You cannot steal something intangible - there are infinite copies of digital content that cost nothing to reproduce. So here's how your story goes for copying a file...
Did you have it before? No.
Do you have it now? Yes.
Do they still have it? Yes.
Did they lose any money? No.
Now, if you still have your car but I now have one exactly like it because I clicked a button and a copy of it appeared, did I steal your car? No, I didn't. There cannot be theft if there is no loss.
They are NOT losing a profit from a sale by me downloading a DRM-ed game because I will not buy DRM-ed games. By your logic, every time that you walk past something in the store and don't buy it, you are causing them to "lose a sale" and are "stealing". That's not how it works.
DRM is not about stopping piracy - many companies have essentially admitted it. It's about killing used game sales. I've told you before, I am glad to pay for quality products - however, when an asshole company wants to sell you something and then have some code to rig it so that they keep ownership of it and can take it away from you, then that is not worth paying for and the company should be shut down for theft.
You are a parasite who thinks that everyone should be forced to have no rights and that it's ok for companies to rape their customers. That's why you lie and claim that when the company makes the same amount of money from me ($0) due to using DRM, that it's "stealing" for me to download a copy of it (they still make $0 because I won't buy DRM infested shit like you do).
He's a good guy, and they follow the laws, so he'd have to be a law-breaking good guy.
No, good guys follow justice. Any adult should be well aware of the fact that the law and justice often are not the same thing (I'd go so far as to say that they're rarely the same thing, but that's another issue). Just about every superhero, including Superman, operates outside the law. Someone who "follows the laws" without thinking is how you get the foot soldiers in dictatorships who claim "I was just doing what I was told / following the law".
The law doesn't stop applying just because the punishments couldn't be enforced against him.
Yes, yes it does stop applying because it can't be enforced. As I pointed out above, many laws are horribly unjust, therefore in order to be just, you must break the law (such as people who helped slaves escape to freedom back in the old days) - you're only bound by the law if they can punish you. It's like when the League of Nations tried to outlaw war after WWI - they had no power to enforce their "laws", therefore no one had a reason to follow it.
I'd imagine that Lex's lawyers would win a civil lawsuit against Superman, and would get discovery of his secret identity and such in the process.
Only if Superman is enough of a pussy to let them. He's fucking Superman. It's not like anyone can make him do anything. That's how laws work - because the government will use the force of the police and military to make you do things. If you are more powerful than the police and military, then you are not bound by the law.
And you do not understand the difference between the rights of a consumer and the BS of a corporation. There's a reason EULA's are only upheld about half the time by courts.
Actually, you bought a *license* for the software.
No, they claim you bought a license, when you actually purchased the software. Just like how Ford can't claim that you only bought a *license* to drive a car.
Note, I'm not a fan of DRM, but understand why they do it.
They do it to piss off their paying customers so that they'll either boycott or pirate - but either way they lose money. I've said it more times than I can count - American businesses are run by morons.
Copyright infringement is not theft. I'm not going to buy Bioshock 2 - if I download it, how is 2K losing money? That's right, they didn't. Now if I walk into a store and steal a copy, it cost them money to produce everything in that box, so they are losing money.
By the way, you do not know my opinion of DRM, so quit assigning me one, shithead.
The fact that you are so violently defending the use of DRM says your opinion of DRM perfectly clear.
Did I ever say that pirating was right? No, I clearly stated that it's wrong. However, I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt at screwing over a company who wants to fuck over their paying customers. Just like I don't feel bad for being a dick to assholes who tailgate. If you want me to be nice to you and play by the rules, then you have to be nice and play by the rules. The second you want to be a dick, I'll get in your face.
If there is DRM there, it was totally transparent. The way it should be.
No, the way it should be is "non-existent". It's not a matter of a 15 install limit, it's that you have to contact the company and ask permission to install the software that YOU BOUGHT. At any time they can turn off the activation servers or go out of business and your money is wasted. THAT is why it's a problem.
Ever hear of a little something called "civil disobedience"? It's a method of protest for enacting change. I gladly pay for quality things (hence my hundreds of movies I've purchased as well as shelves of video games I've purchased). However, I'm NOT going to pay someone to fuck me over. So while it's wrong to pirate (yes, I'll openly say it, and I always have), they were in the wrong first by trying to dick over their paying customers and also kill off the used games market at the same time.
