Supergrunch

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to ye!

Yep. But I seriously doubt most people delete ripped music before selling the cd it came on, so most cds you buy secondhand will probably involve copyright theft somewhere.

You're assuming the first owner of the album hasn't ripped it to their computer.

Haha, 5 days isn't really a lot of time however you look at things. Try a year. I hope I'm invited. Anyhoo, good times for me. And Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is an amazing book.

I thought that was great, especially Noam Chomsky: Blood on the Sand.

Happy birthday Mr. O!

More importantly, can you pronounce her name yet? Hm. Yesterday was good. Went out to the shops a total of four times to buy stuff for breadmaking, and ended up successfully breaking in our breadmaker. Then I wrote the introduction to my dissertation and drank some cider etc.

You have, to play it it has to be downloaded to your RAM. Which is of course legal, it's downloading it to your ROM that's illegal.

Happy birthday to the many birthday people.

It's not a bullshit argument provided it's used correctly, it's just classifying the crime correctly. Copyright theft is a different crime to theft. Similarly, credit-card fraud is a different crime to shoplifting, and so any decent legal system should take these kinds of distinctions into account, whether for better or for worse. It's only a bullshit argument if you try and use it to justify what you're doing as being morally okay. Equally, conflating two different crimes is also a bullshit argument.

Happy birthday guys!

Lol, fair enough. Then substitute Star Wars for something with a suitably smaller (but still large) fanbase of your choice. It was hyperbole anyway.

My point exactly. Everyone hates James Blunt. Apart from the mysterious people who apparently buy his records...

Isn't that a bit like saying you're glad you've found someone else who likes Star Wars? This. Whatever the adverts at the start of DVDs may claim, copyright theft is not equivlent to shoplifting, as you're not depriving anyone of a product - a more suitable comparison would be going into a book shop and taking photos of every page of a book then putting it back on the shelf and going home to read it without paying. Which is of course still illegal, but you've not stolen a product, you've violated copyright. But that's again not the same thing, as the vast majority of people committing copyright theft aren't profiting out of it, they're just using the copied item for their own enjoyment. It would be like someone taking one of your sample images and turning it into a print, then putting it up on their wall, without paying anything. Sure, they'd have violated your copyright, but would you call that theft? Of course artists can protect against this sort of thing by only giving out low quality and/or watermarked samples, but the same isn't true for musicians. But yes, filesharing and so on is definitely a problem, though I think the onus is more on the music companies to provide a solution that's better for customers than illegal downloading than for the downloaders to stop what they're doing, as they always have been and always will be people committing copyright theft. Like almost everyone here, I used to download music a few years back, but have stopped, in part because I haven't owned or needed an mp3 player for ages. I used youtube for listening to the odd song I didn't have, and now Spotify exists, all my problems are solved - that's one example of a good partial solution to the problem. I've heard two other proposals that sounded realistic - one was to provide more bonuses in the purchasable product (be it physical or otherwise), such as lossless files, and whatever else people might want, then accept that an inevitable few will decide not to bother with this and download the track instead. This of course rests on actually making a product that people will want to buy over and above just the track itself, which is really what record companies should be doing in the first place, though it'd be difficult to think of suitable things to include, and it's possible that this would have to be coupled with a fall (or at least, lack of an increase) in price for a better product. The other suggestion came from Matt Bellamy I think, and was to effectively have ISPs giving out different priced packages depending on what you wanted to do with your connection - those just wanting web and email paying less, and those wanting to download stuff on top of this paying more, with some of the extra paid going to the music companies and so on who'd suffer losses from the downloading. I think this would have to be flat rate, and could potentially work some time in the future, but there are difficulties - while it's easy enough to block off the ports for things like torreting, it'd be hard to stop all downloading efficiently, and also you'd have hell getting ISPs to conform with this. And of course it wouldn't be terribly popular with internet users. Finally, it's worth noting that it isn't really the rich musicians and so on who are suffering from the losses surrounding filesharing. It's all very well to think it's okay to marginally reduce the profits of wealthy individuals or faceless corporations, but such reductions have knock on effects, and could, for instance, lead to low level employees of these companies having to be sacked. These are the sorts of people who really suffer from copyright theft.

This, probably. Anyway, my previous post is now updated with lots of lovely science.

There we go, threads all merged so everyone is happy. (though Dyson got there first ) Anyhoo, happy birthday Paj!

Well there's definitely a lot of science behind attraction, though of course it's not the be all and end all of everything. Evolution means that those strategies that propagate genes most efficiently are the most successful, but (assuming a more primitive society) men and women invest vastly different amounts in each (successful) sexual encouter - for a man, it's just a few sperm, whereas for a woman it's 9 months plus childcare, which calls for an awful lot of resources. Hence for men the best strategy is just to sleep with as many women as possible, but for women, it's much better to select desirable genes in their mate as they'll end up investing so much time and so many resources in any resulting offspring. This leads to men being ardent and women being choosy. Of course, if you transfer this to gay people, it means that on average gay men are more promiscuous (twice as much ardency). Of course, gay people don't transfer their genes anyway (excluding various modern methods), which leads to many more complexities for evolutionary science... As for general attraction, there're probably some factors to do with promoting as much heterozygosity (mixing of different variants of genes) as possible, as this prevents pairings of faulty genes which can lead to disease (as you can get with incest), so it's possible that people are more attracted to those with different genetic complements to their own. There have been experiments to do with this - one I remember involved guys rating the smell of t-shirts that different women had slept in overnight, and they tended to prefer the t-shirt of the woman most genetically different to themselves. There have also been studies to do with face structure - if I recall correctly, heterosexual couples tended either to be of each respective extreme or both somewhere in the middle. There're also various hormonal things that go on when you start to like someone that cause you to forget about their negative facets, although I can't remember the details of the studies for this one. And of course, while some aspects of attraction come under the realm of science, there are many more that do not.

Hm, that's interesting. I knew that some straight guys (and presumably girls) find bi people more attractive, but I always thought it was because of the shared interest thing... I guess there must be something else on top of that.

Yeah, hypocrisy for the loss.

As I said on IRC, this really sucks. And multiple things Dynastygal has done to you seem pretty unforgivable (not just the cheating, but also the explosion when you were dating the new girl), so much as you might feel you love her, it sounds like you're best forgetting about her altogether. Also she's probably telling you this to get some kind of a rise out of you, so the best thing you can do is ignore it. *joins in the hug*

I'm going to assume you were abbreviating the Middle English genitive form Cates. BUT WHAT DOES IT POSSESS? Yep.

Greetings to you! I'm the one who gets worked up about linguistics and various other things. You may be interested in the various prose/poetry threads hanging about in the creative forum.

Well this had absolutely no effect on me, or the guy sitting next to me. Kind of disappointing, but then I wasn't expecting much. And I've yet to come across anyone that I can be sure aren't stooges who it's had a decent effect on (excluding nightwolf's reaction, if that counts).

Happy birthday guys!