I have about three and a half thousand songs, all either ripped from CDs, bought from iTunes or actually legitimately free to download. I estimate it must have cost me about £2100 over the past five years. I'm probably just insane.
I had one with Sky, a British satellite TV company. One call to my bank sorted it all out within minutes. I don't know what things are like in the US, but in the UK there are a lot of rules governing Direct Debit, and lots of emphasis placed on "if things go wrong, the bank will make them right".
I'd like to see the employer who tried to fire me over bad credit.
It happens. Financial institutions tend to be scrupulous over how employees conduct their finances. Go bankrupt or go over your overdraft limit, and it's VERY likely you could at the least have disciplinary action taken. My employer have a clause in the employee handbook about it.
See, even if I could afford Super Awesome Broadband, and even though it sounds like a great idea, I really can't stomach having an AUP of "don't do anything illegal or stupid". That's incredibly vague, and sounds like they could kick you off for just about anything within the rubrick of "stupid". Not that that'd stand up in a legal context, but still...
I'm with John Lewis' Greenbee Telecoms division. Shitty download caps but no blocks, and you just pay for what you use over your (meagre) bandwidth allowance. Not had any downtime or tech problems in the three months I've been with them. They also appear to be quite friendly to BitTorrent, if you're into that sort of thing.
As far as I'm concerned, having advertising rammed down your throats in a game that retails for $60 is adequate grounds for piracy. After all they're still going to make money off of you.
You know, I swear half of Slashdot keeps its fingers crossed for someone to do something objectionable with something they'd like to buy, just so they've got an "excuse" to pirate it. Every time someone does something that goes against the Slashdot groupthink - DRM, advertising, supporting the RIAA, saying they don't want people warezing their stuff, reporting statistics saying whatever they make has a high piracy rate - there's always a load of people who come out with "Well I guess that means I have to pirate it."
It's like a little kid faced with a huge cake, which he really, really wants, then he sees it has an expiration date of today. And he sees the date and sorta says, out loud, so nobody is in any doubt as to that he really doesn't want to, "Oh well, I guess I'll just HAVE to eat this delicious cake all by myself, because the cake-maker's actions have FORCED ME TO." Of course, we all know what the kid's original intention was, and the expiration date was just as convenient an excuse as possible. Same with this.
Examples: "Ads? In my game?! NO THANKS! I'll pirate instead!" "SecuROM? Really? I guess The Pirate Bay will be getting MY business!" "Guitar Hero Eleventybillion doesn't have CCR's Fortunate Son? Warez time!" "They're not releasing for Linux?! To Mininova?" "They won't produce downloads in the obscure format and insanely high bitrate which I demand?! Well, I'll just download the MP3 instead! They should listen to their customers, i.e. me." "RIAA doesn't care about quality! So I'm gonna download this album because it's probably going to be crap anyway." (Real argument - my response is that if you know it's shitty, why are you downloading it?!)
Urgh. You fool nobody. While I don't like piracy in general, I have more of a respect for people who come right out and say they just want the Hot New Shinies for free, rather than trying to look like Gandhi with some shitty little protest - a protest which conveniently allows them to get Hot New Shinies for free.
Amen to that. I use Direct Debit for everything except paying my credit cards (because I like to choose odd amounts to pay each month, and DD won't let me do that) and the only problem has been with Sky, who are just monumental fucknuts. Everything else has gone very smoothly.
You'd be absolutely horrified the number of people who still pay bills with cheques and cash in this day. They willingly choose to either write out scrappy bits of paper or draw out cash, then stand in a line for god knows how long so they can pay their bills. So goddamn insane, when you can get all of that stuff done for you, automatically and for free.
Because it was created to be sold, and your "information wants to be free, as does entertainment, and anything else I want" bullshit deprives the people who make the stuff that you warez of an income?
"I don't want to pay, it should have been free in the first place" doesn't cut it as an argument. You could use that for anything to wheedle out of paying for anything - it's yet another shitty argument foisted by pirates so they can justify (to themselves) the fact that they're cheap.
While your love of it in the pooper is entirely your own decision, and I respect you for being able to admit it so bravely, I fail to see why the submitter shouldn't take something to the press as a result.
I hear there's a good way of finding out whether a demo of something exists. It's called Google. Searching for "world of goo demo" popped up 2dboy's site, and from there it's about 20 seconds of clicking to get to the demo itself.