If you don't want to pay the asking price, don't use the fucking software. Is that so hard to comprehend?
If you bothered to read you'd know that I DO want to pay the asking price. What I DON'T want is some jackass company thinking that they have the right to control my property. They're not getting my money for being assholes and using DRM, so if they're not making money from me anyways, why not download it and enjoy the game I wanted to pay for and they wanted to fuck me over for paying for it?
The problem is with DRM supporters like you, not with the people who gladly pay for items but have the intelligence to value property rights.
The DRM for Bioshock 2 is even worse than before. Securom is still there and requires online activation and now there is Games for Windows Live forcing it's own online activation and 15 install activation limit.
The real kicker is that 2K has a thread where they lie and claim they "scaled back" the DRM by removing the 5 install limit set by Securom - but it's irrelevant since GFWL has it's own install limit. Oh, and if you buy it on Steam? You get the Steam DRM + Securom + GFWL - that's 3x DRM......and yet 2K claims that they listened to customers after the fiasco that was Bioshock's DRM.
The people that pirate due to not wanting to pay will never pay. You're lying to yourself if you think that they will. But then again, you approve of DRM, which says something about your morals, so you think that people can be forced to pay for something that they don't find to be worth buying. It also says something very bad about your morals that you think standing up for peoples rights is "childish". I guess we should all just do what our good masters tell us to, eh?
Seeing as how the law allows for use of lethal force in dangerous situations, I don't see many situations where Superman would be in the wrong for killing Lex Luthor.
"Thermite-poof container"? It's called "dig a whole in the yard". And yes, I agree, if you're going to do something like this, right after you get it on the torrents and you're no longer needed to seed, you'd better utterly destroy the drives pronto in case the government comes after you.
The people who are going to download instead of paying are not the people who will go to the store and buy a game - they think that they're overpriced and if piracy wasn't an option, they just wouldn't play it.
I've always paid for games until recently when I got pirated copies of a few games - not because I didn't feel that the game was worth the money, but because of the DRM involved. Hell, I even had conversations with employees at the companies where I told them flat out "I WANT to buy your game, but your bullshit-DRM you use to rape your customers stops me from buying it". What developers need to do (since it's publishers like EA / 2K / Activision who force DRM on developers) is make a way to "donate" directly to the developer - that way people can get a DRM-free version of the game AND reward the team who made it without rewarding the asshole publisher who forced the DRM in.
One of the recent big ones was a cynical doctor with a lame leg and drug addiction.
I think you meant "One of the recent big ones was a completely honest doctor with a lame leg and takes prescription pain killers for the pain his lame leg causes him".
Sorry, but it really irks me when people call House a drug addict when it's been clearly shown that he's not (when his leg was temporarily better from the end of season 2 through early season 3, he didn't take any Vicodin - if he was addicted, he'd have continued to take Vicodin even after the pain was gone). Also, it bugs me that people call being honest about shitty things "cynical", but that's a lesser annoyance.
Superman and every DC character I can think of are held back from being REALLY cool by the fact that they tend to be wimps. Even Batman, as cool as he is, would rather let countless people die as Joker / the Riddler / Poison Ivy / every other villain kills away than to just grow some balls and finish the villain off. That's not "valuing life" (if he valued it, he'd want to stop psychos from killing innocent people - he doesn't, he just temporarily detains them), that's being afraid to do what's necessary.
Definitely. The classes where I learned the most were where professors put the notes up on Blackboard for us to download. That meant that instead of focusing on "Is this important enough to write down?" and scribbling fast enough to keep up with the professor, you could just actually listen to what the professor was saying. Then you download the notes and review them at your leisure / make your own notes from them.
Also, not having a laptop discourages you from checking email, facebook, or playing games.
Well, you could always create a second account on the machine (lets call it Class) that doesn't have the rights to run email / web browser / games. That eliminates the temptation.
I've run Vista with Office 2007 and Ubuntu with Open Office 3.0 on the same laptop (that's about 3 years old and was only average specs when it was new) and the Ubuntu with Open Office was much faster to load. That's what we're talking about here - Open Office on Ubuntu, not on Vista (which runs everything slower).
I use OpenOffice at home but it would be a tad heavy for a netbook.
