Which is why there's been oil companies that stayed down at $.99 a gallon, right? Because not all of them were drilling in the middle east, right? Because not all of them had the same costs and risks, right?

Greed trumps all else. When you have a product that people can't live without, you can dick around with the cost day and night, so long as you pay off the government.

I think everyone's a bit more pissy about the fact that instead of plugging the well "right away", they tried a few other methods to suck up more oil for themselves. Y'know, instead of fixing the problem, they tried to glean more profit. No one (well, except for the extremely ignorant) expected a fix in a few hours. We kinda expected them to have a plug or two waiting in the wings, or to know what to do when things went wrong. This is taking longer than thought because of profiteers, and it's at the expense of millions of humans. Americans, too, and we're bending over backwards to give BP excuses?

It's like opening a theme park above a volcano, and when the paths break and trap all of the people above the volcano with random pieces falling in and killing people, the theme park owner decides to sell the remaining customers some soda...just so they can squeeze a few more dollars out of a disaster.

Because musical instruments are not free. Because paint is not free. Because clay is not free. Because lighting equipment is not free. Because video cameras are not free. Because sound stages are not free. Because green screens are not free. Because most 3D programs require a license of some kind, if not thousands of man hours to produce.

Art is not free to produce. Why do you believe that art is utterly worthless if it's a copy the artist is selling? Oh right, because you don't wanna pay for something you definitely wanna consume.

No, the MP3 was never an advertisement. It was an alternative for those of us that don't want to be surrounded by shrieking harpies and deafening music. You seem to believe that just because MP3's didn't exist before electricity that they therefore shouldn't be worth so much as one cent.

It's not your choice. The artist chooses to sell their work. There are artists who give things away for free. How about instead of spitting on the artists that want to sell their work, you simply go and consume the free stuff?

Or, to put this to a comparison, since you seem apt to use comparisons yourself:

Say that an artist has their newest painting up in a museum. Everyone can come look at it for the entry fee to the museum, and they can buy a print of the painting-a copy, if you will-in the store. According to you, every human being on the face of the Earth should be allowed to go in to that store and grab a print, simply because the artist made something and can get a tiny bit of payment for every visitor that comes to see the "live" painting.

And you believe that won't stifle creativity at all, when doing something like that will mean that artists make less than they used to with more people using their work for free.

I hate to burst your bubble, but not all music is possible to host in a concert. Nor could you seriously expect that to be what the artist should look forward to. It should be their choice to do that, not yours.

As for free movies? HAH! Some movies go straight to video because they'd never be able to get in to all of the movie theaters they wanted to. Should they just throw in the towel and expect no money for their work? If consumers were offered a legal and free alternative, sales would plummet.

As I said before, you have a sense of entitlement. What you're saying is that you don't want to pay the artist, but someone else will through a different means. Guess what? Artists get pretty damn pissed when someone takes their work, loves it, but refuses to pay them for it when they were selling it. It says that you love what they do, that you'll come back for more, but that you don't think they're worth the $5 they're asking for.

Hey, I saw you made a new program and you're selling it for $30. I would really like it, but well, I think I'll just take it. It's just a copy, after all, and free software is the future of computing!

No, no, holy fuck no. Radio was never free, you simply weren't the one paying. Or did you think that radio stations were just magically generating paychecks for their radio hosts?

Broadcast television was never free, your eyeballs were being whored out to advertisers that paid the TV channels for the chance.

And Shakespeare and Mozart weren't bloody giving their art away for free! They were hired, then produced their creative work. At no point did either artists just sit himself down in someone's home and give away their latest work, then leave.

You're an entitled little bugger who thinks that someone should just give you something for free because you don't think it's worth it. So yes, the sky is falling, because you don't know what the fuck reality is.

This scares me.

What we need to be doing, is killing the middle man. The RIAA, the MPAA, the greedy non-artist studios that do nothing but leech off of the artist.