DRM was never about piracy prevention, but about maximizing the number of people who would pay, to be forced to buy the game.
So, what you're basically saying is that DRM wasn't about piracy prevention, it was about making people buy the game instead of freeloading it (i.e. preventing piracy). Good one.
Personally, I don't see what's so horrible about stopping freeloaders, but hey.
Cheques are still pretty huge here in the UK. Businesses still use them a lot for payments to other businesses, settling of invoices and whathaveyou, and person to person payments still use them a lot.
It's probably fear of technology that does it; many people, especially the elderly, will trust a bit of paper more than an electronic transaction, even if the latter is actually more secure.
Um, great. So the pirates who download studio albums and claim it's "advertising" might actually be helping to destroy that same "advertising". Brilliant. And those of us who like properly produced studio albums and don't mind paying for them can go screw, I guess? After all, some people want things for free.
I hate this argument, for this reason; producing the sort of high quality, well produced tracks made today costs money. Especially the 5.1 mixes of things. For advertising for live concerts, that's a lot of energy and money spent for very little return. If the recording industry followed this lead, and pirated music was treated as advertising for live concerts, then I would reckon studio-produced music would die out to be replaced with what are now live albums, as the latter are cheaper and provide more effective advertising than the former.
Yes. We are. I can't recall the RIAA ever suing or taking any action to kill off indie music. Can't get on mainstream radio? You can start your own. Not in the charts? Start your own. The RIAA isn't required to give you access to any of their charts, radio or any other shit really.
Goddammit the paranoia on this site is so stupid sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
I have about three and a half thousand songs, all either ripped from CDs, bought from iTunes or actually legitimately free to download. I estimate it must have cost me about £2100 over the past five years. I'm probably just insane.
Then you die.
Duh.
I had one with Sky, a British satellite TV company. One call to my bank sorted it all out within minutes. I don't know what things are like in the US, but in the UK there are a lot of rules governing Direct Debit, and lots of emphasis placed on "if things go wrong, the bank will make them right".
I'd like to see the employer who tried to fire me over bad credit.
It happens. Financial institutions tend to be scrupulous over how employees conduct their finances. Go bankrupt or go over your overdraft limit, and it's VERY likely you could at the least have disciplinary action taken. My employer have a clause in the employee handbook about it.
Or a series of tubes. I know, I know.
At least Demon have the decency to tell you (a little unsurprising, given their history.)
See, even if I could afford Super Awesome Broadband, and even though it sounds like a great idea, I really can't stomach having an AUP of "don't do anything illegal or stupid". That's incredibly vague, and sounds like they could kick you off for just about anything within the rubrick of "stupid". Not that that'd stand up in a legal context, but still...
I'm with John Lewis' Greenbee Telecoms division. Shitty download caps but no blocks, and you just pay for what you use over your (meagre) bandwidth allowance. Not had any downtime or tech problems in the three months I've been with them. They also appear to be quite friendly to BitTorrent, if you're into that sort of thing.
As far as I'm concerned, having advertising rammed down your throats in a game that retails for $60 is adequate grounds for piracy. After all they're still going to make money off of you.
You know, I swear half of Slashdot keeps its fingers crossed for someone to do something objectionable with something they'd like to buy, just so they've got an "excuse" to pirate it. Every time someone does something that goes against the Slashdot groupthink - DRM, advertising, supporting the RIAA, saying they don't want people warezing their stuff, reporting statistics saying whatever they make has a high piracy rate - there's always a load of people who come out with "Well I guess that means I have to pirate it."
It's like a little kid faced with a huge cake, which he really, really wants, then he sees it has an expiration date of today. And he sees the date and sorta says, out loud, so nobody is in any doubt as to that he really doesn't want to, "Oh well, I guess I'll just HAVE to eat this delicious cake all by myself, because the cake-maker's actions have FORCED ME TO." Of course, we all know what the kid's original intention was, and the expiration date was just as convenient an excuse as possible. Same with this.
Examples:
"Ads? In my game?! NO THANKS! I'll pirate instead!"
"SecuROM? Really? I guess The Pirate Bay will be getting MY business!"
"Guitar Hero Eleventybillion doesn't have CCR's Fortunate Son? Warez time!"
