Ah, but that was fairly late in the game, a better example (IMHO) would be early days of the space program when the general mentality among a lot of western leaders was "if they can put stuff in orbit then they can nuke us from anywhere! We need to one up them, now!".
Now, substitute "stuff in orbit" in the first part of that with "space stations (that aren't just very expensive tin cans with solar panels)".
Sadly I suspect that the one thing that would really get NASA and ESA some serious funding would be if say, Pakistan, India and China all started attempts at building military space stations, especially China since they have the resources coupled with a "Just get it up there right now!" attitude similar to that of the soviets.
It's not so easy to sit back and relax when some other guy decides that you can just train more astronauts if a few die if it means you get there first.
Oh god, Angelfire, they still have a website I made in the mid-90's when I was in high school. I forgot the password an eternity ago but that site is still there, I'm just glad I didn't use my real name anywhere on the page...
The last update I made on the page was apparently in 1998 (I mentioned that I had lost interest in my website).
Well, by that line of reasoning there would be no open source since there is no direct economic incentive to contribute no sane human would do that, right? right?
Classic and horrible analogy, that would be like deleting the original data after copying it. And I'm pretty sure if you could just scan your neighbour's Ferrari and then make an exact replica he/she would be thrilled and might even ask you to make him/her a second Ferrari. Ferrari might not be so happy about it though (even though such technology would seriously lower the manufacturing costs).
Bad analogy as well. Money is a tool we use so that we don't have to revert to a primitive direct barter system and from this point of view the "bits and bytes" in your bank account are actually accessible as a physical item (cash), with something like a CD or a video game this is not the case, they are (ostensibly) works of art, an expression of ideas and can be replicated infinitely without losing their purpose and meaning (unlike cash which if replicated would lose its value for all involved).
Think of it this way, copying a CD is like adding the sum in someone else's bank account to that in your own without subtracting the same sum from that person's account and since there is an agreed-upon artificial scarcity on money the value of all money would decrease if you just created more of it, the music on the CD does not become less of what it is just because I make one, ten or a thousand copies of it.
/Mikael (I'd explain in even more detail but I think you're just trolling)
I'll just skip the car analogy since we're not dealing with physical goods here.
So what would you pay for a movie, a song or a copy of "professional" software? All of these cost corporations/people time and money. Would you only pay $10 for a copy of some software that took $25m to develop or a movie with a $100m budget? Why do you only stop at things you can anonymously download and create a perfect copy of?
Well, the thing about pro software is that the "target consumer" is the pro who can afford to pay thousands of dollars for it, for a hobbyist or someone who's just messing around at home and wouldn't have bought it anyway the only sensible approach (if there's no comparable free alternative) is to pirate it. For software like Maya and MATLAB the copy protection just needs to be hard enough to get around that the companies making the software can make a reasonable case that any professionals using pirated copies were well aware of what they were doing, they know they can't get $3000 for Maya from some hobbyist who's just playing with it at home (once that hobbyist starts offering his/her services for pay OTOH).
As for movies and music you only addressed the cost issue and even there there's a problem, I now of several albums I've downloaded because the only places selling them that I could find were american companies that wouldn't ship internationally and my local record store wanted $30+ per album to get them for albums that were retailing at $12 or so in the US. Not to mention movies and games where there's only a Region 1/US release because us swedes are supposed to wait until the publisher/studio has run its marketing campaign and added french and german vocals (and various subtitle tracks), I don't need any of that I just want to watch the damn movie/play the damn game.
Also, considering the quality of a lot of movies this could be seen as simple supply and demand, people simply aren't willing to pay what Hollywood wants them to pay for their movies, they don't consider them worth that much (but when they're free people will at least give the movies a shot).
It's like you just chose not to read half the words in my original comment.
If something's expensive, why do you feel the right to watch it/listen to it/use it, when others have to pay?
Well, this is the classic "try before you buy" combined with factors like "I have a few friends over and --- asks me if I have a specific album", in both cases I'm unlikely to listen to it again and the act of listening to it once will actually be a waste of my time.
As for convenience, that's no excuse at all, it's just laziness. Given the ease of legally downloading these days, it's even less of an excuse.
I see you missed the "(DRM)" bit in my post, I like to have control over data, something which I suspect I'm not alone in here on slashdot.
