Hunh. "Free with their internet" would normally indicate VOIP on cable or channelized DSL where I live. So those guys get listed in the white pages then?

Man, I can't even keep track. :D Next question: Who actually wants to be listed in the white pages? :P

Well, we could start by admitting you know nothing about me. I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't see anyone else this far down the thread who says that they are either. Why don't you look at some meat and calm down. :P

I eat meat in some form in pretty much every meal, and have my whole life, though the meat selection is largely beef, some chicken and a little pork from time to time. However I live in a small town, on the West Coast, and I'm not certain what a butcher's shop even looks like. I eat fast food, take-away, frozen food, and I have yet to even see "lamb" on a menu anywhere. I imagine it's a fairly unusual thing to eat in my region. Might just be more popular in the mid-west.

By "our point", I also don't mean "vegetarians", I mean people who don't feel we need to see a doctor just for panning the differences of timbre and undertone between farm animals. If you enjoy the tableau, more power to you, just lose the snobbery.

Absolutely correct, this is how Big Media wants all information to be made available. Only when you pay the appropriate ultra-specific, overinflated toll, and even then only at their discretion and convenience.

Try watching Crackle/C-spot videos (bankrolled by Sony) on Youtube outside of the US. Oops! Not available in your country. :3 Nor available for purchase. Just, not, legally available at all.

I'm sure glad Copyright Law encourages artists to create more works to fill the gap left by Copyright Law empowering rights holders to censor any content they had a hand or a pinky in creating. And it's refreshing to see the same creative spirit funding important content creation via triple-dipped internet pricing, which may or may not allow you access to the services we all enjoy today.

I've come pretty far down the thread without anyone explaining to me why there is still content for the white pages.

I mean, you're normally not listed there if you have a cell, right? or VOIP? How many non-businesses (aka non-yellow page fodder) still have landlines?

Meh, we've got different definitions of the word "broken".

I work for a small ISP that does consulting. We favor Windows over linux. We get folk who know little to nothing about computers, to have us install a fresh OS, and given the current balance we're not about to give them linux, because we actually don't want them to come back in. We want them to pay for internet and recommend their friends; broken computers translate in their mind to broken internet service.

We never get anyone coming to us to get new software, nor would I think a newbie know how a "repository" works or what current FOSS software gets named (aka, "I want to edit pictures" --> "Gimp" or "I want to make a flier" -> "inkscape or scribus or XYZoffice").

Repelling Malware would be a definite argument for pushing Linux, however Linux isn't any better than Win7 at protecting the naive from actively running what they should not, which leads to a lion's share of the problems that we see in the field.

Finally, the major definition of "broken" we have to live by is "does it follow de facto conventions". Literally, "does it work like it did yesterday" or "does it work like my neighbor" or "does it work like my computer at the office". Anything that foil's the end-user's expectation is "broken" by their definition.

By any metric, Global Ease of Use (not just "hey we made this part of the installer easier to use, job finished") is the gap Linux/BSD must cross in order to compete with Windows and Mac on the desktop. I mean, just look at Android. It's Linux based and it's bullying everyone else on the Mobile platform ... because Google invested enough into the distribution to give it Global Ease of Use. It has consistent and familiar conventions. 99% of people will never have to touch a text file or compile a module to use it or even do most common customizations to it.

It's presentation is end-user centric instead of ameture-project centric.

Now mind you there's nothing wrong with ameture projects per se; the bazaar development strategy is what drives the power of Linux as an OS. It's just that when combining that many odd shaped bricks you absolutely NEED heaps and heaps of mortar to fill the seams or I guarantee everyone who cares one iota about comfort will complain or move out from the bitter draft.

I'm not GP, but clarified his statement a bit. Palestine can't keep Isreal from getting invaded by, let's say, France.. but show me where Israel is morally obligated to help form a government that can't keep it's people from attacking Israel.

And you, Smiths:

Alright then, citation needed that any policies similar to this are actually being carried out. Your linked article doesn't say this is happening, just that an outrageous professor thinks it's worth trying. Fail troll is.

Then the question is .. can you tell Lamb from Kid? I guess it proves our point that the meat is interchangeable if you can change the species and they keep calling it lamb. 8I

No. In America, we've got Cow + Pig + chicken + fish. We've also got Turkey and Corn. Sheep get raised a lot more for wool than for eating, here, I guess *shrugs*

Seeing a doctor is probably a bit extreme unless you are wealthy. I probably can't discriminate a whole lot better than Unity can. I can differentiate between well prepared (steak vs pork vs chicken vs fish), but not (chicken vs turkey) or (ham vs bacon) or (salmon vs cod), let alone different sides of the same porterhouse.

