And of course, this actually happens: people pay good money for bottled water even where good tap water is available.
Only in the sense that all physical media is obsolete.
Picking up a penny takes a second. Adds up to $36 an hour.
Probably not. Microsoft makes a lot more money off the enterprise market and charges accordingly for that. Microsoft obviously wants people to buy home versions of Windows but most people really don’t. They buy a PC with Windows already installed (with an OEM key negotiated far lower than $100) and, for the last couple generations, can upgrade it for free if they want. The segment of the market left (has a PC, doesn’t have Windows, wants Windows) is who would be buying $100 keys and now Microsoft needs to balance between pushing these people to Linux or Apple or people just pirating Windows or buying a very cheap ‘grey market’ key. It’s insanely easy to buy a legitimate working Windows key for $10 or less and the higher the retail price gets, the more people will just go that route. $100ish is their balancing point to capture the most retail customers.
Also, not sure how badly this torpedoes @bump’s point, but paying for Windows is entirely optional for home users. You can buy all the components to build your own computer, then (from a different computer) download the installation for the official Windows version you want directly from Microsoft for free.
You can then install, set up and run Windows just fine without ever paying a single penny. You have to pay to activate Windows, but Windows itself doesn’t care if it’s activated or not, it’ll run just fine. You just can’t do some customizations like changing the wallpaper. (Unactivated Windows shows a nag message to activate it in lieu of wallpaper. There might also be advertising.)
I’ve also heard it argued that tap water in most places has stronger regulations than bottled water, so your tap water might be better.
(Full disclosure: The tap water where I live is awful. But my fridge has a water filter in it, so drinking water from that is always good.)
A good way to look at it is that you may own a specific copy of a book, but you don’t own the book, in the sense that you can’t start publishing your own copies. Nor can you take your DVD and show it to a bunch of people or broadcast it legally.
But it’s the sort of integrated nature of the media that lets people do things like show a DVD to a whole classroom full of kids without legal repercussions. There’s no way for them to tell, as the media and information are all self-contained.
This whole thing reminds me of arguments a decade ago on Usenet that physical photographic negatives are better than digital photos because formats change, etc… and negatives last for a century. What they didn’t realize is that with a bit of care, the digital formats will be unchanged indefinitely. As in a digital photograph taken 30 years ago will look exactly the same in 100, 200, 300 years, as the information itself doesn’t inherently degrade like physical media does. But there was no hammering that into their heads; the idea of information uncoupled from the physical media seemed to be a concept too far for them.
Sure you can: just right-click on the image, and select “Set as background image” or however it’s called in the menu.
Is your Windows activated?
EDIT: Ah, I see that you posted the work-around. You can’t change the wallpaper from the “change wallpaper” windows setting, but you can navigate in explorer to the image you want as your wallpaper, right-click it and set it as wallpaper.
No… I was saying that Microsoft has a monopoly, and that for a long time, the CPU was the single most expensive thing in the PC, only being eclipsed relatively recently by GPU.
I haven’t bought an Intel chip since my 286 back in 1989. I had an IBM/Cyrix 486/66, and then a series of AMD processors for the past 25 years or so. I’m well aware that Intel hasn’t ever had a monopoly. But there really isn’t a viable alternative to Windows for the vast, vast majority of users.
Fair enough. There have always been alternatives to Windows, but nothing that does what Windows does, not really.
And yes, I agree about GPUs. Half of the value of my current PC is in the video card.
I got really lucky and renovated my PC in February 2020, only a few weeks before the pandemic started and prices got crazy. So I got a Radeon 5600XT GPU for under $300.
Otherwise yeah had I got a GPU in the past 2 years, it would easily have cost as much as the rest of the PC combined.
My comment here is prompted by yours, but is intended to be a general comment and not specifically directed at you.
The DMCA was a draconian piece of legislation enacted in 1998 that is highly biased towards the content owners that have Congress critters in their back pockets, owning them like cheap trinkets, and is mostly unique to the US. The idea that you’re breaking the law if you rip a DVD that you’ve bought and paid for – for which you’ve already paid the royalties to the creative artists – to a digital file just so you can watch the same movie on another device like a tablet – is just plain extortion.
And that kind of greed and extremism is what has created a whole generation of media pirates. I consider myself an honest person. A little while ago I went back to my veterinarian’s office to pay nearly $100 for a bag of expensive dog food that they had forgotten to charge me for after hundreds of dollars of consulting fees. I don’t like cheating anyone, and it would have hung on my conscience.
But fuck the big media companies and their greed. Fuck 'em with a cactus. I have no qualms whatsoever about ripping a DVD or Blu-ray disc that I own, and by extension, I’ve developed no qualms about pirating a movie that I don’t own. The greedy fuckers have brought the situation on themselves.
If they were providing a service at a price you considered excessive, then the moral and ethical choice is to forego that service. If enough people agree with you, then they will have to change their offerings.
I see absolutely nothing particularly “greedy” about using technology and licenses exactly as the copyright law intended them to be used. You don’t have a right to consume media solely on your terms. If you don’t like their terms, your choice is to find something else to consume.
There’s plenty of competition out there: There are public domain works, there are libraries that lend you things for free, there are less popular works that you can get on easier terms. Don’t try to tell me that they forced you to become a pirate. I’m not buying that hogwash.
Oh, and the United States is not the only place to have an anticircumvention law. The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Copyright Treaty requires it, and the European Union has implemented it as well.
In my opinion, the United States has become the world’s leader of cultural output not in spite of our strong copyright protections, but, at least in part due to our strong copyright protections. Quality has a cost.
If I legally purchase something, I consider myself fully within my rights to transfer that something to a different medium for personal consumption. For example, the 400 CDs I bought legally (used, but still legal!) and ripped onto my hard drive for conversion into mp3 files I put on a USB stick and plug into my car stereo. I also listen to the flac files while sitting at the computer.
If that is an example of illegal copyright infringement, fuck that law. If I wanted to set up a personal media library and stock it with the 40 or so DVDs/blu-rays I own, and DRM measures prevent me from ripping the DVDs, I’ll download them illegally. While I’m there I’ll probably also pick up a few movies I don’t own the DVDs for. Which is something I wouldn’t even consider if I wasn’t already there doing it for stuff I already legally purchased.
I would bet that we have not seen the end of litigation around this issue, both in the US and in the EU, also touching upon subjects that do not really have to do with copyright law, like reverse-engineering of software and hardware (discs) for interoperability purposes, and the enforceability of licenses that limit the devices on which the media may be viewed.
Copyright law constantly balances competing interests and rights. The anti circumvention law indeed explicitly provides for exceptions. The fact that such back and forth will continue is a feature, not a bug.
Let me be clear that I fully support the right of creative artists to fair compensation for their work, and to hold and enforce copyright on such work. What I don’t support is the unmitigated greed of the industry that they have to work in, which tends to support only its own interests and against the interests of consumers and artists alike.
A few snippets:
When music was first offered online, the record labels wanted $15.00 for a CD sold through retail and $15.00 for an online version of the same collection of songs sold direct and without the CD. They would take perhaps $4 to $6 from the first transaction and $15 from the other. Their attitude was ‘let’s use the huge potential of the internet to make fantastic profits.’ That’s really what triggered piracy and left the door open for file sharing networks. Perhaps they have now learned their lesson and will be ever so humble. But we ask you, does the RIAA look humble to you?
Much the same message has come from the film industry.
US inspired copyright laws set to sweep the globe ' for fun and profit - Rethink
Unless you just want it for free, and then you’ll just pirate it.
lol grandma taped Dallas for me in another room so i didn’t miss Miami vice …and she hated both shows lol