...which is all a side effect of the fact that the copyright owner wants to trample all over your personal property rights associated with the legitimate copy you bought from them.
BBC stuff is horrible when it comes to pricing. They are absolute dead last on my shopping list when it comes to content. There's just too much other cheaper stuff out there to get my attention. Now I have started watching some of their stuff on Netflix because it's there and it's cheap enough. If not for their prima donna pricing, I would have a lot more of their stuff (bought and paid for even).
ANY ethical argument then becomes completely null and void.
Sadly, due to how the industry tries to abuse it's paying customers it is actually much easier to participate in a torrent swarm than to create your own similar media files from the physical disks you already own. This is a practical issue caused by the industry's own paranoia and disrespect for the paying customer.
As someone who uses the more legitimate approach, I really can't fault anyone else for not wanting to bother with it.
The "farming lobby" is more about large megacorps than it is about real farmers. That's the real problem here. If you cut out the farm subsidies then some very large corporations will be hammered right in the pocketbook. They aren't going to take that lying down. Neither will Republicans.
This is all about "big business". Using the word "farm" to refer to any of this is a huge and misleading misnomer.
...except you don't need all of that nonsense to deal with a personal need.
You don't even need to use a "NAS" box. You can just use any number of external storage devices that are big and cheap.
It's not 1995 anymore. The only real reason to fixate on the cloud is devices that are intentionally crippled and need some proprietary service to make up for the fact that they can neither use standard external storage nor standard network protocols nor be freely accessed by non-proprietary tools.
If you have problem with a device in one distro, you're probably going to have the same problem in others.
PnP on Linux pre-dates Mandrake.
If something like ndiswrapper is even in the discussion then clearly there are some basic driver support issues regardless of how well you dress up the hack in question.
I would rather not be tied to a particular company store. Most stuff that's wrapped in DRM and turned into the modern equivalent of a WinDOS application is pure data that doesn't really need such a dependency. This goes for Amazon too. Except they strive to have wider and more device support than Apple.
> Prior to patent every company kept its own in house guarded secrets which they literally had to write special rules to guard
Companies still have that. They have that for things that they don't want an expiring patent on.
The problem with patents, is that most of them are not terribly inventive. The net "social cost" of the pre-patent situation is far less destructive than the actual current patent system. The entire industry for the most part would be far better off if they could simply re-invent everything they need inhouse. This is generally how it's done anyways since patent searches are a bothersome waste of resources that only increase your liability should you be found to violate a patent.
FAT is essentially a "file format" as is any other file system. Patents on those simply should be illegal. People's data should not be held hostage by a monopoly.
So the R&D needs to be liberated from crap design, crap marketing, and crap management.
IOW, much of the current patent regime needs to be gutted in order to prevent the industry from being crippled in a manner that is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the original intents of patents and intellectual property in general.
IBM has been doing mind blowing basic research since before Microsoft existed. If IBM has a patent, there's a good chance that it is for something actually real that is an integral part of your current Slashdot experience.
So who does IBM troll?
They could probably troll all of the Android vendors too, and Apple, and Microsoft.
Linux users respect the developer and their choices. This is inherent in the whole GPL thing.
I see a product and I am willing to pay a fair price for it. I won't make excuses meant to make things cheaper for me.
No. In truth it's Windows users that are the real "freetards". Their numbers just help diffuse this problem somewhat In truth, Windows users are a den of theives that have no problem pirating anything they might want or need. This is the reality that the results of the Humble bundles reflects.
> Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players?
Lack of demand based on a bundled feature would be my first guess. If the built in stuff is adequate, why would most "consumer" type users bother with trying something else? The only time it ever occured to me to install an alternate media player on a PhoneOS device is when there was some sort of really big flaw with the default option.
Android subjects you to less bullsh*t in some ways and has better default application behavior. It does things by default that require jailbreaking and hacks on an iPhone. The idea that there is no "consumer user" reason to buy an Android phone is just fanboy self-delusion.
The sacred cow merely delineates a categorical imperative that is being violated.
It takes the extreme corner case in order to make it obvious to the sheeple masses that there is a problem. They are not aware otherwise. This doesn't mean that the imperative isn't universal.
Baby boomers and other aging geezers are a far more powerful constituency. There is no AARP for kids. Any group that claims to protect children usually are just using them as a political football. They are not organized themselves. They don't vote or spend large amounts of their own money.
Slashdot Mirror
...which is all a side effect of the fact that the copyright owner wants to trample all over your personal property rights associated with the legitimate copy you bought from them.
BBC stuff is horrible when it comes to pricing. They are absolute dead last on my shopping list when it comes to content. There's just too much other cheaper stuff out there to get my attention. Now I have started watching some of their stuff on Netflix because it's there and it's cheap enough. If not for their prima donna pricing, I would have a lot more of their stuff (bought and paid for even).
10 years ago the industry tried to kill off the single and pushed whole album sales down everyone's throats.
Today, the fastest growing distribution method is the single and singles are cheap.
You also no longer have artificial demand created by format changes.
There are plenty of explanations for the numbers that don't require using piracy as a crutch.
Yes it does.
YOU PAID FOR IT.
ANY ethical argument then becomes completely null and void.
Sadly, due to how the industry tries to abuse it's paying customers it is actually much easier to participate in a torrent swarm than to create your own similar media files from the physical disks you already own. This is a practical issue caused by the industry's own paranoia and disrespect for the paying customer.