Also, those distinctions are minuscule compared to (steak vs ground beef), (chicken vs scrambled eggs), or (tuna vs bubble gum). Just to provide some perspective, meat differentiation isn't like telling blue from purple it's like telling prussian from navy.

Didn't we have a slashdot article recently about coffee taste being impossible to synthesize, but if you label hot brown liquid "coffee" and make the room smell like coffee, people will generally think it is coffee?

Economics is simply the discipline of more optimally distributing scarce resources.

A replicator would be a wonderful device, but depending on it's parameters there are guaranteed to be things it cannot replicate. Either scarce, unreplicatable materials (Star Trek "Latinum") or slight benefits of unreplicated products (unreplicated metals might be harder than replicated, or have certain nanoscale properties that cannot be reliably/inexpensively replicated, etc) or time or space or compassion or creativity or sunshine. Whatever cannot be replicated, our economy will then just need to shift to distribute that now relatively scarce commodity to wherever it is needed.

There will still be work to be done, and the application of Capitalism will still reward those who do the work with the greatest shares of the scarce resources. Should folk choose not to participate, they get the least of whatever is scarce. If they can live that way forever, then I tip my hat to them. :3

Man, I never thought I'd be able to use this image in a thread. It's just way too farking specific. But here you go. :3

That sounds like a fair outlook on things, keep in mind the word "piracy" is pretty heavily abused. When I say it, I really just mean "disobeying copyright law" (note, I did misuse the term in my last post; I don't actually encourage people to pirate my wares given that I licence them CC0 so there is no copyright to infringe upon.. slip of the tongue :S)

As evidenced by my own vocabulary error, you can work with public domain or copyleft content and get some of the benefits of cultural liberty without infringing upon copyright, and you can encourage people to use copyleft instruments to avoid the negative ramifications of copyright. I see that you approve of these, as I do also.

But to be clear I do additionally champion the direct infringement of copyrighted works because I do personally believe that copyright law is foundationally immoral.. not to mention gapingly unenforceable in the face of today's technology and globally connected marketplace.

"Intellectual Property" literally means owning ideas, and ideas exist only as irremovable components of the minds of people who have learned them. Thus IP directly means owning the thoughts of other people, and controlling who can express those parts of themselves and who cannot.

Laying claim over other's minds is as bad an incentive to create art as laying claim over other's bodies is to process cotton. Sure, it drives your profits up immensely, but only on the backs of others. On the one hand there are countless ways to make money from art without first censoring the entire planet. On the other hand, it is literally not my concern how art gets funded. I simply want the freedom to share my thoughts, and if every selfish artist in the world simply stopped all their creativity for want of funds as a result I would still see the tradeoff as an enormous gain. Hell I can produce my own art and I will when I'm bored enough. Would I become the last artist in the world? How would people not outbid each other to hear me hum off key if nobody else is even doing it?

I create art, and having to vet clearance against other people's copyright makes that job technically impossible — if practically only very difficult. I guarantee every new piece of art infringes someone's copyright, it's just that you hope whoever you step on in the crowded sea of toes never notices. That is a terrible game of Russian Roulette to even pretend to play.

When we craft (or modernize) law we compare the law against certain maxims, and one such popular yardstick is that possession is nine tenths of the law. Directly, I possess everything in my mind, and I possess every megabyte of information on the hardware I physically own from mp3 players to computers to media center. That makes it my prerogative should I choose to share that data with another person, or should another person choose to share similar data with me.

Intruding within that well established and strategically easy to defend personal property arrangement to add complicated enforcement of Intellectual Property rights from people all over the planet is realistically absurd. No one has the capacity to prevent my sharing that information; Nobody could afford to even make an attempt. You'd have more luck trying to enforce a law that no wild birds may fly greater than 50 feet from the ground, and all violating birds will somehow be ticketed and fined.

It's a stretch to imagine a law so ineffective and ignored with such volume could have any impact on commercial artwork to begin with. Every piece of digital information is being shared freely somewhere right now, yet art continues to be made and Youtube accepts more than 24 hours of video uploads per minute. Movies continue to be produced and shown in theaters around the world, though I know the MPAA wishes they were making more, but who doesn't want more profit? Independent movies and games are on the rise (which is actually MPAA's only valid concern). I bought a Minecraft account a couple of weeks back, the author of which made over 2 million USD the weekend I bought in. I could have pirated it, but I felt that funding that project was a good use of my money (instead of throwing it into big media's wishing well) and apparently I was not alone.