As for pirating professional software for 'fun' or 'non-commercial' use, if you don't need all the features, then why not get a more limited program that does what you want and actually compensate a developer? On the other hand, if you do need the features, then pay the money or don't use it.
If I pirate it I generally want to use specific features not available in open source alternatives (as I pointed out! Please do yourself and everyone else a favor and read comments before replying to them.). Also, just because I feel like using some Maya-specific feature that isn't available in Blender doesn't mean it would make any sense whatsoever for me to shell out $3000+ for a Maya license, no one pays for Maya unless they're doing for-pay work (and the developers are well aware of this and the "trial" version is a joke).
You don't have a right to use something for free just because you think it's too expensive.
I can definitely think of quite a few situations in which a vast majority of people would disagree with this argument (e.g. AIDS medicine licensing).
It seems strange to me considering the pricing and how much more convenient it is (at least IMO) to just use the App store. In fact, all the apps I've got on my iPhone are from the App store and were either free there or I paid for them.
That's not to say I'm fervently anti-piracy, I'll admit that I've downloaded a fair amount of movies, music and software in my life but it's almost always been because it was too expensive, not yet released where I live or simply much more convenient to do so.
As an example, a piece large expensive "professional" software that I want to use at home for fun or some minor non-commercial purpose isn't something I'm about to pony up $300 or whatever it costs for (I try to use open source when there is a good alternative), I've also downloaded games simply because I wasn't willing to pay full price to play it once for a few hours with a friend or two and then never play again. As for music and movies it tends to be a combination of pricing ($20 for an album I've never heard that probably only has a handful of good songs?), convenience (DRM) and it simply not being available where I live yet (woohoo, ordering Region 1 DVDs from the US). But a $4 iPhone game that can be downloaded in a minute at the click of a button? That seems pointless to me...
The problem probably wouldn't be getting Google to route your traffic to Cogent through their net, the problem would be Cogent blackholing all traffic from your AS regardless of how it was routed to them (as they've done before).
Anyone feel like taking bets on how long it will take until the other Tier 1 ISPs gang up on Cogent and just shut off their peering to Cogent?
Seriously, every one of these conflicts that Cogent gets involved in seems to involve Cogent acting like a bunch of dicks and the only people defending them are their most loyal customers and their employees, why are they even still in business?
Actually, from what I've seen in countries that actually use SI/metric units (I'm not counting Britain, Canada and other "converts") centiliters, decimeters and other similar uses of prefixes are very common. I have a soda bottle next to my laptop right now that has "50 cl" printed on it.
An even easier model is some kind of tube, a lightbulb and a lighter to heat it with. It does require some skill though and if you use it too many times the glass will most likely crack.
All it takes is to plug "lightbulb vaporizer" into Google and you'll get all the info you need.
I can see potential problems with these laws but generally they serve a good purpose in that they force employers to actually negotiate with unions instead of hiring a busload of guys with baseball bats and another busload of scabs just to stick it to the unions.
Of course, maybe you're one of those guys who refer to unions as "employee cartels" and think they should be illegal because they "disturb the natural market forces for labor costs" or something (yes, I've heard people make claims like this).
I have a far harder time visualising 200cm than six foot and there comes a point where units become non descriptive, saying 200cm is to much resolution and 2 meters not enough to make an instant visualisation of a persons height. It becomes even more apparent when saying 160cm, it's completely meaningless, you can't visualise 160 1cm segments or 1.6 meter segments it's impossible, but 5ft is immediate.
You're accustomed to using feet and inches to describe a person's length, here in Sweden most people wouldn't have a clue what 5'8" or 6'1" was without thinking really hard (or consulting Google). But if you told me you were 176 cm/1.76 m or 1.93 m/193 cm I (along with most Swedes) would have a pretty good idea of how tall you were.
Same with inches, it's easier to visualise an inch than it is to visualise 30 mil when giving rough distances, and it's easier to visualise 10cm than 6 inches and so on.
Why is an inch easier to visualize? To me an inch is some arcane unit that has been standardized to 2.54 cm and which everyone insists on using for measuring monitor size (but little else).
And most countries still really use both more than some would like to admit.