There's that word again! Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
On a more serious note, I don't see how OpenOffice is taxing for even the lowest power netbooks. So it might take a few seconds to boot - big deal. People are so used to programs loading instantly on modern hardware that they forget that it used to be normal to wait a good 30 seconds for a typical program to load and think that waiting 2-3 seconds for a program to load is a crime against humanity.
Almost all of the cost of a book is the cost of paying the author/editor/proofreader plus the retail markup. These costs remain the same regardless of format.
People always point out that being a musician was never a way to become obscenely rich, so why should writing? I'm a huge book lover, but there's no justifiable reason for why book prices should be inflated so that authors can all be rich. A reasonable price would allow an average author an average income, a good author a good income (say $80k / year) and an amazing author would make a very nice income - all because of people buying their books as a reward for them doing a good job. A $3 ebook allows for the author to get $1, the editor/proofreader to get $1, and the book seller (Amazon, iBooks Store, etc) $1. That means if their book is a hit and sells 100,000 copies, then the author, the editor, and the store all get $100,000. I'm willing to even go so high as to say $5 is a fair price for an ebook since it costs $8 for a paperback - which means that the cost of making the book, shipping the book, inventory costs, and paying people at the bookstores are all factored into that, there's no reason for ebooks to cost more than $5.
Not every author is going to be rich. There's a reason why up until the last century, being an author wasn't considered a "respectable" job - because it wasn't a job where you weren't going to get rich. I love books and respect authors, however, the "professional writer" isn't someone who should be making hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) a year.
recognises that he must try to delete the images associated with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune from the public's consciousness
Hell, erase the memories of a fantastic adaptation by a fantastic director and replace it by a freaking 3D toystory?
There's nothing to erase - according to my one boss, in her 40's, who claims that the 1984 movie doesn't exist (despite me telling her that it does exist and that I own a copy of it).
Agreed. I've been using Win 7 on my laptop since the beta came out - the battery was already going bad (POS HP batteries) before I installed Win 7 and I got the replace battery message last night - but I knew before I installed Win 7 that my battery was down to only about 40% of it's original capacity.
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You cannot steal something intangible - there are infinite copies of digital content that cost nothing to reproduce. So here's how your story goes for copying a file...
Did you have it before? No.
Do you have it now? Yes.
Do they still have it? Yes.
Did they lose any money? No.
Now, if you still have your car but I now have one exactly like it because I clicked a button and a copy of it appeared, did I steal your car? No, I didn't. There cannot be theft if there is no loss.
They are NOT losing a profit from a sale by me downloading a DRM-ed game because I will not buy DRM-ed games. By your logic, every time that you walk past something in the store and don't buy it, you are causing them to "lose a sale" and are "stealing". That's not how it works.
DRM is not about stopping piracy - many companies have essentially admitted it. It's about killing used game sales. I've told you before, I am glad to pay for quality products - however, when an asshole company wants to sell you something and then have some code to rig it so that they keep ownership of it and can take it away from you, then that is not worth paying for and the company should be shut down for theft.
You are a parasite who thinks that everyone should be forced to have no rights and that it's ok for companies to rape their customers. That's why you lie and claim that when the company makes the same amount of money from me ($0) due to using DRM, that it's "stealing" for me to download a copy of it (they still make $0 because I won't buy DRM infested shit like you do).
He's a good guy, and they follow the laws, so he'd have to be a law-breaking good guy.
No, good guys follow justice. Any adult should be well aware of the fact that the law and justice often are not the same thing (I'd go so far as to say that they're rarely the same thing, but that's another issue). Just about every superhero, including Superman, operates outside the law. Someone who "follows the laws" without thinking is how you get the foot soldiers in dictatorships who claim "I was just doing what I was told / following the law".
The law doesn't stop applying just because the punishments couldn't be enforced against him.
Yes, yes it does stop applying because it can't be enforced. As I pointed out above, many laws are horribly unjust, therefore in order to be just, you must break the law (such as people who helped slaves escape to freedom back in the old days) - you're only bound by the law if they can punish you. It's like when the League of Nations tried to outlaw war after WWI - they had no power to enforce their "laws", therefore no one had a reason to follow it.
I'd imagine that Lex's lawyers would win a civil lawsuit against Superman, and would get discovery of his secret identity and such in the process.
Only if Superman is enough of a pussy to let them. He's fucking Superman. It's not like anyone can make him do anything. That's how laws work - because the government will use the force of the police and military to make you do things. If you are more powerful than the police and military, then you are not bound by the law.