With or without copyright, we'll still have money to spend on art and art will flourish more wherever we direct our cash to. At the end of the day, Copyright is pretty bad at funding art and very good at impeding it. It puts money into the hands of cartels who make money by limiting the proliferation and creation of artwork. Copyright allows industry to make money via artificial scarcity, which can only happen when the product is actually forced to be scarce.

So that's a treatment about why I personally disobey copyright law and encourage others to do so as well. Copyright is no law at all and does not deserve our respect nor observance. I don't mind if you continue to disagree and you don't have to explain your point of view, but I felt like it was a good opportunity for me to clarify my own. :3

Hi there AC and Successful Troll, how's it going? This is a hell of a thread you've got here. Congraturation!

Your (yes I know it's plagiarized) post here reminds me a lot of Jonathon Swift's Modest Proposal. Just a nit pick, it is just a touch whinier and less smooth and deadly, but you know if the original you've carped needs some spackle us Pirates won't despise you for adding a little bit of effort to make it a mashup, especially if it's more effective. Nonetheless this was plenty effective, people falling over themselves talking about karma whoring and all manner of silliness. God damn. :D

In any event, I agree about (checks figures) 80% with your strawman here. I pirate. I don't give a damn who's going out of business because of that. It is, in fact, easier for me. If it weren't I might not. I guess I don't have your strawman's dissonance about that. I don't feel guilty and don't look to /. for other voices to ease my guilt. I am confident that my position is right, and enjoy describing how, if for no other reason than it's fairly counter-intuitive and I'm proud of it. And I like pontificating. :D

So if you're strawman (or, borrowed strawman) would like it's guilt eased, I'll be happy to post here about how what it's doing is perfectly moral, because if I read your post correctly what it is allegedly doing is perfectly moral and it should continue to allegedly do that. It's like I've just read Karl Marx make up a "Mr Capitalist" strawman who feels guilty about being selfish or about putting inefficient competitors out of business. It just sounds so awesome that I want to root for the puppet no matter how much the puppeteer might dislike him. :3

For the other 20%, it's mostly mild misunderstandings. The GPL, for example, I am simply against. I want to see it fail along with all other copyright instruments. I publish all of my work as CC0 as it is the closest effective approximation to ridding my work of all copyright entirely. If people wish to hide their ideas in closed source then I won't stop them. If other people wish to reverse engineer those ideas, then I won't stop them either. If I write open source code and someone wants to "steal" it away into their closed source bundle, then I encourage them to do so. Freedom, flexibility, and good publicity will always triumph over paranoia and restrictions and I'm overjoyed at every opportunity to demonstrate that in practice.

Otherwise your puppet laments over misguided concerns of the puppeteer, saying "even though none of my rights are violated" and "even though this spells doom for my favorite ad-run site" and confusing the people who manage slashdot with it's commenters. I am a commenter, and my views probably don't reflect the views of the site owners. Slashdot might sue people for stealing their content, but I would not in their stead. I do believe that preventing me from obtaining or retransmitting publicly available information is harming my rights. I do believe that retransmitting data authored by someone else does not actually harm their rights. Your puppet may or may not agree with me, but it sounds like it would at least sleep easier if it choose to agree with me. Believing in True Things tends to make sleep easier, and I recommend that to anyone.

So by all means bring your puppet back to ask any other questions it's feeling guilt about and I'll be here all week, eh? Fictional and needlessly angstful as it may be, the world would be better off if more people behaved precisely that way.

Wait, when did Rupert Murdoch get a slashdot account?

Hi! I'm a pro-pirate abolitionist, and.. uh .. I'm sorry I'm not understanding your question here. :D

I have purchased some things which I have pirated. Not many, some. That's just a whim away from "none" and patently different than "all".

If it were somehow magically impossible to pirate, I would have bought a larger number of the things I did pirate, but I still would not have bought "all".

In short, even though I am an abolitionist, I think I must be honest in saying that if you ignore the social aspect the capability of piracy does inexorably decrease the volume of sales of canned digital media. It does not drop it to zero, it does not drop it anywhere near as much as media claims, but it does reduce the sales volume for canned digital media. I am not upset because I think canned digital media sales are overinflated just as canned tuna sales would be overinflated if there were no other food available.

In some cases the social aspect of piracy does overturn this sales drop and lead to a sales increase. For example, I sell virtual products in second life and outsell all of my direct competitors for virtually no other reason than baldly encouraging people to pirate my products. That piracy becomes advertisement which raises product awareness and PR and thus sales. That may not work in every market, but it cannot work without the social aspect which didn't sound like it was part of your analysis.

So I can't tell if you're anti-piracy or pro-piracy (because your post is ambiguous) but in case you are pro-piracy, I just want to make sure you're measuring the right metrics. misinformed allies are always more dangerous than a well informed opposition. :S