Most electronic equipment is not that sensitive to such decay. They tend to be far more sensitive to tin whiskers creating short circuits and other problems.
The OP I was replying to was claiming "They removed the lead because of neutron radiation from lead decay."
Which sure sounded like bullshit.
The OP also claimed: "Radiation that can upset bits in an electronic circuit don't come from your cell phone, TV/radio stations or microwave oven. You may get enough EMI to interfere with your radio, but flipping individual bits in a chip pretty much requires an ion"
Which is bullshit, GSM phones can cause enough interference to interfere with electronic equipment (GSM interference certainly isn't that wimpy ). It can interfere with digital electronics if you're not careful or you're unlucky. And if you want to take the extreme case, a microwave can certainly flip lots of bits in an electronic circuit when you place said circuit in the oven and turn it on.
Do more people prefer it or understand things better if I write this way? e.g. just say it's bullshit upfront...
> Flipping 1 bit is pretty rare, the probability of flipping more than 1 bit is almost non-existent.. so dozens or thousands?
Stop being fixated on "Single Event Upsets". There are other ways of flipping bits. So many ways.
And in case you didn't understand the other part of my post, I'm not saying that the problem is due to EMI. I'm saying the fact that they're even talking about stuff like SEUs makes me think they're clutching at straws in trying to come up with explanations.
If it's mangled till it no longer looks like your work, then they're not using your work.
It sure doesn't seem so unfair a punishment/reward that if he wants the full amount of money for someone else's piece of crap, he has to have his name linked with it.
> Radiation that can upset bits in an electronic circuit don't come from your cell phone, TV/radio stations or microwave oven > You may get enough EMI to interfere with your radio, but flipping individual bits in a chip pretty much requires an ion
You don't need to flip individual bits in a chip to cause problems with car electronics. I suspect if something flipped dozens or thousands it would still cause problems. So you shouldn't get so fixated on individual bit flips.
From the perspective of car safety, the people that are saying "outer space" seem like they're clutching at straws.
As for the removal of lead. It actually made the tin-whisker problem bigger and thus made stuff less reliable.
I strongly doubt the removal of lead was anything to do with making stuff more reliable by avoiding lead decay, if you can provide a decent citation for that, that'll be interesting.
I find it hard to believe that's the problem with "timestamp" that the OP was talking about. After all, couldn't the OP have just used datetime instead?
Whenever you port from one RDBMS to another you're going to have to put up with all sorts of stuff like this. So I don't see this as a showstopper.
So that's why I was curious on what the OP's problem was. If it's just "MSSQL names stuff differently and I didn't bother to do a bit of research to find that out" then I can ignore that particular complaint about MSSQL.
Whereas if it's something else, then it could be far more interesting and more useful to know.
FWIW, I'd think Oracle's behavior of treating an empty string as NULL could be more annoying, but lots of people still use Oracle...
> > Especially where it should exceed, like, for example, finding MS stuff. > The word you're looking for is excel.
That might explain why he doesn't get good results from using Bing. Maybe Google's typo and fuzzy stuff is better for people like him.;).
In contrast nowadays I often have to put a "+" in front of keywords when I use Google.
Google too often gives me search results that do NOT contain my search terms at all. And those results are usually useless to me.
I still use Google out of habit, but if Bing or some other search ever starts producing significantly better results, I have no loyalty to Google at all.
The syntax might be crap, but it's far easier to get everyone to standardize on SQL to talk to DBs.
"NoSQL" stuff is fine if your company is simple in structure - very few products/services, and it has to write most of that stuff itself anyway.
When you have many different departments with their own different apps (in house and 3rd party), and they all want to access the same bunch of databases, SQL just becomes the "standard API or language" you use to talk to them. In contrast say you have some custom "NoSQL" DB, it's going to be harder to find stuff that talks to it (you might have to write your own connectors).