"They're not releasing for Linux?! To Mininova?"
"They won't produce downloads in the obscure format and insanely high bitrate which I demand?! Well, I'll just download the MP3 instead! They should listen to their customers, i.e. me."
"RIAA doesn't care about quality! So I'm gonna download this album because it's probably going to be crap anyway." (Real argument - my response is that if you know it's shitty, why are you downloading it?!)
Urgh. You fool nobody. While I don't like piracy in general, I have more of a respect for people who come right out and say they just want the Hot New Shinies for free, rather than trying to look like Gandhi with some shitty little protest - a protest which conveniently allows them to get Hot New Shinies for free.
Rant over.
Amen to that. I use Direct Debit for everything except paying my credit cards (because I like to choose odd amounts to pay each month, and DD won't let me do that) and the only problem has been with Sky, who are just monumental fucknuts. Everything else has gone very smoothly.
You'd be absolutely horrified the number of people who still pay bills with cheques and cash in this day. They willingly choose to either write out scrappy bits of paper or draw out cash, then stand in a line for god knows how long so they can pay their bills. So goddamn insane, when you can get all of that stuff done for you, automatically and for free.
Because it was created to be sold, and your "information wants to be free, as does entertainment, and anything else I want" bullshit deprives the people who make the stuff that you warez of an income?
"I don't want to pay, it should have been free in the first place" doesn't cut it as an argument. You could use that for anything to wheedle out of paying for anything - it's yet another shitty argument foisted by pirates so they can justify (to themselves) the fact that they're cheap.
That's not the point. People reading someone's book for free doesn't magically put money in their bank account or food on their table.
I have an iphone and a supermodels hand on my cock right now.
Whoa, not only do you have a supermodel's hand on your cock, but it's also big enough to fit an ENTIRE IPHONE on it! Lucky bastard!
What sort of reasons? IANAL.
While your love of it in the pooper is entirely your own decision, and I respect you for being able to admit it so bravely, I fail to see why the submitter shouldn't take something to the press as a result.
Isn't that precisely the argument that Microsoft used re: Internet Explorer? Like, "it's just the default, you can change it"?
Do you really think that's a valid argument, in any way whatsoever?
I hear there's a good way of finding out whether a demo of something exists. It's called Google. Searching for "world of goo demo" popped up 2dboy's site, and from there it's about 20 seconds of clicking to get to the demo itself.
DRM was never about piracy prevention, but about maximizing the number of people who would pay, to be forced to buy the game.
So, what you're basically saying is that DRM wasn't about piracy prevention, it was about making people buy the game instead of freeloading it (i.e. preventing piracy). Good one.
Personally, I don't see what's so horrible about stopping freeloaders, but hey.
Cheques are still pretty huge here in the UK. Businesses still use them a lot for payments to other businesses, settling of invoices and whathaveyou, and person to person payments still use them a lot.
It's probably fear of technology that does it; many people, especially the elderly, will trust a bit of paper more than an electronic transaction, even if the latter is actually more secure.
Um, great. So the pirates who download studio albums and claim it's "advertising" might actually be helping to destroy that same "advertising". Brilliant. And those of us who like properly produced studio albums and don't mind paying for them can go screw, I guess? After all, some people want things for free.
Yes, I forgot about the worthy artistic endeavour A Knights Tale. Truly the sparking of a new renaissance, that was.
I hate this argument, for this reason; producing the sort of high quality, well produced tracks made today costs money. Especially the 5.1 mixes of things. For advertising for live concerts, that's a lot of energy and money spent for very little return. If the recording industry followed this lead, and pirated music was treated as advertising for live concerts, then I would reckon studio-produced music would die out to be replaced with what are now live albums, as the latter are cheaper and provide more effective advertising than the former.
Yes. We are. I can't recall the RIAA ever suing or taking any action to kill off indie music. Can't get on mainstream radio? You can start your own. Not in the charts? Start your own. The RIAA isn't required to give you access to any of their charts, radio or any other shit really.
Goddammit the paranoia on this site is so stupid sometimes.
I can't fail to agree with anything you've said. Nice one.
Wondering why there's no replies though. Maybe the "piracy ftw" crowd can't think of a decent rebuttal?
It's not the CDs themselves, dumbass, it's the music contained within them and the right to distribute them, which costs money.