Actually, here in Sweden it's almost entirely SI units (and some "extensions" to these like the unit "mil" which is 10 km) except for in certain professions such as carpentry (and even there it's 90% old-fashioned jargon, a "tvåtumfyra" (that is, two-by-four) is actually normally 5x10 cm but the term "tvåtumfyra" lives on even though all carpenters know the real measurements).
Most people who use SI units in their everyday lives are perfectly content to either express fractions as fractions or settle for 0.25, 0.33..., 0.166... and so on. It's more a matter of what you're used to.
As for the meter being too long, well most people here in Sweden don't seem to have any trouble "just knowing" how long a meter is, and there's also the decimeter (0.1 m), centimeter (0.01 m) and millimeter (0.001 m).
As for grams, there are also hectograms (100 g), kilograms (1,000 g) and tons (1,000,000 g) that are all in common use.
Celsius makes a lot more sense to me, 0 C = water freezes, 100 C = water boils (and it's "compatible" with the Kelvin scale). What was it fahrenheit was measured by? 32 F = water freezes, 100 F = body temperature, 212 F = water boils?
Admittedly I have some bias as I am more accustomed to SI units but I find them easier to work with in practically all situations (including everyday situations like cooking where the main problem tends to be with recipes where someone's thrown in some random "add n ounces/cups/hogsheads").
Unfortunately it appears that certain types of games are dying along with PC gaming, such as good RTS games (no, "start, rush, kill everything, if killing everything failed then build more shit and rush rush rush until it works" isn't a good RTS, a good RTS is one with large maps where you don't live next door to your enemy, that would be "realtime tactics" IMHO).
"nth of month, year" isn't exactly uncommon either.
Also, the written form Americans use causes a lot of confusion when dealing with non-Americans who use yyyy-mm-dd, dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd.
And as always, I think grandpa Simpson's classic comment really sums up the attitude behind why so many Americans are reluctant to switching; “My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!”
Most likely you only think "feet" are better than "meters" in D&D because you're used to imperial units and they feel more "natural" to you. As someone who grew up in a country where inches and feet are units only used when dealing with things imported directly from the US I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is, or how heavy something that is "150 pounds" really is, and don't get me started on the British use of "stones" for weight...
Saying that crossing a picket line is disagreeing with the union is like saying that Timothy McWeigh bombing the Alfred P. Murrah building was "disagreeing with the government" in the sense that it went beyond "I disagree with you" (and perhaps elaborating on your point) and into the realm of going against them in actual physical action.
While I don't condone vandalism and threats I can understand why people would be pissed at your father if he was a both a union member and a scab. In fact, in quite a few countries the use of scabs to subvert legal strikes is illegal.
Are you seriously suggesting that the sales of the PC version are likely to be 1/1000th of those for the various consoles? You do realize that this would mean that if the console versions together sold 10,000,000 copies there would only be 10,000 copies sold of the PC version. I find that highly unlikely....
If we assume that the aforementioned 89,000 complaints is the entire PC market for the game then that would, by your logic, mean that they will end up selling 89,000,000 console copies. Why would they even be making a PC version if the market looked like this?
...note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows,...
Of course, the pro-Windows arguments tend to be even sillier (including such classics as complaining about shortcomings that OS X or the hardware it runs on got rid of ages ago, I've encountered people IRL as recently as a few months ago who were utterly unconvinced that Macs supported mice with more than one mouse button, and that they actually ship with mice with more than one button (technically "no" buttons but that's just semantics) was unpossible).
Well, the Amiga still had plenty of enthusiastic (read: Zealous) users as late as the early years of this millenium, really, I've been to demo parties where there were guys still running their A3000 towers with NetBSD and telling anyone who wanted to listen how awesome their rat's nest of a machine with soldered on components, G3-expansion cards and all that was. The Amiga scene seems to be pretty dead these days though (but the even older 8-bit scene has made a comeback since it somehow attained some sort of "retro cool").
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but that was fairly late in the game, a better example (IMHO) would be early days of the space program when the general mentality among a lot of western leaders was "if they can put stuff in orbit then they can nuke us from anywhere! We need to one up them, now!".
Now, substitute "stuff in orbit" in the first part of that with "space stations (that aren't just very expensive tin cans with solar panels)".