And you do not understand the difference between the rights of a consumer and the BS of a corporation. There's a reason EULA's are only upheld about half the time by courts.
Actually, you bought a *license* for the software.
No, they claim you bought a license, when you actually purchased the software. Just like how Ford can't claim that you only bought a *license* to drive a car.
Note, I'm not a fan of DRM, but understand why they do it.
They do it to piss off their paying customers so that they'll either boycott or pirate - but either way they lose money. I've said it more times than I can count - American businesses are run by morons.
Copyright infringement is not theft. I'm not going to buy Bioshock 2 - if I download it, how is 2K losing money? That's right, they didn't. Now if I walk into a store and steal a copy, it cost them money to produce everything in that box, so they are losing money.
By the way, you do not know my opinion of DRM, so quit assigning me one, shithead.
The fact that you are so violently defending the use of DRM says your opinion of DRM perfectly clear.
Did I ever say that pirating was right? No, I clearly stated that it's wrong. However, I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt at screwing over a company who wants to fuck over their paying customers. Just like I don't feel bad for being a dick to assholes who tailgate. If you want me to be nice to you and play by the rules, then you have to be nice and play by the rules. The second you want to be a dick, I'll get in your face.
If there is DRM there, it was totally transparent. The way it should be.
No, the way it should be is "non-existent". It's not a matter of a 15 install limit, it's that you have to contact the company and ask permission to install the software that YOU BOUGHT. At any time they can turn off the activation servers or go out of business and your money is wasted. THAT is why it's a problem.
Ever hear of a little something called "civil disobedience"? It's a method of protest for enacting change. I gladly pay for quality things (hence my hundreds of movies I've purchased as well as shelves of video games I've purchased). However, I'm NOT going to pay someone to fuck me over. So while it's wrong to pirate (yes, I'll openly say it, and I always have), they were in the wrong first by trying to dick over their paying customers and also kill off the used games market at the same time.
If you don't want to pay the asking price, don't use the fucking software. Is that so hard to comprehend?
If you bothered to read you'd know that I DO want to pay the asking price. What I DON'T want is some jackass company thinking that they have the right to control my property. They're not getting my money for being assholes and using DRM, so if they're not making money from me anyways, why not download it and enjoy the game I wanted to pay for and they wanted to fuck me over for paying for it?
The problem is with DRM supporters like you, not with the people who gladly pay for items but have the intelligence to value property rights.
The DRM for Bioshock 2 is even worse than before. Securom is still there and requires online activation and now there is Games for Windows Live forcing it's own online activation and 15 install activation limit.
The real kicker is that 2K has a thread where they lie and claim they "scaled back" the DRM by removing the 5 install limit set by Securom - but it's irrelevant since GFWL has it's own install limit. Oh, and if you buy it on Steam? You get the Steam DRM + Securom + GFWL - that's 3x DRM......and yet 2K claims that they listened to customers after the fiasco that was Bioshock's DRM.
The people that pirate due to not wanting to pay will never pay. You're lying to yourself if you think that they will. But then again, you approve of DRM, which says something about your morals, so you think that people can be forced to pay for something that they don't find to be worth buying. It also says something very bad about your morals that you think standing up for peoples rights is "childish". I guess we should all just do what our good masters tell us to, eh?
Seeing as how the law allows for use of lethal force in dangerous situations, I don't see many situations where Superman would be in the wrong for killing Lex Luthor.
"Thermite-poof container"? It's called "dig a whole in the yard". And yes, I agree, if you're going to do something like this, right after you get it on the torrents and you're no longer needed to seed, you'd better utterly destroy the drives pronto in case the government comes after you.
The people who are going to download instead of paying are not the people who will go to the store and buy a game - they think that they're overpriced and if piracy wasn't an option, they just wouldn't play it.
I've always paid for games until recently when I got pirated copies of a few games - not because I didn't feel that the game was worth the money, but because of the DRM involved. Hell, I even had conversations with employees at the companies where I told them flat out "I WANT to buy your game, but your bullshit-DRM you use to rape your customers stops me from buying it". What developers need to do (since it's publishers like EA / 2K / Activision who force DRM on developers) is make a way to "donate" directly to the developer - that way people can get a DRM-free version of the game AND reward the team who made it without rewarding the asshole publisher who forced the DRM in.
