Can you really not stand to not read Slashdot for one day if it bothers you that much? Are you really complaining about their free news aggregation community that has been a longstanding staple of the tech world? Do you really think one AF prank is going to alienate readers who have been here for decades?
Exactly this. It's a non-story. They aren't saying Apple doesn't have trademark over iPad Mini, but that 'iPad Mini' is already considered a trademark because iPad is already thus trademarked.
No, that is completely unrelated. You are saying "There is always someone out there who wants something for nothing." That is true, but what we are discussing is something completely different: In this case, there is something people want, and they are willing to pay for it, but the provider will not allow them to buy it.
This DOES make copyright infringement OK - at least in my(and many people's) view. If you can't legally purchase something even if you want to, then they aren't losing any sales when you pirate the media, and there is no loss for them. The losses they experience in the long run come from their failed business model not allowing them to take your money, not from your actions of piracy.
And third, it's completely incorrect to say piracy/copyright infringement has no victim just because you don't like the victim
Ok, I'll bite: in his story about pirating a french cartoon, who was the victim? He made every attempt possible to pay(a rather excessive price) for their goods, and they refused him. Who is he hurting by downloading it in this case? They didn't lose a sale, because they wouldn't sell it to him. They didn't lose the show, because piracy is not theft - it is free copying.
If you really believe that piracy in this way has a victim, you are a brain damaged hypercapitalist shill, and I thank a deity of your choosing that you do not influence my life.
It is also readily apparent that you were not demonstratively using hyperbole in your original post, but that you simply dropped the comparison as a simple false argument to try to shock people away from logic and critical thought. Rape is not a tool for your argument, and they aren't remotely the same thing. You are a bad person, and you should feel bad.
There are many things that are plainly and obviously victimless crimes, including many drug charges, traffic citations, and the fact that 'suicide' is a crime. It just so happens that copyright violation is also a victimless crime, unless you buy into the proven-false propaganda that people who pirate media would buy it if they couldn't pirate it.
Are you really calling the litigious, antiquated, ineffective businesses encompassed by the MPAA and their ilk 'the victims' on par with a rape victim? Clearly, even if you say 'the harm is much less' your comparison is nonsense and doesn't stand up to any real analysis. If you make an actual argument I might even agree with you, but you just spit a false comparison, and followed up with repeated defenses of your (rather insensitive to rape victims) retarded analogy.
If they provided a better, simple, modern, cost-efficient and popular way to view their program, which was already easily available to them(oh, I don't know, like....the internet?) then many pirates would not do so. I am one of those many pirates. They don't provide this, hence, they induce much of the piracy with their company's policies and business model.
But hey, it's always good to throw rape randomly into a comment to shock people away from critical thinking, right?
You want hi-def... therefore you now need a Bluray player... simple.
Hi, this is reality, have we met? If you think BluRay is the only viable way to watch HD content, you are too stupid to properly insult.
You know what's more awesome than paying $50 for a season's worth of GOT on BD months or a year after it airs? Downloading GOT the night it airs, with the same quality, for free(or for a few bucks if they allow it).
Also, how much of what you pay for your Dish do you think goes to things like Nickelodeon, or 6 news channels, or HGTV, or CrimeTV, or Nogginz, or whatever, which you will never watch? Wouldn't it be nice if you could avoid paying so much for just a few episodes you actually want to see?
Welcome to the discussion. I think you're pretty well caught up now.
If someone wants to choose to 'cut the cord', they damn-well have that right. Piracy provides the customer an alternative to paying inflated fees encompassing a myriad of things they don't even want to get a minutia of things they do want. After how much money I shoveled into cable and satellite so they can provide things I don't watch like CourtTV and HGTV, I don't even feel bad ripping off the new shows. This is now something that competes with cable and publishers, and they should start adjusting their business model accordingly instead of whining and suing people over it.
If the publishers don't supply them an alternative to an antiquated and poorly-managed business model like subscription cable, then it's THEIR OWN fault when the customers pirate the shows. It is THE PUBLISHER'S FAULT that they did not make that sale, because they failed to meet the needs of the consumer. If I can go online and download a DRM-Free copy of the show the day it airs or within a couple days of then, I will happily toss up to a few dollars at a show I want to see.