It's just like "English", the syntax might be crap, but it's far easier to get 3rd parties and other departments to use it. In contrast if you use Lojban, despite its supposed advantages you're probably going to have to get translators (or worse - train your own translators) whenever you need to deal with outsiders who don't speak it.
Over here the meter readers use binoculars or a mini telescope. The meter has to be in a spot visible from outside though, so it doesn't work for all places.
> Guess who the board of directors are for the government.
Looks like most of them don't even know they are the "board of directors".
And they keep voting for the same two "management teams" who take turns to screw the shareholders, so why should the management teams change their ways? It's working really well for them.
Similarly, why should the consultants change either? They're being rewarded tremendously for their behaviour.
You didn't rake it 600K/year right? I suppose the consultants figured out early that if they actually built the timekeeping system the NYC would figure out exactly how much the consultants are overcharging the NYC;).
Then again perhaps the NYC has put in lots of complicated (and potentially conflicting) requirements. My guess is you were the one deciding on most of the requirements with only a few coming from others.
Photoshop provides extremely big discounts for students. So students get familiar and used to the photoshop way of doing things, and alternatives become "out of the question", especially when the company is paying for it and not the ex-students...
As for Europe and Canada, I don't see why you should have such big problems. AFAIK they typically have copyright laws that make it illegal for companies to copy your software without your permission.
If your market in Europe or Canada is big, then it should be big enough for you to deal with the legal and court stuff there (e.g. friendly email to the bosses, friendly letters, not so friendly lawyer letter, etc). It's all part of the cost of doing business in a different country. That's how countries work.
If it's not big, then ignore them till later.
If the problem is you can't or don't want to go to court in Europe or Canada, then there is nothing that's going to help you, and it's not going to change till you have some World Government (which to me is a scarier and worse prospect - at least now citizens have the option of seeking asylum in a more acceptable country). So until then, even if the copyright laws are "harmonized", if the infringer refuses to settle out of court, you will still have to go to court in the country where the infringer is (or will be).
Note: you could actually go to court in some other country (e.g. USA), but you're not likely to collect anything - unless the infringer ever goes to that country or wants to directly do business in that country.
If you do not care that much about business in Europe or Canada then there is no problem, other than it bothering you that your stuff is being used by them for free (but remember Bill Gates's point). Heck, your sales people could use it in their informal sales talk - "there are X thousand users of our software".
If your software is complex enough you might still be able to make money from that market by having certification and training... Look at Cisco - CCIE, CCNA etc. Even though Huawei and Juniper are squeezing them, there are lots of people who'd still buy Cisco because they know how to hire people who know Cisco stuff- just look for "Cisco Certified". Whereas if Mr Boss buys Huawei, and wants someone to configure them, how does he figure out who actually knows and who doesn't?
The number of people who are "Huawei Datacom Certified" can't be that many- I think they only just started in June 2008 (sure took them a while to realize that weakness;) ).
Lastly, over in my country apparently one of the local Microsoft bosses apparently scolded his employees for taking companies straight to court for using infringing copies of Microsoft products.
Seems he said something to the effect of: these people are already happily using our products, so all you have to do is get them to pay for it.
And the sales talk is quite easy, after all the bosses know it's either go to court and pay 20000 per copy (and perhaps go to jail), or pay Microsoft the retail price (which is much cheaper).
You don't even have to teach them how to install the software, or even ship them any CDs/DVDs. Just collect the money, send them the keys and some paperwork.
Some companies unknowingly infringe - they install a copy here, a copy there, forget to uninstall somewhere and soon they lose track of how many they should have.
> He's in the military where his colourblindness is an asset. Most camouflage is almost useless against him due to the patterns being designed with normal colour vision in mind. > He also has far better night vision than a person with normal vision would have
An asset maybe to the grunts on the ground...
Might not be so good for those in vessels or vehicles or aircraft who need to know the difference between "green=systems OK, and red = something is wrong". Hey I didn't pick those colours. Somehow they became a standard - red = stop/bad, green = go/OK.
