also i am not saying i fear global warming and that gas prices should be allowed to rise and that would divert private money into alternatives. i only care about alternatives inasmuch as they are superior to oil for the consumer. i am saying that if i did fear global warming, i would certainly hope for oil prices to go as high as possible. nothing would spur the move to alternatives like expensive oil. it isnt like consumers would not be paying for alternative research anyways if the government funds it. if it has to be done, why not let private citizens invest in it without forcing people and funneling the money through the government beauracracy? havent we learned over time that a profit-minded person or group will accomplish a task faster and more efficiently than the government? and don't restricting oil profits directly punish those who want to make profits in alternatives? also i believe it is immoral to tell someone what profits they should make. it is basically stealing. for items i do not own, i do not take at the price i choose.
ideally yes. practically? probably not. we have not learned this at all. what we have learned, especially recently, is corporations with lots of money and power stall innovation as long as possible until the market forces them to. if crappy products make money, why change? also oil prices rising only allows the oil companies to continue to make even more money, with which they will pay the government and auto makers to halt adoption of alternative fuels. the above two paragraphs are in no way advocating governmental intrusion or socialism, i just don't nearly have as much trust in capitalism as you do. there are too many ******* people involved. somehow you continue to correlate the two. plenty of people, including yourself and sometimes myself, disagree with this. otherwise, why would you freely avail yourself of downloading games, music, and movies? if you agreed with the price that the media companies set for the media, you wouldn't have problems paying it.
because i dont agree with the government enforced monopoly on information. if you have a bunch of ones and zeros that are music, and you want to give them to me, we should have that right. i am not stealing if you share your information with me. the record companies and government should not force me to keep my ones and zeros secret. if i want to share i will share. i realize that in ordinary cases stealing creates problems because it kills the motivation of the producers to produce, but thats isnt the case with music and in often isnt the case with software and other forms of information. so allowing the free flow of information doesnt hurt society in many cases. for instnace, if everyone pirated microsoft and they went out of business, it might be a net gain for society that we all started using open-source software. information exchange is not the same as stealing in the tradiational sense of the word stealing, like one might steal a potato. when you steal a potato, thats one less potato for the guy who owned it before you, one less he can sell, one less reason for him to continue to produce potatoes for the rest of us. with music and software, and to a lesser extent movies, the motivation to produce remains and often cannot be taken away. people will always play music. even in the absence of (financial) payment, people around the world are working on linux and rocking out new songs in the garages, and making cool new movies on their macs. and these products are arguably better than the ones the governemnt will not allow us to trade amongst ourselves, the ones protected by the artificial government enforced monopoly. music and software and movies, it is information, much like a secret. and one the secret is out, you cant un-ring the bell. people will spread it and exchange it and enjoy it. thats the way it works, and i think that is fine. the corporations who produce information do not like this and have asked the government to help them. but i dont want the government to help them. i dont care about keeping their secrets. why shouls we protect certain types of information producers and not others? if i made up a joke and told you but asked you not to tell, would you? of course not. if it was funny you would tell it and i cant blame you, even though i get nothing in return for my production of the joke. but if i had produced music i would have government protection. i dont steal games. as of now they are probbly so expensive to produce that widespread stealing might hurt production. thats isnt true with music and in fact widespread stealing might improve the state of modern music by rewarding merit as judged by listeners ratther than good marketing by record companies. if i am working on an oil alternative, government restricting of oil profits definitely punishes me directly because it keeps people addicted to oil rather than seeking out my alternative. the money i need to work out the tech of the world-saving alternative stays tied up in oil because the government keeps oil prices down and removes motivation for consumers to change.
speaking of jokes, check out this amazing joke i made up in the form of a caption for this photo. this is the exchange between kaz matsui and alyssa milano in the dugout before a mets game: Kaz: hey, come over here and lets take a damn picture! Alyssa: sure! KAz: yeah thats right, get your ass over here! who's the boss now bitch! Alyssa: haha hey thats neat they have my show in japan? they show reruns in japan? Kaz: what show? you are an actress?
it's definitely true that in some cases bands rely on income from touring and are indifferent to filesharing contradictory to the wishes of the record company. on the whole this is not the case. as a budding musician, if i had spent say ten grand of my own money on a compact disc and received no money from it only to see a billion copies of it on bittorrent, i'd be pretty upset. as a software programmer, if that point of sale program i'm writing turns up on alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc, i'd be pretty upset i spent 200 hours coding for nothing. utilitarian principles do not supersede the laws of the land you live in. this is definitely true and an argument I've previously made, on this forum no less, in the selfish support of my own personal stealing. i can see an argument for music but not necessarily in software, which takes many many manhours of labor in order to produce quality. i think prices are high, but i still think movie houses deserve to earn some money. that's why i proudly pay 20 a month to netflix in order to watch movies. i don't have to waste $7 for one movie in a crowded house and the studios still get some money. people should have their investment protected. it cost you $0 to tell a joke, but it probably cost that record company upwards of 50 grand to produce that album, or maybe it cost joe independent 5K. might be partially true, but see above. consumers have no options right now. we depend on detroit and japan to make affordable (read: equivalently priced) alternative fuel vehicles, and we depend on small business owners to make the initial investment in E85 stations. unfortunately both are controlled by the oil company dollar which is spent on a large scale to prevent either from happening.