It is an incredible waste for them, in an age where they can EASILY and really inexpensively do just that: provide digital viewing per-episode at a reasonable market value through the now-ubiquitous internet. It is not the pirates ruining their sales, it is their own incompetence and bullshit legal impasses. Simply put: Less laws and distribution red tape, along with embracing technology instead of fighting it, would allow them to make more money without being seen as assholes.
Here's a breakdown of what I pay and what I would pay if they did adopt a per-episode sale model: Now: Cable - ~$150/month --$70 30Mbps Internet --$40 Expanded Digital Cable(required for premium add-ons) --$15 HBO --$17 Showtime
New Model: Cable - ~$70/month --$70 30Mbps Internet Publishers - ~$36 (at ~$3/episode, part of the year) --$15 Dexter 4-5 episodes per month, some of the year --$15 Breaking Bad 4-5 episodes per month, some of the year --$6 A couple other shows that pique my interest, occasionally (I don't like or watch GOT, or anything else currently airing on HBO)
This rounds out, entirely, my paid TV viewing schedule. Everything else I watch is available on free, OTA TV(hell, it's even in HD Digital now).
missing out on the cost to distribute it worldwide
Welcome to the internet: Where video can be shared with everyone, worldwide, regardless of their cable subscription or locale, for pennies.
Storage/CDN, bandwidth, hosting. Done. Pennies. Also let's not forget a couple ads in the mix can generate them exceedingly more money than they spend to distribute it. Shit, throw a single commercial in the file and upload it to TPB yourself. Then you don't have to pay for bandwidth or hosting, and you make enormous profit for such a widely-viewed commercial.
"Intended market". Now there's a bullshit legalese term if I ever heard one.
The 'intended market' line is a convenient way to say "We're too lazy to localize our series, or negotiate and organize syndication deals elsewhere". When that is the only reason for not having a full, global market, then you are throwing away vast potential revenue, and you should not be allowed to complain about 'piracy' hurting your bottom line. Hell, if they were good businesspeople they would offer free viewing on their site for non-intended markets so their content can reach everyone regardless of subscriptions and fees.
I'd also like to point out the fallacy that is "If they didn't pirate it, they'd pay for it". That's just complete nonsense, and applies to a very small amount of piracy cases. In my case, I only pirate stuff I would never pay for. If I'm willing to pay for it, in any way or at any point, I will just buy it instead.
I would wager there are almost as many people who pay for HBO who aren't 'consuming' this series as there are people who pirate it. At least this guy understands that he's not hurting for cash, and doesn't feel the need to squeeze every possible penny out of every person to ever hear the series' name. I would be OK with it if this guy wants to run the country.
I think you're confusing a billion pages and 'users' with a billion actual people. There is nowhere near a billion people using Facebook. I would wager that there is maybe half a billion actual, real people who use it. The rest are interest pages and duplicate accounts. I know several people who have multiple accounts of their own, and a few who actually have dozens to spam likes and comment blasts for fun and profit.
Google would not benefit from the use of Android in this phone. Likewise, they won't lose if they decide NOT to use Android as a base. Hell, if they decide to go with Microsoft, when(not if) Microsoft screws something up completely and their products have some huge fiasco that drives people away, Google-based handsets are perfectly in line to greet the exodus.
I don't understand these 'creepy Google privacy concerns'. Is it astoundingly computer-illiterate people buying into MS's 'scroogled' ads? Is it people just not understanding the way phones, apps, software, operating systems, and the internet as a whole work? If you know how to run and manage your devices, Android is an excellent operating system with almost no privacy concerns to speak of.
If you're Jane Dipshit who just buys it from the AT&T(Worst.Company.Ever.) store and powers it up, of course it's full of bloatware and invasive shit. This is what I (less than) affectionately call the 'Mac Syndrome'. "I have a Mac, and it just does what I want it right away. I shouldn't have to know how this computer stuff works, durrrrrr.... OMG Google is spying! The competitors said so!" *drools on self*
If you want to use a computer, you should be required to at least understand in a broad sense how a computer works. What is a hard drive, what is RAM, what is a network, etc. Mac Syndrome is much like driving a Ferrari without knowing what the wheels do. I can only imagine how many Macfools are flipping their shit without any more optical media.