Don't say "free as in beer media" is the future. Say that buying directly from the artist, at whatever price the artist dictates, is the future. That is the free you want.

Because if you make it so that artists can't make money at all, then you will kill creativity. Don't give me anecdotal evidence to the contrary, one artist here and there already sitting on millions or on another job do not count as success with 100% free art. At the end of the day, a lot of art takes years of 80 hour weeks to produce, and you can kiss non-D movies and non-flash games goodbye if everyone stopped paying the artists involved.

Yeah, because if you don't live off the grid 100%, then oil will therefore last forever and we should just ignore all problems down the road!

-cough-

Racist? Did I...did the meaning of racist change?

Oh God, it's starting! Texas changed the meaning of racist to mean prejudice against businesses! GOD HELP US!

Sometimes it is. Right now, what we don't need are students growing up believing in the evils of Affirmative Action. Sexism is bleeding to death, and I really don't think it helps any damn person for it to come back.

I say "by God", "God damn it", and "Jesus Christ" a lot, too. But I'm a raging atheist. Think the public is inept now? Most people couldn't read back then, and religion was a highlight of a miserable life. Life in the good ol' days was terrible.

Then again, taking little snippets of speech from the founders where they mention God and then blowing that up to mean Evangelical Christian Nation is about as outrageous as taking one line from the Bible and saying that homosexuals shouldn't get married....oh wait.

Yeah, the fifty million they dropped on the movie is practically zero; they earn it back the instant it goes out to theaters, and once they reach the magical line of $0, they ought not make a profit. The whole point of movies is to entertain people, after all; it isn't a business!

Wait, what?

I mean, I get that you aren't physically stealing a disk and then kicking a baby, but it's hardly justified. In the end, someone put their time into something, often doing something that few people can (As terrible as Transformers was, they truly did have some revolutionary graphics with millions of polygons and animations in the faces alone). While I find DRM and anti-consumer behavior appalling, it's a far cry from justifying not paying.

If you have a problem with their policy, stop consuming their product. Are we really all such blind consumers that we can't live without their DRM laced crap? Do we need it to the point where we'll blatantly break the law just so we can have their shit for free? We can't honestly take our money elsewhere?

By God, I can connect this to cars!

Say that you design a bloody brilliant car. Everyone wants to own it, but it's a little pricey. Well, you set it out in the world, all of these copies of your prototype. Someone buys your car, and figures out how to copy it. He copies it a few hundred times, and just starts giving them away to people. Suddenly, the car you designed is being produced rapidly by someone else, without any flaws in the new model at all. People caught with the copy of your car argue that they were never going to buy your model, that it had some sort of flaw in it that prevented it from going over 70 Mph which made it suck.

In short: If you can't afford it, if you're too lazy to go get it, if you think there's a flaw in the software, or if you can't get it in your region...don't get it.

A better example:

You can buy this Chef knife kit, complete with measuring tools, spatulas, and the works for $500. It lets you do all sorts of stuff besides simply cutting things up; an adventurous cook only needs the ingredients, a pot, a pan, and a plate to work miracles with this kit. Even newbies can use the kit.

Or you can buy the iChef, a knife that looks really cool and functions roughly the same as the Chef knife in the kit, for $1000. Sure, you can't do as much and the knife breaks if you try to do anything besides cut with it (ie, smash garlic with the side of blade), but it's really popular with non chefs because of how well it can slice.

Suing shouldn't be the only solution. Facebook actually has rules written in about how you can sue them; I have no idea if those rules need be followed, I certainly doubt it's true. Even so, suing is expensive and tedious.

It saddens me deeply that the only way to protect one's privacy from idiocy is to sue.

From someone else's damn miserable life. I love that you're an AC who's replying, that's rare.

I can't find the comment I pulled that example from. If you really want to discredit my entire post because you're fixated on it being my boo-hoo miserable life, then I guess I can go find it for you. If you just want to step back, breathe, and just relax, we can do that too. All depends on how petty you are.