One of the recent big ones was a cynical doctor with a lame leg and drug addiction.
I think you meant "One of the recent big ones was a completely honest doctor with a lame leg and takes prescription pain killers for the pain his lame leg causes him".
Sorry, but it really irks me when people call House a drug addict when it's been clearly shown that he's not (when his leg was temporarily better from the end of season 2 through early season 3, he didn't take any Vicodin - if he was addicted, he'd have continued to take Vicodin even after the pain was gone). Also, it bugs me that people call being honest about shitty things "cynical", but that's a lesser annoyance.
Superman and every DC character I can think of are held back from being REALLY cool by the fact that they tend to be wimps. Even Batman, as cool as he is, would rather let countless people die as Joker / the Riddler / Poison Ivy / every other villain kills away than to just grow some balls and finish the villain off. That's not "valuing life" (if he valued it, he'd want to stop psychos from killing innocent people - he doesn't, he just temporarily detains them), that's being afraid to do what's necessary.
You mean how you can buy a 3.4 GHz Phenom II X4 from AMD? That 3.0 GHz ceiling?
Along these same lines, I find that simply powering off the WiFi radio can keep me focused. It also extends the battery :)
Yes, but it's very easy to flip the switch to turn it back on. Getting around account permissions at least takes a little bit more energy! =)
Definitely. The classes where I learned the most were where professors put the notes up on Blackboard for us to download. That meant that instead of focusing on "Is this important enough to write down?" and scribbling fast enough to keep up with the professor, you could just actually listen to what the professor was saying. Then you download the notes and review them at your leisure / make your own notes from them.
Also, not having a laptop discourages you from checking email, facebook, or playing games.
Well, you could always create a second account on the machine (lets call it Class) that doesn't have the rights to run email / web browser / games. That eliminates the temptation.
I've run Vista with Office 2007 and Ubuntu with Open Office 3.0 on the same laptop (that's about 3 years old and was only average specs when it was new) and the Ubuntu with Open Office was much faster to load. That's what we're talking about here - Open Office on Ubuntu, not on Vista (which runs everything slower).
I use OpenOffice at home but it would be a tad heavy for a netbook.
There's that word again! Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
On a more serious note, I don't see how OpenOffice is taxing for even the lowest power netbooks. So it might take a few seconds to boot - big deal. People are so used to programs loading instantly on modern hardware that they forget that it used to be normal to wait a good 30 seconds for a typical program to load and think that waiting 2-3 seconds for a program to load is a crime against humanity.
Almost all of the cost of a book is the cost of paying the author/editor/proofreader plus the retail markup. These costs remain the same regardless of format.
People always point out that being a musician was never a way to become obscenely rich, so why should writing? I'm a huge book lover, but there's no justifiable reason for why book prices should be inflated so that authors can all be rich. A reasonable price would allow an average author an average income, a good author a good income (say $80k / year) and an amazing author would make a very nice income - all because of people buying their books as a reward for them doing a good job. A $3 ebook allows for the author to get $1, the editor/proofreader to get $1, and the book seller (Amazon, iBooks Store, etc) $1. That means if their book is a hit and sells 100,000 copies, then the author, the editor, and the store all get $100,000. I'm willing to even go so high as to say $5 is a fair price for an ebook since it costs $8 for a paperback - which means that the cost of making the book, shipping the book, inventory costs, and paying people at the bookstores are all factored into that, there's no reason for ebooks to cost more than $5.
Not every author is going to be rich. There's a reason why up until the last century, being an author wasn't considered a "respectable" job - because it wasn't a job where you weren't going to get rich. I love books and respect authors, however, the "professional writer" isn't someone who should be making hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) a year.
recognises that he must try to delete the images associated with David Lynch's 1984 version of Dune from the public's consciousness Hell, erase the memories of a fantastic adaptation by a fantastic director and replace it by a freaking 3D toystory?
There's nothing to erase - according to my one boss, in her 40's, who claims that the 1984 movie doesn't exist (despite me telling her that it does exist and that I own a copy of it).
Supposedly they are making a Neuromancer movie.
Agreed. I've been using Win 7 on my laptop since the beta came out - the battery was already going bad (POS HP batteries) before I installed Win 7 and I got the replace battery message last night - but I knew before I installed Win 7 that my battery was down to only about 40% of it's original capacity.