The app on Android was abysmal at best. I couldn't properly shut it down(not sure how it kept restarting itself with no input). I would have to go into the settings window and manually kill the task every couple hours or it would start up and 'sync' something(even after I told it not to sync anything). It would also turn on notifications randomly every couple days even after I disabled them. I have since removed it and canceled my FB account(fuck FB, seriously, what a waste of time).
Hands-down the absolute worst app ever created for a smartphone. After trying it for a couple weeks, I would rather intentionally download several horrible viruses.
I, too, was wondering what this 'tech skills crisis' was. I have yet to see it.
I see plenty of bloated ads requiring nuts skills for things I could do in my sleep, but that's hardly a crisis - that's just moron HR people copying other companies' ads out of laziness, or not really understanding the job they are hiring for.
For building abstract, conceptual 3D objects, I find Maya or 3DS Max are the best. The uniform interface style Autodesk provides is very easy to learn across programs, and they both seem to achieve the same end result in different ways. I use these mostly for creating models for video games or for CG animations, but I have saved the odd.OBJ and 3D printed it before.
For creating something you actually want to mass produce, or even I would suppose for the one-off 3D printed objects, SolidWorks can't be beat. It is the fastest and most accurate CAD/3D platform I have ever used. I was able to create some very complicated and measurement-accurate CAD drawings - complete with 3D render, engineering diagrams and tests, and various export formats - in just minutes with zero experience.
All of the aforementioned programs are very expensive, but Autodesk has free student software, and if you look hard enough everything is free on the internet.
The idea that the Internet is "cyberspace" is stupid.
Only insofar as that every computer can have its own little piece of cyber-space, and until they are all connected together by a network, they can't be logically visualized as a single coherent space(cyber or otherwise).
Slashdot Mirror
Just think of all the lawsuits from Apple when they get to Windows X!
Unless you're eating late-night Indian food, 'naan' is not an acceptable replacement for 'midnight'.
I have the checkbox to disable advertising from karma or whatever, but to be honest I've never seen an ad on /.
Thanks, AdBlock Plus! *Cheesy Sunny-D Smile*
Can you really not stand to not read Slashdot for one day if it bothers you that much? Are you really complaining about their free news aggregation community that has been a longstanding staple of the tech world? Do you really think one AF prank is going to alienate readers who have been here for decades?
You are a true April fool.
The comments on this 'article' are far funnier than the "explanation of our April Fool's joke" summary. Ohgawd.
Exactly this. It's a non-story. They aren't saying Apple doesn't have trademark over iPad Mini, but that 'iPad Mini' is already considered a trademark because iPad is already thus trademarked.
No, that is completely unrelated. You are saying "There is always someone out there who wants something for nothing." That is true, but what we are discussing is something completely different: In this case, there is something people want, and they are willing to pay for it, but the provider will not allow them to buy it.
This DOES make copyright infringement OK - at least in my(and many people's) view. If you can't legally purchase something even if you want to, then they aren't losing any sales when you pirate the media, and there is no loss for them. The losses they experience in the long run come from their failed business model not allowing them to take your money, not from your actions of piracy.
I'm not sure: Is it still Godwin's Law if it's compared to rape or murder(or something equally as horrible but unrelated) instead of Nazis or Hitler?
And third, it's completely incorrect to say piracy/copyright infringement has no victim just because you don't like the victim
Ok, I'll bite: in his story about pirating a french cartoon, who was the victim? He made every attempt possible to pay(a rather excessive price) for their goods, and they refused him. Who is he hurting by downloading it in this case? They didn't lose a sale, because they wouldn't sell it to him. They didn't lose the show, because piracy is not theft - it is free copying.
If you really believe that piracy in this way has a victim, you are a brain damaged hypercapitalist shill, and I thank a deity of your choosing that you do not influence my life.
It is also readily apparent that you were not demonstratively using hyperbole in your original post, but that you simply dropped the comparison as a simple false argument to try to shock people away from logic and critical thought. Rape is not a tool for your argument, and they aren't remotely the same thing. You are a bad person, and you should feel bad.
there is no such thing as a victimless crime
Not sure if trolling...or retarded.
There are many things that are plainly and obviously victimless crimes, including many drug charges, traffic citations, and the fact that 'suicide' is a crime. It just so happens that copyright violation is also a victimless crime, unless you buy into the proven-false propaganda that people who pirate media would buy it if they couldn't pirate it.
