
It's _all_ about culture.
You're preaching to the converted. I don't tink there should be such a thing as copyright, and I don't agree with patents either. But if you pay for a service and when paying you agree to certain conditions, you should honour those conditions.
I disagree that this is about culture. The latest pop song is not "culture", and neither is the latest blockbuster movie. You have a very broad definition of "culture" if you think it includes those things.
This is about the protection of contracts. Contract protection is one of the cornerstones of a civilised society. If you trade with someone and that trade has with it certain restrictions, then you should honour those restrictions or not agree to them in the first place.
You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce.
I have the right to control what my computer does. I have the right to do math. I have the right to copy memory locations to disk. I have the right to communicate.
No, I don't have the right to what other people produce. But if you tell me something, I have the right to write that down. And I have the right to tell that information to other people.
I agree completely, unless you have made an agreement with another party that you explicitely won't do those things.
If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere.
On the contrary, they have no right to stop me from seeking it elsewhere. They may have the legal ability, because they've bought protection from a corrupt government, but that's a far cry from a right. When I send a file to a friend, that's a private communication between consenting individuals. No third party has the right to interfere in that.
Unless you made an agreement with the content provider not to do that.
I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous
Great. Now convince the rest of the world to respect my right to communicate information.
I agree with you, my argument is that if you form a contract with someone then you should not break that contract. Also, you should not agree to a contract if you know you will dishonour it.
"You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce. I don't and never did. I don't consider it to be "culture" either."
No, but you should have a right to play content you've paid for on a device of your choosing without artificial restrictions.
...unless you have agreed to those restrictions when you paid for the content.
Which is really the problem. If the content creators can choose what you play content you've paid for on, especially from the web, then they can arbitrarily prevent it working on your old device, and force you to buy a new device when there's nothing wrong with your old one. They can work with companies like Microsoft to ensure it only works on Microsoft devices for example and kill viewing of content on iOS and Android dead in the water.
You seem to think it's just about viewing content illegally, it's not. It's about having control of content you have obtained legally and not allowing content to be used as a tool to be used by vendors in other markets such as hardware to gain advantages through artificial incompatibility and planned obsolescence.
If content producers want us to rent content only then they need to lower their prices to reflect that and make it clear. Right now they want to pretend you're purchasing content to keep whilst only giving you rental rights. This is unacceptable.
If you don't agree to the conditions they place on your having access to their content, then choose not to view/listen to it. The choice it fully yours - you are not forced to agree to onerous conditions. You choose to willingly because you want the content they are providing.
The dream of content companies is that they can use DRM to force you to rebuy content every single time you buy a new device. They view this as a way of increasing profits without doing any additional work by profiting off the same thing over and over. They're trying to turn a purchased product into a throwaway consumable that you have to replace with each device using artificial means without dropping the price to match. That is not acceptable.
Then don't accept it by not giving money to such companies. The choice is easy: pay them money and abide by their conditions, or don't.
The internet and digital revolution has made content far cheaper to reproduce and deliver so in a healthy natural market the price for consumers should come down. Content producers want to use DRM to subvert that and instead make the cost of content in the digital age go up by making you buy it over and over if you want to keep watching it. This is their ultimate dream and their preferred goal with DRM as it allows massive company growth for zero effort if it's ever achieved.
If no-one bought such content then these companies would have to change their ways. There must be a market for content with these strict conditions on it, because they continue to operate this way. As I said, no one is forcing your to partake in such content. Vote with your wallet.
It's this culture that forms the foundation of every copyrighted work ever produced. So I have to ask, when even they are clearly freeloading off our common culture, what gives "content producers" the right to deny others from enjoying and sharing this new addition to our cultural heritage?
Because it is work that they have produced. It's theirs and they should be allowed to share it with whomever they like. You have no right to content I produce and neither do I have a right to content you produce. To claim that they are denying us access to "culture" is absurd. Culture is not something that was created 20 minutes ago, it's intergenerational.
I'm not saying writers, artists, etc, should just let big commercial entities like Walt Disney "steal" their work. All I'm saying is that we should get rid of the monopolistic "all rights reserved" provision, which in today's networked world can only be enforced through NSA-like surveillance, and focus simply on the commercial exploitation aspect.
They have produced the content, the choice of how (or if) they distribute it and under which conditions that distribution takes place should be entirely up to them.
It's pretty obvious the content owners (not makers, authors, or creators, by in large) will insist on DRM for all their content, when it benefits just about nobody except them. The DRM battle was nearly won, and now W3C is actively undermining this societal progress.
It's not about "your website", it's about your access to culture that is increasingly consolidated among a few large corporate players due to the chicanery of copyright law.
You make it sound as if I have a right to the content other people produce. I don't and never did. I don't consider it to be "culture" either.
DRM is about controlling the playback, locking out certain uses and users.
I'd say that this will just push even more traffic to the torrents, but the NSA will probably divulging the correlated info for torrents soon enough.
If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere. If I cannot watch a movie through legal channels then I don't watch the movie. Same thing with TV shows and music. I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous, and I don't think I'm missing out on much.
You don't understand atheism. Atheists believe that there is no god. That takes faith, acknowledged or not.
That's incorrect. Atheism is about a lack of belief. An athiest doesn't believe there is a god. That's not the same thing as believing there is no god. A lack of belief does not equate to a belief of lack.
Belief zero? That's skepticism. But there is even extreme skepticism. Extreme skeptics don't believe that the world exists.
The problem is in the language. People hear "don't believe" to mean "believe the opposite". The very notion of undecideability just doesn't occur to people. I try to not believe things that I haven't seen proof of. Sometimes I fail in that.
Atheists who claim to be rational and faithless are either idiots or ignorant. If they don't realize they're agnostic they're simply ignorant. But hey, good news: ignorance can be fixed.
Agnosticism is about knowledge, not belief. At least learn what the words mean before branding others as ignorant.
With Facebook you are not the customer, you are the product.
Shortening words in that way is unnecessary and leads to confusion. Though it does make the writing take on a less formal tone, which could be used to serve a purpose. There are many worse abbreviations in my opinion: In particular, "prolly" - I speak New Zealand english and all of the syllables of "probably" are pronounced (at least by the people I know). Are there any dialects where it is actually pronounced "prolly"? Similarly with "library" - this is often bastardised in speech to "LAI-bry" - missing out one of the syllables. Is shortening words in speech like this due to laziness, poor spelling, a desire to seem trendy, or because that's how the word is spoken by the writer? Either way it's an interesting topic.
Surely you mean "favourite colour"?
Where was autumn in the results? "Fall" is something you do if you've had too much to drink.
Don't panic.