FWIW, it's not that difficult to give people with normal colour-vision some goggles that'll produce the same effect - colourblindness and better night-vision.
In contrast it was impossible to cure colourblindness, till now...
> And it is very frustrating to see a 90% piracy rate among your users
If you have a million users, and only 10% pay USD5 and 90% pay nothing, I think you'd do OK especially if you're not living in an expensive place.
If your software is only interesting to about 10000 possible users in the world, sorry but you cannot use that business model of selling your stuff at USD5, unless you're doing it as a hobby or side business.
If your software is in the former category you need more publicity and marketing (lots of free ways of doing it). If it's in the latter category, you need a different approach - more upmarket, more expensive.
And it's not going to work if you're trying to sell software for USD5 that has lots of competing free or open source software.
> In fact, if I had my way, only citizens from the U.S. would be able to use the software.
If the piracy rates of your software are high outside the US, just look at it as your real customers are already and effectively only the ones in the USA.
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
It's a famous/infamous quote. The Chinese people and government took note of it especially the "addicted" part - they still remember when the Brits did the gunboats+opium stuff on them. The Chinese government then tried to push for Linux and open source (not sure how well that's worked;) ).
Do also see the "World of Goo" example ( http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/ ) - they sold a lot in their "pay whatever you want" anniversary celebration - they got a fair bit of publicity. I paid USD5 or USD10 (can't remember) and I only played it for a few minutes - haven't played it since last October. Yes I'm a cheap bastard who didn't pay the full original price (USD20?), but they got $$$ from me that they would not have otherwise. I'd never have paid their full original price for it. You may wish to read some of the comments by others on the world of goo thing too.
Then there was also Doom as shareware... Which was a big success.
FWIW: In my previous job I wrote software for a living too, but I wrote it for a company - and the company provides the stuff as part of their service to hotels etc. So piracy was not an issue. I've also put one of my programs on sourceforge for free.
I'm not sure what sort of market you are targeting, so far I do know of people who spend quite a lot on iphone games. Sure many pirate it, but as long as enough buy it you're OK.
Radio stations play music to listeners who don't pay a single cent for it, as a result many (not all) listeners buy the music. They don't buy some indie musician's stuff - because there are thousands out there, many are crap or not to their tastes - so how would listeners know what they like? So they just buy what they or their friends have heard and liked.
So depending on your software, you might need to market it differently. Nowadays many market their products (jewelry, cakes, etc) via facebook or blogs, if you're lucky it can work quite well. Make it easy to find and buy...
> Assuming extradition is not enforced, that person would only be labeled criminal when in Saudi Arabia's borders.
That already happens now - it's how the laws already work. If that's all you want, it's already done, so what your point? See Dmitry Sklyarov.
As for "diplomatic ties", that's also already done and being done. There are many countries that have "harmonized" their laws with the USA for the sake of diplomatic ties (often whether their citizens like it or not).
> How do you think citizens from the country you are exploiting feel? > Do you think they are endeared by your actions?
Far fewer citizens have really been exploited by copyright infringement by P2P etc, than the number of artists and stars that have been exploited by the labels[1] and the programmers that have been exploited by their companies (e.g. EA etc). And how about the people were who rooted by Sony's rootkit (which is technically considered hacking in many countries)? Who went to prison for that hacking?
If the artists and creators are already getting ZERO $$$$ from the labels they can't lose any more to P2P. In fact the smarter ones have realized they might as well encourage distribution of their stuff and then make money via tours - otherwise they're not going to get anything (it's all taken up by the "middle man").
If you feel so strongly about exploitation, go bark up that tree instead.
And if you're actually from one of those Big Media Companies and trying to promote their agenda, take this message to your handlers: "FUCK YOU".
The ordinary citizen in the USA has little to worry about from "piracy", it does practically nothing to them.
The media companies actually make money, they just use hollywood accounting to pretend they don't, when it suits them.