You call the copyright mafia 'the victim' and then say
Copyright terms and validity actually have nothing to do with my point
followed by a list of copyright terms and your opinion on their validity.
Wow, now there's a degree of hypocrisy, double-talk, and bullshit I don't see every day.
Are you really calling the litigious, antiquated, ineffective businesses encompassed by the MPAA and their ilk 'the victims' on par with a rape victim? Clearly, even if you say 'the harm is much less' your comparison is nonsense and doesn't stand up to any real analysis. If you make an actual argument I might even agree with you, but you just spit a false comparison, and followed up with repeated defenses of your (rather insensitive to rape victims) retarded analogy.
If they provided a better, simple, modern, cost-efficient and popular way to view their program, which was already easily available to them(oh, I don't know, like....the internet?) then many pirates would not do so. I am one of those many pirates. They don't provide this, hence, they induce much of the piracy with their company's policies and business model.
But hey, it's always good to throw rape randomly into a comment to shock people away from critical thinking, right?
You want hi-def... therefore you now need a Bluray player... simple.
Hi, this is reality, have we met? If you think BluRay is the only viable way to watch HD content, you are too stupid to properly insult.
You know what's more awesome than paying $50 for a season's worth of GOT on BD months or a year after it airs? Downloading GOT the night it airs, with the same quality, for free(or for a few bucks if they allow it).
Also, how much of what you pay for your Dish do you think goes to things like Nickelodeon, or 6 news channels, or HGTV, or CrimeTV, or Nogginz, or whatever, which you will never watch? Wouldn't it be nice if you could avoid paying so much for just a few episodes you actually want to see?
Welcome to the discussion. I think you're pretty well caught up now.
If someone wants to choose to 'cut the cord', they damn-well have that right. Piracy provides the customer an alternative to paying inflated fees encompassing a myriad of things they don't even want to get a minutia of things they do want. After how much money I shoveled into cable and satellite so they can provide things I don't watch like CourtTV and HGTV, I don't even feel bad ripping off the new shows. This is now something that competes with cable and publishers, and they should start adjusting their business model accordingly instead of whining and suing people over it.
If the publishers don't supply them an alternative to an antiquated and poorly-managed business model like subscription cable, then it's THEIR OWN fault when the customers pirate the shows. It is THE PUBLISHER'S FAULT that they did not make that sale, because they failed to meet the needs of the consumer. If I can go online and download a DRM-Free copy of the show the day it airs or within a couple days of then, I will happily toss up to a few dollars at a show I want to see.
It is an incredible waste for them, in an age where they can EASILY and really inexpensively do just that: provide digital viewing per-episode at a reasonable market value through the now-ubiquitous internet. It is not the pirates ruining their sales, it is their own incompetence and bullshit legal impasses. Simply put: Less laws and distribution red tape, along with embracing technology instead of fighting it, would allow them to make more money without being seen as assholes.
Here's a breakdown of what I pay and what I would pay if they did adopt a per-episode sale model:
Now:
Cable - ~$150/month
--$70 30Mbps Internet
--$40 Expanded Digital Cable(required for premium add-ons)
--$15 HBO
--$17 Showtime
New Model:
Cable - ~$70/month
--$70 30Mbps Internet
Publishers - ~$36 (at ~$3/episode, part of the year)
--$15 Dexter 4-5 episodes per month, some of the year
--$15 Breaking Bad 4-5 episodes per month, some of the year
--$6 A couple other shows that pique my interest, occasionally
(I don't like or watch GOT, or anything else currently airing on HBO)
This rounds out, entirely, my paid TV viewing schedule. Everything else I watch is available on free, OTA TV(hell, it's even in HD Digital now).
missing out on the cost to distribute it worldwide
Welcome to the internet: Where video can be shared with everyone, worldwide, regardless of their cable subscription or locale, for pennies.
Storage/CDN, bandwidth, hosting. Done. Pennies. Also let's not forget a couple ads in the mix can generate them exceedingly more money than they spend to distribute it. Shit, throw a single commercial in the file and upload it to TPB yourself. Then you don't have to pay for bandwidth or hosting, and you make enormous profit for such a widely-viewed commercial.
"Intended market". Now there's a bullshit legalese term if I ever heard one.
