Just because you cannot distribute other people works without their permission doesn't mean you are not free to "communicate", you just have to communicate your own speech.

If is isn't your speech, then why do you think you should have a right to repeat it when the person who did say it says you can't? It is quite relevant if the words are your own or not.

What you think is absurd isn't relevant. The concept of "freedom of speech" is what we're talking about here. If the words belong to someone else, they aren't yours to exercise "freedom of speech" over, they're someone else's. If it isn't your "person, papers, or property", then you can't claim your fourth amendment rights are being violated when the cops confiscate your neighbor's car. You can jump up and down and yell about hey they violated HIS fourth amendment rights, but they didn't violate yours.

What a remarkable red herring. Making copies of things has nothing to do with "freedom of speech", especially when it isn't your own speech you are copying, and when the issue isn't copying but distributing.

Cop out. Nothing in the "copyright cartel" (whatever that is supposed to be) stops you from producing a big-budget motion picture under CC licensing, nor does it stop anyone else. You'll claim that it is a viable model, but when challenged to use it you'll admit that you don't know that it is because nobody else has done it yet. The fact nobody else has done it yet is your excuse it cannot be done.

What does stop people from doing this is the knowledge the people who actually have the money to do such a thing have: that they'd be spending a lot of money and never get it back. They couldn't charge for a DVD of the movie because lots of someone's who didn't have a huge up-front cost of producing the movie could undercut their pricing. Any "merchandising" opportunities would be filled by a similar large number of companies where the costs of developing the characters and advertising the initial concepts didn't need to be recouped from the chachkis. Some people would go to see the movie in theaters, but many more would simply wait for it to appear for free on TV, just like what happens today.

No, it isn't a viable model. THAT'S why nobody has done it yet. Not because of some mythical "copyright cartel" that prevents someone from doing it.

Freedom of speech does not mean the freedom to reproduce the speech of others when those others do not wish you to do so. It means the freedom for YOU to speak YOUR WORDS, not using a copy of a movie produced through a great deal of hard work and much money by someone else.

of something that has artificial value. None of the pirated video or audio has any real intrinsic value, it is only valued for its transient entertainment value. It's the "new hobbit movie" or "hot band's latest track". It's the final episode of a series that didn't enrich society in the long run anyway. It's the latest Henry Potter or vampire/zombie/apocalypse book. People who think they are owed a copy of such works and will take them for free if the copyright owner doesn't see fit to sell it to them, well. The work cost money to produce, it costs the user nothing if they never get to view or hear it.

Do all of those deserve copyright protection? Of course, simply because you don't want government determining what is "valuable" enough to merit protection and what isn't.

If you don't want people to worry about getting "a piece of what you've got", you are free to give it all away for free. (Use of the word "free" in both major senses, intentional.) Of course you aren't free to demand that others give away what they've got for free. If you've accepted a license that says you won't give away what they've given you from their stash of "got", then you aren't free to give that away for free, either.

It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.

In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.

I see two ways this might apply to plasma confinement in fusion systems:
  * It may give insight into the details of plasma instabilities and lead to ways to suppress them - enough for a practical reactor.
  * It might lead to a way to use the phenomenon deliberately, to produce a (probably pulsed) past-breakeven plasma confinement, along the lines of Dense Plasma Focus.

The hit is taken by the store owners and their landlords. [Insurance usually has escape clauses for riots.]

Just heard on the news that more than half of the stores destroyed last night in Fergusun were minority owned, too. (I think it was actually "black owned" but I'm not sure.)

IMHO the main point of the burning is so that, once the stores have been looted, the evidence of who did it is largely destroyed. Video survelience tapes, fingerprints, serial number records, ...

The sad thing is that they have been around long enough to know better. They're just hamming it up for the camera.

Think of those soccer players that fall to the ground weeping over their kicked shin right when a penalty would be very convenient for their team. Same thing basically.

You point this out and they call it "victim blaming"... even when the people you're blaming have admitted to faking it. It is still called victim blaming.

You're missing the point. I'm not taking anything away from you.

If I replaced what you have now with a PC made to appear to be the same thing you wouldn't even notice the difference.

The big difference would be that porting games from the console to the PC would be instant because they'd literally be the same thing.

What you want is a standardized system with less configuration, a small specialized form factor, and a TV centric GUI.

Do you honestly think a PC cannot have these things? If it can... then I could replace your Xbox with a gaming PC with an identical GUI, squeeze the machine into a similar looking box, and how exactly would you tell the difference? And if you could... why would you care?

See my point? Consoles are an anachronism. They made sense at one point but today they are pointless.

The primary difference between a PC and a console is software. That means the hardware distinctions are an utter waste of time.

If you like. Though really, I think all we need is something like the Microsoft TV GUI or something like XBMC but for games. In fact, steam already has a TV GUI which you can use right now. I think they call it big... something. It is under view or something in steam. I've turned it on a few times by accident. If all your games are loaded into steam, you can have steam auto load with the boot and then open into that mode.

I use some wireless keyboards and nice to interact with computers that are across the room. You plug them into a big tv and then control them from the other side of the room.

First off, a gaming machine that can beat a modern console is about 1000 dollars.
Second, the basic machine you own to do email and taxes costs about 500 to 600 dollars.

The price difference is the cost of a gaming machine. The game machine is not an additional expense beyond a normal computer but rather the cost of buying a computer that is ALSO a gaming machine. In my experience, this difference in cost is about two to four hundred dollars for a mid range gaming machine.

High end machines are very expensive and really are not what we are talking about because they have VASTLY more computing power then the consoles. If we want to talk about an apples to apples comparison between consoles and PCs, then we need to address that range.

For example, I am currently using a gaming laptop which cost me about 1200 USD. It crushes pretty much every game I play at 1080p. It also has HDMI out, optical out, a display port, USB 3, a micro SSD for the boot partition, and a spindle harddrive for data.

It is a very nice machine and it cost me about 1200 USD. And it should be noted that 100 of that was a custom alligator skin that I had applied to it because I thought it looked cool.

Can it play blueray? Yep. Who cares though. I don't think I've ever even owned a blueray disc. The whole disc concept is dying rapidly and going to join 8 tracks in the near future.

As to 7.1 sound, PCs can do that as easily as the consoles.

As to sitting on the couch, I think I made clear that the PC could as easily sit in your living room as anywhere else. In my case, I use laptops because they're easy to move around.

As to getting 65 inches... again, the laptop can be plugged into a tv and you can play the game on the tv. I do that all the time. I have a bunch of emulators on my laptop that I like to play on my TV.

Can your console play every game from the NES to the N64? Any modern PC can do that easily.

And if you want to talk about newer games... we have those too.

PCs are better.

I agree. I wasn't implying further that AA missiles are not killer robots. I was pointing out rather the pros and cons of autonomous drone warfare and its reasonable applications.

That is a good point... that is utterly disgusting if they're still relying on volunteers while a tiny group are basically buying yachts and hookers.