As someone who uses the more legitimate approach, I really can't fault anyone else for not wanting to bother with it.
Yup.
Got multiple wars going on... can't balance the budget... I know lets cut the space program. [rolls eyes]
They probably have their own versions of ADM and Con Agra.
The "farming lobby" is more about large megacorps than it is about real farmers. That's the real problem here. If you cut out the farm subsidies then some very large corporations will be hammered right in the pocketbook. They aren't going to take that lying down. Neither will Republicans.
This is all about "big business". Using the word "farm" to refer to any of this is a huge and misleading misnomer.
...except you don't need all of that nonsense to deal with a personal need.
You don't even need to use a "NAS" box. You can just use any number of external storage devices that are big and cheap.
It's not 1995 anymore. The only real reason to fixate on the cloud is devices that are intentionally crippled and need some proprietary service to make up for the fact that they can neither use standard external storage nor standard network protocols nor be freely accessed by non-proprietary tools.
They are all the same kernel.
They all use the same user land apps and daemons.
If you have problem with a device in one distro, you're probably going to have the same problem in others.
PnP on Linux pre-dates Mandrake.
If something like ndiswrapper is even in the discussion then clearly there are some basic driver support issues regardless of how well you dress up the hack in question.
I would rather not be tied to a particular company store. Most stuff that's wrapped in DRM and turned into the modern equivalent of a WinDOS application is pure data that doesn't really need such a dependency. This goes for Amazon too. Except they strive to have wider and more device support than Apple.
You can buy 3 of them and they are still cheap.
You can buy 3 of something else that's equally portable but sufficiently large and it will still be cheaper (than enterprise storage).
Once you've got 3 or more, many of the usual "benefits" of "enterprise" storage start to go away.
Being able to sync photos is a very granny-friendly sort of use case for cloud storage.
Yeah... license their patents for the cost of an entire OS.
Suuuure, they're not a troll.
REALLY.
> Substitute "a small inventor in his garage" though...
Doesn't change anything.
The value of a few weak patents is probably not as much as the off the shelf price for an entire operating system.
It's this "death of a thousand cuts" that's going to kill what's left of American industry.
The fact that something is re-invented multiple times in isolation is the very definition of obvious.
> Prior to patent every company kept its own in house guarded secrets which they literally had to write special rules to guard
Companies still have that. They have that for things that they don't want an expiring patent on.
The problem with patents, is that most of them are not terribly inventive. The net "social cost" of the pre-patent situation is far less destructive than the actual current patent system. The entire industry for the most part would be far better off if they could simply re-invent everything they need inhouse. This is generally how it's done anyways since patent searches are a bothersome waste of resources that only increase your liability should you be found to violate a patent.
FAT is essentially a "file format" as is any other file system. Patents on those simply should be illegal. People's data should not be held hostage by a monopoly.
So the R&D needs to be liberated from crap design, crap marketing, and crap management.
IOW, much of the current patent regime needs to be gutted in order to prevent the industry from being crippled in a manner that is the EXACT OPPOSITE of the original intents of patents and intellectual property in general.
IBM has been doing mind blowing basic research since before Microsoft existed. If IBM has a patent, there's a good chance that it is for something actually real that is an integral part of your current Slashdot experience.
So who does IBM troll?
They could probably troll all of the Android vendors too, and Apple, and Microsoft.
...except the more hardcore part of the market is less slanted towards Windows.
Get into the demographic that's actually likely to know what a video card even is and you will see much more Linux and MacOS users.
Linux users respect the developer and their choices. This is inherent in the whole GPL thing.
I see a product and I am willing to pay a fair price for it. I won't make excuses meant to make things cheaper for me.
No. In truth it's Windows users that are the real "freetards". Their numbers just help diffuse this problem somewhat In truth, Windows users are a den of theives that have no problem pirating anything they might want or need. This is the reality that the results of the Humble bundles reflects.
> It's also a niche market filled with skinflints
It's no different than Windows in this regard.
Linux from a developers perspective isn't really all that difference. Most of it is just rhetoric from a few noisy people on either side.
Local prosecutors have been successfully pulling this very sort of crap since the BBS days. It is really nothing new.
With competent programming "tablet only" apps shouldn't be necessary. Being fixated on one and only hardware spec should not be necessary.
You should not need to program a DOS app like the original PC XT is the only type of hardware out there.
> Have you ever wondered why there are no Android music players?
Lack of demand based on a bundled feature would be my first guess. If the built in stuff is adequate, why would most "consumer" type users bother with trying something else? The only time it ever occured to me to install an alternate media player on a PhoneOS device is when there was some sort of really big flaw with the default option.
Android subjects you to less bullsh*t in some ways and has better default application behavior. It does things by default that require jailbreaking and hacks on an iPhone. The idea that there is no "consumer user" reason to buy an Android phone is just fanboy self-delusion.
The sacred cow merely delineates a categorical imperative that is being violated.
It takes the extreme corner case in order to make it obvious to the sheeple masses that there is a problem. They are not aware otherwise. This doesn't mean that the imperative isn't universal.
Baby boomers and other aging geezers are a far more powerful constituency. There is no AARP for kids. Any group that claims to protect children usually are just using them as a political football. They are not organized themselves. They don't vote or spend large amounts of their own money.