The 'intended market' line is a convenient way to say "We're too lazy to localize our series, or negotiate and organize syndication deals elsewhere". When that is the only reason for not having a full, global market, then you are throwing away vast potential revenue, and you should not be allowed to complain about 'piracy' hurting your bottom line. Hell, if they were good businesspeople they would offer free viewing on their site for non-intended markets so their content can reach everyone regardless of subscriptions and fees.
I'd also like to point out the fallacy that is "If they didn't pirate it, they'd pay for it". That's just complete nonsense, and applies to a very small amount of piracy cases. In my case, I only pirate stuff I would never pay for. If I'm willing to pay for it, in any way or at any point, I will just buy it instead.
I would wager there are almost as many people who pay for HBO who aren't 'consuming' this series as there are people who pirate it. At least this guy understands that he's not hurting for cash, and doesn't feel the need to squeeze every possible penny out of every person to ever hear the series' name. I would be OK with it if this guy wants to run the country.
I think you're confusing a billion pages and 'users' with a billion actual people. There is nowhere near a billion people using Facebook. I would wager that there is maybe half a billion actual, real people who use it. The rest are interest pages and duplicate accounts. I know several people who have multiple accounts of their own, and a few who actually have dozens to spam likes and comment blasts for fun and profit.
Google would not benefit from the use of Android in this phone. Likewise, they won't lose if they decide NOT to use Android as a base. Hell, if they decide to go with Microsoft, when(not if) Microsoft screws something up completely and their products have some huge fiasco that drives people away, Google-based handsets are perfectly in line to greet the exodus.
I don't understand these 'creepy Google privacy concerns'. Is it astoundingly computer-illiterate people buying into MS's 'scroogled' ads? Is it people just not understanding the way phones, apps, software, operating systems, and the internet as a whole work? If you know how to run and manage your devices, Android is an excellent operating system with almost no privacy concerns to speak of.
If you're Jane Dipshit who just buys it from the AT&T(Worst.Company.Ever.) store and powers it up, of course it's full of bloatware and invasive shit. This is what I (less than) affectionately call the 'Mac Syndrome'. "I have a Mac, and it just does what I want it right away. I shouldn't have to know how this computer stuff works, durrrrrr.... OMG Google is spying! The competitors said so!" *drools on self*
If you want to use a computer, you should be required to at least understand in a broad sense how a computer works. What is a hard drive, what is RAM, what is a network, etc. Mac Syndrome is much like driving a Ferrari without knowing what the wheels do. I can only imagine how many Macfools are flipping their shit without any more optical media.
You know, except the Moto Droid line...which also happens to be the best Android phone line in production.
The app on Android was abysmal at best. I couldn't properly shut it down(not sure how it kept restarting itself with no input). I would have to go into the settings window and manually kill the task every couple hours or it would start up and 'sync' something(even after I told it not to sync anything). It would also turn on notifications randomly every couple days even after I disabled them. I have since removed it and canceled my FB account(fuck FB, seriously, what a waste of time).
Hands-down the absolute worst app ever created for a smartphone. After trying it for a couple weeks, I would rather intentionally download several horrible viruses.
I, too, was wondering what this 'tech skills crisis' was. I have yet to see it.
I see plenty of bloated ads requiring nuts skills for things I could do in my sleep, but that's hardly a crisis - that's just moron HR people copying other companies' ads out of laziness, or not really understanding the job they are hiring for.
For building abstract, conceptual 3D objects, I find Maya or 3DS Max are the best. The uniform interface style Autodesk provides is very easy to learn across programs, and they both seem to achieve the same end result in different ways. I use these mostly for creating models for video games or for CG animations, but I have saved the odd .OBJ and 3D printed it before.
For creating something you actually want to mass produce, or even I would suppose for the one-off 3D printed objects, SolidWorks can't be beat. It is the fastest and most accurate CAD/3D platform I have ever used. I was able to create some very complicated and measurement-accurate CAD drawings - complete with 3D render, engineering diagrams and tests, and various export formats - in just minutes with zero experience.
All of the aforementioned programs are very expensive, but Autodesk has free student software, and if you look hard enough everything is free on the internet.
The idea that the Internet is "cyberspace" is stupid.
Only insofar as that every computer can have its own little piece of cyber-space, and until they are all connected together by a network, they can't be logically visualized as a single coherent space(cyber or otherwise).