/Mikael
Sadly I suspect that the one thing that would really get NASA and ESA some serious funding would be if say, Pakistan, India and China all started attempts at building military space stations, especially China since they have the resources coupled with a "Just get it up there right now!" attitude similar to that of the soviets.
It's not so easy to sit back and relax when some other guy decides that you can just train more astronauts if a few die if it means you get there first.
/Mikael
Oh god, Angelfire, they still have a website I made in the mid-90's when I was in high school. I forgot the password an eternity ago but that site is still there, I'm just glad I didn't use my real name anywhere on the page...
The last update I made on the page was apparently in 1998 (I mentioned that I had lost interest in my website).
/Mikael
Well, by that line of reasoning there would be no open source since there is no direct economic incentive to contribute no sane human would do that, right? right?
/Mikael
Classic and horrible analogy, that would be like deleting the original data after copying it. And I'm pretty sure if you could just scan your neighbour's Ferrari and then make an exact replica he/she would be thrilled and might even ask you to make him/her a second Ferrari. Ferrari might not be so happy about it though (even though such technology would seriously lower the manufacturing costs).
/Mikael
Bad analogy as well. Money is a tool we use so that we don't have to revert to a primitive direct barter system and from this point of view the "bits and bytes" in your bank account are actually accessible as a physical item (cash), with something like a CD or a video game this is not the case, they are (ostensibly) works of art, an expression of ideas and can be replicated infinitely without losing their purpose and meaning (unlike cash which if replicated would lose its value for all involved).
Think of it this way, copying a CD is like adding the sum in someone else's bank account to that in your own without subtracting the same sum from that person's account and since there is an agreed-upon artificial scarcity on money the value of all money would decrease if you just created more of it, the music on the CD does not become less of what it is just because I make one, ten or a thousand copies of it.
/Mikael (I'd explain in even more detail but I think you're just trolling)
I'll just skip the car analogy since we're not dealing with physical goods here.
So what would you pay for a movie, a song or a copy of "professional" software? All of these cost corporations/people time and money. Would you only pay $10 for a copy of some software that took $25m to develop or a movie with a $100m budget? Why do you only stop at things you can anonymously download and create a perfect copy of?
Well, the thing about pro software is that the "target consumer" is the pro who can afford to pay thousands of dollars for it, for a hobbyist or someone who's just messing around at home and wouldn't have bought it anyway the only sensible approach (if there's no comparable free alternative) is to pirate it. For software like Maya and MATLAB the copy protection just needs to be hard enough to get around that the companies making the software can make a reasonable case that any professionals using pirated copies were well aware of what they were doing, they know they can't get $3000 for Maya from some hobbyist who's just playing with it at home (once that hobbyist starts offering his/her services for pay OTOH).
As for movies and music you only addressed the cost issue and even there there's a problem, I now of several albums I've downloaded because the only places selling them that I could find were american companies that wouldn't ship internationally and my local record store wanted $30+ per album to get them for albums that were retailing at $12 or so in the US. Not to mention movies and games where there's only a Region 1/US release because us swedes are supposed to wait until the publisher/studio has run its marketing campaign and added french and german vocals (and various subtitle tracks), I don't need any of that I just want to watch the damn movie/play the damn game.
Also, considering the quality of a lot of movies this could be seen as simple supply and demand, people simply aren't willing to pay what Hollywood wants them to pay for their movies, they don't consider them worth that much (but when they're free people will at least give the movies a shot).
/Mikael
I know, but it still involves jailbreaking and doing a bit of setup before the pirated download becomes easier than a legit download.
/Mikael
It's like you just chose not to read half the words in my original comment.
If something's expensive, why do you feel the right to watch it/listen to it/use it, when others have to pay?
Well, this is the classic "try before you buy" combined with factors like "I have a few friends over and --- asks me if I have a specific album", in both cases I'm unlikely to listen to it again and the act of listening to it once will actually be a waste of my time.
As for convenience, that's no excuse at all, it's just laziness. Given the ease of legally downloading these days, it's even less of an excuse.
I see you missed the "(DRM)" bit in my post, I like to have control over data, something which I suspect I'm not alone in here on slashdot.
