Look, that's a good argument when you're talking about a utility, or necessities. But an Apple computer is not a necessity, it is a Luxury. Same with the various iDevices. Even if you have a legitimate need for a device which does what they do, there's still a cheaper option that does the same stuff. Your argument simply does not apply. Putting the tax burden on corporations does indeed result in them raising their prices. Then the consumer can see up front the actual cost of their economic activity, and what's more, the person who incurs the cost actually pays it. In short, it by far makes the most sense to tax corporations on this basis! And only idiots cheer when corporations successfully evade taxes. I want Apple customers to have to pay the taxes from which Apple profits, and not every taxpayer in the EU, which is the current situation!

We call them loopholes specifically because they present a way to do a run around the intent of the law. Simply by speaking English correctly you have doomed your own argument.

I know an AC has already addressed these points, but I feel like addressing them again, and I have time.

Not only is at least Photoshop already GPU-accelerated, but PDF rendering is also 2d-accelerated. Things like drawing lines have been accelerated by video cards Since Windows 3.1 or thereabouts. That's when the first consumer-level PC 2d accelerators started to come out, from names like ATI and Radius. They had bigger, more special video drivers than did earlier video cards, because they performed 2d acceleration of things like drawing primitives and even text. By the end of the Windows 3.1 era, 2d-accelerated video cards were the norm rather than the exception, and $40 Trident ISA cards had acceleration, not just $200 Radius cards.

You may also not remember when Macs got Color Quickdraw, in the Macintosh II era. The Macintosh had always been sort of an odd fish in that it was a graphics-only OS designed for a system with no graphics acceleration whatsoever. It had a dumb framebuffer, and clever software routines for drawing primitives. This situation persisted until the Macintosh II series, when Apple brought out the 8*24 GC, not to be confused with the 8*24 which was non-accelerated. I believe the 8*24 was around $200 and the 8*24 GC was about $500. I only mention this because it was going on around the same time.

Video cards even used to be designed to accelerated Autocad for DOS, and had special drivers for this purpose.

AMD drivers are shitty, and before that ATI drivers were shitty, even before ATI made 3d cards. I've been watching ATI drivers cause Windows to crash since Windows 3.1.

It's broadly believed that ATI's hardware is as good as or better than nVidia, but their drivers hold them back.

I'm still glad ATI is around, just to keep nVidia scared

Welcome to the 1990s, I guess?

If you mean Marin, they certainly do recognize that there are other people in the world. You think they know how to make a latte?

I'm not sure that is more useful. Don't you think we're moving towards additive machining rather than subtractive? The numbers of machinists have been dwindling steadily in the USA, both automotive and general. In the automotive case, centralized rebuilders have taken over most of the business. What would really be useful would be welding, but that's really fairly dangerous stuff and best kept in the colleges. I'm ambivalent about having machining in high schools for that reason as it is. Wood shop is a good balance between danger and usefulness. You can still build a lot of good, useful stuff out of wood. And as an added bonus, if you put the tooling into it a little too hard or deep, you have a much lesser risk of flying metal fragments.

I think we're moving more towards a world where nothing is rebuilt when machining would be required, and instead it's recycled. Or if it does require rebuilding, it is always done centrally.

My favorite used bookstore is also a better new bookstore than Borders. It's in Santa Cruz, where I no longer live, and it's called Logos. The Borders moved in within a stone's throw, but obviously was defeated.

Sadly, I can think of few other examples. Location, location, location...

Luckily, they still fit in a mylar bag.

Why the fuck (insert pic of Patrick Stewart here) would you miss Borders, the worst of all chain bookstores? They never ever have anything but new releases and the most popular of older works. If I'm going to order something and wait for it to come in, I'm not going to involve a bookstore. I'm going to get it much cheaper from Amazon or eBay. Borders was worthless, and in every case of which I'm aware it displaced something the people would rather have had.

What everybody forgets is that these changes usually are obvious, but most people willfully ignore them.

When cars showed up, it should have been obvious that buggy whips were going away. Likewise, when streaming video became a ubiquitous thing, it should have been obvious that video disc rental was going away. The whole DVD-by-mail thing was just Netflix figuring out how to profit from its death throes.

Things which have been true for every generation! Well, there were some setbacks scientifically, but those people generally had to deal with a lot of strife so they weren't really wrong.

Right, and all I'm doing is arguing against the extensions.

I'm not seeing why your plan is better than my plan.

I see two problems. The first problem is a problem for society. The purpose of copyright is to promote works. But permitting someone to profit from a long time from a work doesn't promote more work, it promotes resting on laurels. The other problem is that once the material enters the collective subconscious, it really ought to belong to all of us. If you can't get it out of your life, it shouldn't be permitted to belong to a corporation. That doesn't actually benefit anyone except the corporation's shareholders. And Disney has been making damned sure that doesn't happen for quite some time now.

I disagree strenuously. It is fixed by reasonably copyright terms, where those terms are much shorter than a human lifespan — as they were originally. The terms were not extended to benefit the people, but to benefit corporate interests.

You've got it. Personal property is the root of all evil. Doesn't matter whether you're claiming dominion over a piece of ground, or a piece of food, or a piece of ass. When you act selfishly, others will get left out.

The fundamental problem with religion is that it encourages fuzzy, bullshit thinking. Before you know it you've proven that black is white and you know how that winds up.

So it's just like religion then.

That's a load of cockery. Science tells us how we should live our life if we want to accomplish particular goals. For example, if we want to continue to have a climate which supports our existence, we have to stop shitting all over our environment.

I'm a human. Atheism appeals to my nature. Atheism appeals to human nature. Some people have been scared into thinking that they need religion, though.

Just because we weren't calling it science doesn't mean we didn't have science. People came up with hypotheses and tested them before we knew what a hypothesis was.