Aside from the critical acclaim and the plethora of Oscars and other awards, the complaint claims that they have grossed over $6 billion (£3.07 billion) worldwide through box office receipts and DVD and merchandising sales.
However, the suit filed by the Trust claims that, apart from $62,500 (£32,000) paid upfront before production began, "not one penny" has changed hands.
p.s. Not related but assuming you are a US citizen, just for some perspective go divide the trillions your Government has spent bailing out ill-deserving companies by the number of US citizens. Google for Federal Reserve trillions.
The Certlock thing should help (assuming they do it right and the software itself can be trusted), but the problem could have been fixed by the browser makers long ago if they took security seriously. If I remember right, the problem was discussed years ago in a firefox bug report.
Basically the browser should have features to allow you to be warned if: 1) The CA has changed (still vulnerable to "Gov can forge SSL certs with CA's help") 2) The cert has changed (paranoid mode- the Gov can eavesdrop only if they have the private key of the server - IIRC in the old days for some strange reason certain CAs actually made you send them everything, go figure why;) ).
Now in paranoid mode, some load balancing sites might cause warnings because the certs could be different. For example different certs were installed on the servers serving up the same sites. This could be because they are in the middle of rolling out new certs. However this is not a huge problem, if the sites with the correct certs provide suitable warning in advance the user would realize that and accept the new certs.
It may be a good life for him, and that's all he thinks he needs. But that may not be so true for the people who are providing for his needs.
No, I don't think he is providing for his needs (he doesn't look capable of doing it) - I think his mother and/or sister are/is.
So if it were up to me, I'd actually use the money to provide a monthly stipend to his mother and sister (for as long as Perelman continues to be supported by them).
Since he doesn't want the money, I think it's fair to give it to the ones who supported him, since without them he might not have survived to solve the problem.
IMO giving a monthly amount is better than a lump sum. Since it is more likely that Perelman would benefit in the long term.
I think it's also a good idea to give the mom and sister a one time sum of money as a gift - on top of that monthly amount.
> A solution then, as I mentioned above, is not to push for a global consensus on copyrights as the U.S. is doing, but to recognize the copyright claims of every world nation. This preserves the native laws of a country, while still pushing for protection of IP.
What you are suggesting is ridiculous and contradictory.
Contradictory because to do what you suggest would also require a global consensus.
> And if you value the laws of your own country, then to maintain them you must respect the laws of other nations, despite personal objections.
Why should I be required to respect the laws of some other country that I'm not staying in, nor have any voice in?
> What gives you the right to steal what is made and issued under the protection of a differing set of laws?
Copying is NOT stealing. Even the lawyers and Courts know the difference - that's why there are copyright laws in the first place.
And this is how ridiculous your ideas are:
Assuming copying is stealing, and the punishment for repeated theft in Saudi Arabia is having your hand chopped off, then I'm sure you should have no objections if in the future citizens in your country would have to have their hands chopped off if they are ever guilty of illegally copying stuff from Saudi Arabia (by Saudi laws).
I think the submitter is worrying about the wrong thing.
The answers could have remained private (as in remained within the Government), but the Japanese-Americans still rounded up.
It's not great comfort when the general public, criminals and Corporations don't have access to your census info, but the Government still kicks in your door at 3am and bundles you away just because you happened to have filled in the "race" field with the "wrong race of the day".
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Most electronic equipment is not that sensitive to such decay. They tend to be far more sensitive to tin whiskers creating short circuits and other problems.
The OP I was replying to was claiming "They removed the lead because of neutron radiation from lead decay."
Which sure sounded like bullshit.
The OP also claimed:
"Radiation that can upset bits in an electronic circuit don't come from your cell phone, TV/radio stations or microwave oven. You may get enough EMI to interfere with your radio, but flipping individual bits in a chip pretty much requires an ion"
Which is bullshit, GSM phones can cause enough interference to interfere with electronic equipment (GSM interference certainly isn't that wimpy ). It can interfere with digital electronics if you're not careful or you're unlucky. And if you want to take the extreme case, a microwave can certainly flip lots of bits in an electronic circuit when you place said circuit in the oven and turn it on.