As for pirating professional software for 'fun' or 'non-commercial' use, if you don't need all the features, then why not get a more limited program that does what you want and actually compensate a developer? On the other hand, if you do need the features, then pay the money or don't use it.
If I pirate it I generally want to use specific features not available in open source alternatives (as I pointed out! Please do yourself and everyone else a favor and read comments before replying to them.). Also, just because I feel like using some Maya-specific feature that isn't available in Blender doesn't mean it would make any sense whatsoever for me to shell out $3000+ for a Maya license, no one pays for Maya unless they're doing for-pay work (and the developers are well aware of this and the "trial" version is a joke).
You don't have a right to use something for free just because you think it's too expensive.
I can definitely think of quite a few situations in which a vast majority of people would disagree with this argument (e.g. AIDS medicine licensing).
/Mikael
It seems strange to me considering the pricing and how much more convenient it is (at least IMO) to just use the App store. In fact, all the apps I've got on my iPhone are from the App store and were either free there or I paid for them.
That's not to say I'm fervently anti-piracy, I'll admit that I've downloaded a fair amount of movies, music and software in my life but it's almost always been because it was too expensive, not yet released where I live or simply much more convenient to do so.
As an example, a piece large expensive "professional" software that I want to use at home for fun or some minor non-commercial purpose isn't something I'm about to pony up $300 or whatever it costs for (I try to use open source when there is a good alternative), I've also downloaded games simply because I wasn't willing to pay full price to play it once for a few hours with a friend or two and then never play again. As for music and movies it tends to be a combination of pricing ($20 for an album I've never heard that probably only has a handful of good songs?), convenience (DRM) and it simply not being available where I live yet (woohoo, ordering Region 1 DVDs from the US). But a $4 iPhone game that can be downloaded in a minute at the click of a button? That seems pointless to me...
/Mikael
The problem probably wouldn't be getting Google to route your traffic to Cogent through their net, the problem would be Cogent blackholing all traffic from your AS regardless of how it was routed to them (as they've done before).
/Mikael
Anyone feel like taking bets on how long it will take until the other Tier 1 ISPs gang up on Cogent and just shut off their peering to Cogent?
Seriously, every one of these conflicts that Cogent gets involved in seems to involve Cogent acting like a bunch of dicks and the only people defending them are their most loyal customers and their employees, why are they even still in business?
/Mikael
Actually, from what I've seen in countries that actually use SI/metric units (I'm not counting Britain, Canada and other "converts") centiliters, decimeters and other similar uses of prefixes are very common. I have a soda bottle next to my laptop right now that has "50 cl" printed on it.
/Mikael
An even easier model is some kind of tube, a lightbulb and a lighter to heat it with. It does require some skill though and if you use it too many times the glass will most likely crack.
All it takes is to plug "lightbulb vaporizer" into Google and you'll get all the info you need.
/Mikael
I can see potential problems with these laws but generally they serve a good purpose in that they force employers to actually negotiate with unions instead of hiring a busload of guys with baseball bats and another busload of scabs just to stick it to the unions.
Of course, maybe you're one of those guys who refer to unions as "employee cartels" and think they should be illegal because they "disturb the natural market forces for labor costs" or something (yes, I've heard people make claims like this).
/Mikael
I have a far harder time visualising 200cm than six foot and there comes a point where units become non descriptive, saying 200cm is to much resolution and 2 meters not enough to make an instant visualisation of a persons height. It becomes even more apparent when saying 160cm, it's completely meaningless, you can't visualise 160 1cm segments or 1.6 meter segments it's impossible, but 5ft is immediate.
You're accustomed to using feet and inches to describe a person's length, here in Sweden most people wouldn't have a clue what 5'8" or 6'1" was without thinking really hard (or consulting Google). But if you told me you were 176 cm/1.76 m or 1.93 m/193 cm I (along with most Swedes) would have a pretty good idea of how tall you were.
Same with inches, it's easier to visualise an inch than it is to visualise 30 mil when giving rough distances, and it's easier to visualise 10cm than 6 inches and so on.
Why is an inch easier to visualize? To me an inch is some arcane unit that has been standardized to 2.54 cm and which everyone insists on using for measuring monitor size (but little else).
And most countries still really use both more than some would like to admit.