you should be able to make a pretty good album for almost nothing. my college roomate bought a 3 thousand dollar digital studio and he could make excellent quality recordings. as time goes by, the production cost of music will get closer to virtually nothing, so you will not need to waste your money on production. i bet i could find some open source software and make an awesome album, if i had talent, which i dont. i think macs actually come with music software that is pretty good, (i believe it is called garage band?). record companies are totally unnecessary. if they all go out of business thats fine with me. like i have said before, i dont care about laws, as long as i am not getting caught. i make my own decisions on right and wrong. almost everyone agrees with me on this, and you will see them violating the speed laws daily by the thousands. laws are not sacred. i dont really steal software much either, because it isnt necessary, there is almost always free software that does the job. i am not saying that whoever is buying this POS (hehe) software you are writing should come and steal it, that is different. maybe programmers should be paid for their time, not their programs. that seems like a nice solution. i rarely steal movies, because i like the experience of the theater, and i am willing to pay 10.75 for the big screen and sound and whatnot. so they are offering me a service i like. but i dont see any correlation between studios making money and good movies being produced. big budget movies mostly suck and we end up paying idiot actors who are no better than the unknowns who act in independent movies. so if we all were stealing, it might be good for the industry, so that is hard to feel guilty about. if we all steal, maybe the popular movies will be the ones that are entertaining, rather than the ones that pay 20 million to tom cruise and another zillion for marketing i cannot avoid. i trust that creative people will continue to produce entertainment we like even if the tradiational payment system we have now totally collapses. it shoudlnt be relevant how much it cost to produce, either stealing/trading information is ok or it isnt. i say it is. whether it is my crappy joke or a 200 million dollar movie. you have options, you just dont like them. i have heard you say things like you cant deal with an ordinary car you need a suv or minivan or whatever. thats fine, big ass gas guzzlers are great, but let's not pretend we don't have options. if you wanted, you could drive a tercel, i think 4 peeps can fit in there fine, particularly if some of them are children. i bet many of us could get by with a motorcycle and a honda civic and cut our gas consumtion by 50% easily, but we dont, because we dont need to yet. when/if oil gets so expensive that we actually do not have options, then money will pour into alternatives so quickly that they will become viable fast. while we might think we are stickin it to the oil companies now if we restrict their profits, they may be laughing at us, knowing that we are only delaying the time at which we no longer need them. if that is true then the problem is that we allow our government to stop adoption of alternatives, which of course is what happens when you keep oil prices low. if the government would just keep their damn hands off, things will work out.
Consumers do have options. We don't have to go out and buy gas guzzling vehicles. We can start buying fuel efficent and/or hybrid cars. And that is exactly what's happening as auto sales are way down and there's a huge demand for hybrid cars. Automakers will give us what we want. But as I said many times before, it's us who don't want to change. We're crying about high energy prices and asking our government to do something about it so we can continue to consume as much cheap energy as we can. And unfortunately, the politicians will try to do something about it and make things worse in the long run. I don't disagree with you about the oil companies not wanting to change, but it's not their job to do so. There job is to make as much money as they legally can for their shareholders. They'll only jump into the alternative fuel business when they see the potential for making a crapload of money. Companies will always give consumers what they want. We drive the market, not the other way around. It won't happen overnight, but if we demand it, we'll get it. But watch what happens if oil and gas prices go back down. We'll go back to our gas guzzling ways and nothing will change, just like in the 70s and 80s. We don't really care about alternative fuels, we just want cheap fuel so we don't have to change our lifestyle. We're greedy like that!:thumb:
there are a few OSS sound solutions but i couldn't get them to install. garage band is OK. record companies exist to market and get songs onto radio and TV. anyone can make their own CD, but not everyone can create their own demand. unless your having a job basically depends on the ability of your company to sell the software you wrote. now i am in a position where my company sells widgets and i write programs to facilitate the sale of said widgets. my company would still be able to sell widgets without my programs, but my programs make them able to sell many more. but i see your point, it's definitely a valid one, i just think some markets should be protected. you trust this because you have an opinion. of course you may be completely wrong, and I may be completely wrong. obviously if there is no longer any money in creating entertainment, much of the industry would not create it. let's look at CGI films such as CARS, for example. it takes lots of electricity and server farm hardware and time to make such a movie, not including the notable voice actors that you'd recognize. millions in fact. now, if nobody sees that in the theatre and steals it instead, they've just dropped a huge pile of money into the toilet. the result? no more pretty CGI movies. thankfully you dont make all of the rules. i say if you were a musician or a software programmer at Microsoft you probably wouldn't agree. i tried to buy a tercel in 2003, there were no used ones available at coleman. toyota doesn't make them anymore. with my sedans, it becomes difficult to put car seats and kids in and out of the car. heads get bumped and what not. i have a civic and an accord. i can't sit in the back seat of the civic ever because my legs are too long. maybe you and your friends are all 5'5" or shorter but not me. see, right now, the oil companies are paying people to slow production of alternative fuel vehicles and blocking the purchase of alternative fuel gas stations. you don't see ford, chevy or dodge prominently advertising hybrid cars or E85 cars. salty didn't even know his avalanche could take E85. this is the same problem as tech. the govt needs to at least step in and stop the oil companies from strongarming alternatives. the "free market" can't operate when there are no competitors.
no more pretty cgi movies? no! well, i would assume that these computers that make these movies will be half as expensive in no time, then half as expensive as that pretty soon after. i am not worried. if i was a musician i would be in it for the women, not the money. and like i said earlier, i would guess we would all be better off if microsoft went out of business and we used open source software. awww, we should tell the oil companies that. children go in the back dummy. your gloriously long legs go in the driver's seat. you should invest in alternatives, you could make lots of money tapping a new market, and if the oil companies pay you off to not produce, then you win. the same tech market where almost any piece of software you need can be had for free? anyways i think tigerwins said it pretty well above: also i think it is clea that when i said i think it is immoral to tell somebody what they are allowed to sell their product for, that is not the same as my information trading policies. i never take information that somebody doesnt give me willingly. i dont necessarily believe you can own sequences of ones and zeros.