Do more people prefer it or understand things better if I write this way? e.g. just say it's bullshit upfront...
> Seriously? are you trolling?
Yes. No.
> Flipping 1 bit is pretty rare, the probability of flipping more than 1 bit is almost non-existent.. so dozens or thousands?
Stop being fixated on "Single Event Upsets". There are other ways of flipping bits. So many ways.
And in case you didn't understand the other part of my post, I'm not saying that the problem is due to EMI. I'm saying the fact that they're even talking about stuff like SEUs makes me think they're clutching at straws in trying to come up with explanations.
If it's mangled till it no longer looks like your work, then they're not using your work.
It sure doesn't seem so unfair a punishment/reward that if he wants the full amount of money for someone else's piece of crap, he has to have his name linked with it.
And there's also the case of Juanita Grossman - apparently she was found by paramedics with both feet on the brake pedal.
> Radiation that can upset bits in an electronic circuit don't come from your cell phone, TV/radio stations or microwave oven
> You may get enough EMI to interfere with your radio, but flipping individual bits in a chip pretty much requires an ion
You don't need to flip individual bits in a chip to cause problems with car electronics. I suspect if something flipped dozens or thousands it would still cause problems. So you shouldn't get so fixated on individual bit flips.
From the perspective of car safety, the people that are saying "outer space" seem like they're clutching at straws.
As for the removal of lead. It actually made the tin-whisker problem bigger and thus made stuff less reliable.
I strongly doubt the removal of lead was anything to do with making stuff more reliable by avoiding lead decay, if you can provide a decent citation for that, that'll be interesting.
I find it hard to believe that's the problem with "timestamp" that the OP was talking about. After all, couldn't the OP have just used datetime instead?
Whenever you port from one RDBMS to another you're going to have to put up with all sorts of stuff like this. So I don't see this as a showstopper.
So that's why I was curious on what the OP's problem was. If it's just "MSSQL names stuff differently and I didn't bother to do a bit of research to find that out" then I can ignore that particular complaint about MSSQL.
Whereas if it's something else, then it could be far more interesting and more useful to know.
FWIW, I'd think Oracle's behavior of treating an empty string as NULL could be more annoying, but lots of people still use Oracle...
> > Especially where it should exceed, like, for example, finding MS stuff.
;).
> The word you're looking for is excel.
That might explain why he doesn't get good results from using Bing. Maybe Google's typo and fuzzy stuff is better for people like him.
In contrast nowadays I often have to put a "+" in front of keywords when I use Google.
Google too often gives me search results that do NOT contain my search terms at all. And those results are usually useless to me.
I still use Google out of habit, but if Bing or some other search ever starts producing significantly better results, I have no loyalty to Google at all.
The syntax might be crap, but it's far easier to get everyone to standardize on SQL to talk to DBs.
"NoSQL" stuff is fine if your company is simple in structure - very few products/services, and it has to write most of that stuff itself anyway.
When you have many different departments with their own different apps (in house and 3rd party), and they all want to access the same bunch of databases, SQL just becomes the "standard API or language" you use to talk to them. In contrast say you have some custom "NoSQL" DB, it's going to be harder to find stuff that talks to it (you might have to write your own connectors).
It's just like "English", the syntax might be crap, but it's far easier to get 3rd parties and other departments to use it. In contrast if you use Lojban, despite its supposed advantages you're probably going to have to get translators (or worse - train your own translators) whenever you need to deal with outsiders who don't speak it.
Just curious - in what way can't MSSQL handle timestamps properly
Over here the meter readers use binoculars or a mini telescope. The meter has to be in a spot visible from outside though, so it doesn't work for all places.
;).
But it's "wireless" too
Or buy a suitably big building and then add a whole bunch of projectors and other fancy stuff like what these bunch use:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheDarkroomTV#p/u
Hmm, this is USD10 cheaper then:
http://www.kingsoft.com.au/products.htm
Doesn't run on Linux though :).