Actually, here in Sweden it's almost entirely SI units (and some "extensions" to these like the unit "mil" which is 10 km) except for in certain professions such as carpentry (and even there it's 90% old-fashioned jargon, a "tvåtumfyra" (that is, two-by-four) is actually normally 5x10 cm but the term "tvåtumfyra" lives on even though all carpenters know the real measurements).
/Mikael
Most people who use SI units in their everyday lives are perfectly content to either express fractions as fractions or settle for 0.25, 0.33..., 0.166... and so on. It's more a matter of what you're used to.
As for the meter being too long, well most people here in Sweden don't seem to have any trouble "just knowing" how long a meter is, and there's also the decimeter (0.1 m), centimeter (0.01 m) and millimeter (0.001 m).
As for grams, there are also hectograms (100 g), kilograms (1,000 g) and tons (1,000,000 g) that are all in common use.
Celsius makes a lot more sense to me, 0 C = water freezes, 100 C = water boils (and it's "compatible" with the Kelvin scale). What was it fahrenheit was measured by? 32 F = water freezes, 100 F = body temperature, 212 F = water boils?
Admittedly I have some bias as I am more accustomed to SI units but I find them easier to work with in practically all situations (including everyday situations like cooking where the main problem tends to be with recipes where someone's thrown in some random "add n ounces/cups/hogsheads").
/Mikael
Unfortunately it appears that certain types of games are dying along with PC gaming, such as good RTS games (no, "start, rush, kill everything, if killing everything failed then build more shit and rush rush rush until it works" isn't a good RTS, a good RTS is one with large maps where you don't live next door to your enemy, that would be "realtime tactics" IMHO).
/Mikael
"nth of month, year" isn't exactly uncommon either.
Also, the written form Americans use causes a lot of confusion when dealing with non-Americans who use yyyy-mm-dd, dd/mm/yyyy or yyyy/mm/dd.
And as always, I think grandpa Simpson's classic comment really sums up the attitude behind why so many Americans are reluctant to switching; “My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!”
/Mikael
Most likely you only think "feet" are better than "meters" in D&D because you're used to imperial units and they feel more "natural" to you. As someone who grew up in a country where inches and feet are units only used when dealing with things imported directly from the US I always have to stop and think for a second when trying to remember how long "five feet" is, or how heavy something that is "150 pounds" really is, and don't get me started on the British use of "stones" for weight...
/Mikael
Saying that crossing a picket line is disagreeing with the union is like saying that Timothy McWeigh bombing the Alfred P. Murrah building was "disagreeing with the government" in the sense that it went beyond "I disagree with you" (and perhaps elaborating on your point) and into the realm of going against them in actual physical action.
While I don't condone vandalism and threats I can understand why people would be pissed at your father if he was a both a union member and a scab. In fact, in quite a few countries the use of scabs to subvert legal strikes is illegal.
/Mikael
Are you seriously suggesting that the sales of the PC version are likely to be 1/1000th of those for the various consoles? You do realize that this would mean that if the console versions together sold 10,000,000 copies there would only be 10,000 copies sold of the PC version. I find that highly unlikely....
If we assume that the aforementioned 89,000 complaints is the entire PC market for the game then that would, by your logic, mean that they will end up selling 89,000,000 console copies. Why would they even be making a PC version if the market looked like this?
/Mikael
That FAQ entry concerns content posted by the editors, not comments.
/Mikael
...note that every pro-Mac argument is simply an argument against Windows,...
Of course, the pro-Windows arguments tend to be even sillier (including such classics as complaining about shortcomings that OS X or the hardware it runs on got rid of ages ago, I've encountered people IRL as recently as a few months ago who were utterly unconvinced that Macs supported mice with more than one mouse button, and that they actually ship with mice with more than one button (technically "no" buttons but that's just semantics) was unpossible).
/Mikael
Well, the Amiga still had plenty of enthusiastic (read: Zealous) users as late as the early years of this millenium, really, I've been to demo parties where there were guys still running their A3000 towers with NetBSD and telling anyone who wanted to listen how awesome their rat's nest of a machine with soldered on components, G3-expansion cards and all that was. The Amiga scene seems to be pretty dead these days though (but the even older 8-bit scene has made a comeback since it somehow attained some sort of "retro cool").
/Mikael