The only reason L-libertarians support the government in fighting physical tyranny is because it is the only weapon that the "peasants" have to fight their desired L-libertarian economic tyranny. Make no mistake, these faux-libertarians are really just authoritarians in disguise.

As a l-libertarian, these people piss me off because they have turned the word libertarian into little more than a pejorative now...

In all honesty, I don't think I have ever seen an ad that was of value to me. Maybe I'm just weird or something, but I start with a need and then seek out a solution in a product or service to fulfill it, usually through reviews and such. I never see an ad and then suddenly decide I need the product or service.

Never mind. I forgot about porn.

By coincidence, I was just looking at this: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-narcissism-epidemic/200905/is-there-epidemic-narcissism-today/

People literally ARE becoming more and more narcissistic and I believe you are probably right in ascribing it to poor societal role models...

Which is why I don't use Google or any of their products and hopefully never will. Google is setting itself up to be as big or an even bigger threat than Microsoft has been to our freedom.

They are trying to monopolize internet communication itself. They are trying to control both the content and the interface by which you access it. They have their hands in e-books, internet videos, cellphones, operating systems, search, advertising, e-mail, applications, browsers, computer hardware and much more. They may not succeed, but there is no doubt they are trying.

They may be beneficent now, but most corporations have an authoritarian hierarchy and all it will take is a change of leadership for things to change and I, for one, don't want anyone having that much power in their eventually corrupted hands.

It may seem wise to some that the enemy (Google) of their enemy (Microsoft) is their friend, but history has shown that most revolutions wind up just instituting a different authoritarian regime of their own, despite their best intentions. I hope I'm wrong, but I would very wary of what Google has the potential to become in the future.

Absolutely. The way the world works is, when you are the underdog you "steal" the IP of all the countries around you until you achieve some level of economic parity, and then you hypocritically pull the ladder up behind you to try and prevent anyone else from doing the same.

America did it. South Korea did it. Now, China is doing it. It's about preserving economic hegemony, nothing more.

The part that I find most humorous about this fact is that our DNA doesn't care what we do for a living or how big our houses are. It doesn't care how intelligent we are either. The goal of our DNA is procreation. So if the rich have fewer children than the poor, then the rich are, by definition, genetically inferior to the poor, and it is natural selection that makes them a minority.

Funnier yet, it is the rich who can afford to have the most children, so the poor are beating them despite having a severe handicap.

Technically only 7 notes, as the 8th note is the first note an octave higher.

The other thing the person you replied to neglected to take into account in addition to what you have already mentioned is that over several thousand years, music theory has worked out pretty well what sounds good and what doesn't. As such, the computer wouldn't have to crunch all combinations. It would simply focus on melodies based on only a couple of scales played over the few basic chord progressions that make up most popular music.

If I were Bill Gates rich, I would make it irrelevant myself.

I would create two monstrous supercomputers. The first would create musical melodies based on the number of notes required by copyright statutes to qualify as unique; the idea being to try and copyright all possibilities of note/time combinations for that level of uniqueness through brute force computing over time.

The second supercomputer would analyze as much new music on the market as possible using the data from the first to determine infringement and automatically send out subpoenas to cease and desist.

The eventual goal would be to crash the copyright system by eventually making it difficult and eventually impossible for anyone to create non-infringing music.

With copyright no longer tenable, piracy would no longer exist and music, a performance art, would go back to being just that; a PERFORMANCE art.

The answer is to do nothing at all. They serve the market, not the other way around. If the market no longer thinks the product they sell is worth paying for, then they have to develop a new product that the market DOES find valuable or they die.

Their attempts to coerce the market to support their incompetence and unwillingness to adapt is despicable.

These are animated polygons. There are no soldiers, there are no civilians, there is no killing, no one has been harmed. If you think otherwise, you need psychiatric help. It isn't real. I don't care if you get to decapitate children and make soup bowls out of their skulls with which to drink the blood of vivisected virgins. It doesn't matter. I repeat, it isn't real. Until we create an AI that becomes self-aware, these polygonal representations have no rights and our treatment of them is irrelevant.

Slap a rating on it and treat it like you would any other piece of media.

I'm always amazed at how evil and brutal human beings are to each other and yet we sit around and get outraged over things that aren't real, while generally sitting on our collective asses when it comes to doing the same in the real world. People need to just STFU when it comes to fiction. Get upset about real life and do something about it.

Time to break out the popcorn and watch the private sector fascists go to war with the government fascists.

Competition in the fascism market benefits everyone. I think we can pretty much all agree we don't want any monopolies here...

And the iconoclastic tree of RMS bears another fruit. You can bet that without the pressure exerted by free and/or open source software and its advocates this would never have happened...

(I now await moderation punishment for having mentioned the name of him is not to be named...)

Considering my only statement WAS the quote, what point exactly are you implying that the quote doesn't help? You clearly have no idea what point I was actually making at all.

Who are you to tell me that what I value is foolish? Obviously I value different things than you do. Ever heard of hypocrisy?

Nowhere did I say I was against downloading. In fact, I am vehemently against the physical production of goods that can be created and distributed digitally. I will NOT buy movies, games, software or music on physical discs and wish for the complete death of manufacturers that produce such environmentally destructive and unnecessary junk.

Those who would give up essential property rights to purchase a little temporary convenience deserve neither property nor convenience.

If the market is unwilling to financially support a work and would rather pirate it instead, then said work is not a viable product and has no real value. NO ONE has any inherent right to make money doing whatever they want, no matter how much effort they put into it.

If you can't make a living making something as trivial as games, get a new career or find some rich eccentric to bankroll your so-called “art”.

Where developers/artists get such a sense of entitlement from is beyond me. The only thing piracy stats prove is how completely out of touch they are with the market; a market that is currently in a huge recession with massive unemployment, I might add...