Problem is it's public money they're throwing at the consultants.
> Guess who the board of directors are for the government.
Looks like most of them don't even know they are the "board of directors".
And they keep voting for the same two "management teams" who take turns to screw the shareholders, so why should the management teams change their ways? It's working really well for them.
Similarly, why should the consultants change either? They're being rewarded tremendously for their behaviour.
You didn't rake it 600K/year right? I suppose the consultants figured out early that if they actually built the timekeeping system the NYC would figure out exactly how much the consultants are overcharging the NYC ;).
Then again perhaps the NYC has put in lots of complicated (and potentially conflicting) requirements. My guess is you were the one deciding on most of the requirements with only a few coming from others.
Photoshop provides extremely big discounts for students. So students get familiar and used to the photoshop way of doing things, and alternatives become "out of the question", especially when the company is paying for it and not the ex-students...
;) ).
As for Europe and Canada, I don't see why you should have such big problems. AFAIK they typically have copyright laws that make it illegal for companies to copy your software without your permission.
If your market in Europe or Canada is big, then it should be big enough for you to deal with the legal and court stuff there (e.g. friendly email to the bosses, friendly letters, not so friendly lawyer letter, etc). It's all part of the cost of doing business in a different country. That's how countries work.
If it's not big, then ignore them till later.
If the problem is you can't or don't want to go to court in Europe or Canada, then there is nothing that's going to help you, and it's not going to change till you have some World Government (which to me is a scarier and worse prospect - at least now citizens have the option of seeking asylum in a more acceptable country). So until then, even if the copyright laws are "harmonized", if the infringer refuses to settle out of court, you will still have to go to court in the country where the infringer is (or will be).
Note: you could actually go to court in some other country (e.g. USA), but you're not likely to collect anything - unless the infringer ever goes to that country or wants to directly do business in that country.
If you do not care that much about business in Europe or Canada then there is no problem, other than it bothering you that your stuff is being used by them for free (but remember Bill Gates's point). Heck, your sales people could use it in their informal sales talk - "there are X thousand users of our software".
If your software is complex enough you might still be able to make money from that market by having certification and training... Look at Cisco - CCIE, CCNA etc. Even though Huawei and Juniper are squeezing them, there are lots of people who'd still buy Cisco because they know how to hire people who know Cisco stuff- just look for "Cisco Certified". Whereas if Mr Boss buys Huawei, and wants someone to configure them, how does he figure out who actually knows and who doesn't?
The number of people who are "Huawei Datacom Certified" can't be that many- I think they only just started in June 2008 (sure took them a while to realize that weakness
Lastly, over in my country apparently one of the local Microsoft bosses apparently scolded his employees for taking companies straight to court for using infringing copies of Microsoft products.
Seems he said something to the effect of: these people are already happily using our products, so all you have to do is get them to pay for it.
And the sales talk is quite easy, after all the bosses know it's either go to court and pay 20000 per copy (and perhaps go to jail), or pay Microsoft the retail price (which is much cheaper).
You don't even have to teach them how to install the software, or even ship them any CDs/DVDs. Just collect the money, send them the keys and some paperwork.
Some companies unknowingly infringe - they install a copy here, a copy there, forget to uninstall somewhere and soon they lose track of how many they should have.
Windows Update could actually be intentionally turned off is many corporate environments.
The updates would be downloaded from a central location, and hopefully tested (to see if Microsoft has done yet another screw up or not).
And then they are pushed out to the clients via WSUS or whatever the company has decided to use for patch management.
Once you get to a high enough machine:admin ratio, it's often better to not have the computers self update just because Microsoft thinks it's time.
> He's in the military where his colourblindness is an asset. Most camouflage is almost useless against him due to the patterns being designed with normal colour vision in mind.
> He also has far better night vision than a person with normal vision would have
An asset maybe to the grunts on the ground...
Might not be so good for those in vessels or vehicles or aircraft who need to know the difference between "green=systems OK, and red = something is wrong". Hey I didn't pick those colours. Somehow they became a standard - red = stop/bad, green = go/OK.
FWIW, it's not that difficult to give people with normal colour-vision some goggles that'll produce the same effect - colourblindness and better night-vision.
In contrast it was impossible to cure colourblindness, till now...
Another thing:
> And it is very frustrating to see a 90% piracy rate among your users
If you have a million users, and only 10% pay USD5 and 90% pay nothing, I think you'd do OK especially if you're not living in an expensive place.
If your software is only interesting to about 10000 possible users in the world, sorry but you cannot use that business model of selling your stuff at USD5, unless you're doing it as a hobby or side business.
If your software is in the former category you need more publicity and marketing (lots of free ways of doing it). If it's in the latter category, you need a different approach - more upmarket, more expensive.
And it's not going to work if you're trying to sell software for USD5 that has lots of competing free or open source software.
> In fact, if I had my way, only citizens from the U.S. would be able to use the software.
If the piracy rates of your software are high outside the US, just look at it as your real customers are already and effectively only the ones in the USA.
But see also Bill Gate's opinion:
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
It's a famous/infamous quote. The Chinese people and government took note of it especially the "addicted" part - they still remember when the Brits did the gunboats+opium stuff on them. The Chinese government then tried to push for Linux and open source (not sure how well that's worked ;) ).
Do also see the "World of Goo" example ( http://2dboy.com/2009/10/19/birthday-sale-results/ ) - they sold a lot in their "pay whatever you want" anniversary celebration - they got a fair bit of publicity. I paid USD5 or USD10 (can't remember) and I only played it for a few minutes - haven't played it since last October. Yes I'm a cheap bastard who didn't pay the full original price (USD20?), but they got $$$ from me that they would not have otherwise. I'd never have paid their full original price for it. You may wish to read some of the comments by others on the world of goo thing too.
Then there was also Doom as shareware... Which was a big success.
FWIW: In my previous job I wrote software for a living too, but I wrote it for a company - and the company provides the stuff as part of their service to hotels etc. So piracy was not an issue. I've also put one of my programs on sourceforge for free.
I'm not sure what sort of market you are targeting, so far I do know of people who spend quite a lot on iphone games. Sure many pirate it, but as long as enough buy it you're OK.
Radio stations play music to listeners who don't pay a single cent for it, as a result many (not all) listeners buy the music. They don't buy some indie musician's stuff - because there are thousands out there, many are crap or not to their tastes - so how would listeners know what they like? So they just buy what they or their friends have heard and liked.
So depending on your software, you might need to market it differently. Nowadays many market their products (jewelry, cakes, etc) via facebook or blogs, if you're lucky it can work quite well. Make it easy to find and buy...
> Assuming extradition is not enforced, that person would only be labeled criminal when in Saudi Arabia's borders.
That already happens now - it's how the laws already work. If that's all you want, it's already done, so what your point? See Dmitry Sklyarov.
As for "diplomatic ties", that's also already done and being done. There are many countries that have "harmonized" their laws with the USA for the sake of diplomatic ties (often whether their citizens like it or not).
> How do you think citizens from the country you are exploiting feel?
> Do you think they are endeared by your actions?
Far fewer citizens have really been exploited by copyright infringement by P2P etc, than the number of artists and stars that have been exploited by the labels[1] and the programmers that have been exploited by their companies (e.g. EA etc). And how about the people were who rooted by Sony's rootkit (which is technically considered hacking in many countries)? Who went to prison for that hacking?
If the artists and creators are already getting ZERO $$$$ from the labels they can't lose any more to P2P. In fact the smarter ones have realized they might as well encourage distribution of their stuff and then make money via tours - otherwise they're not going to get anything (it's all taken up by the "middle man").
If you feel so strongly about exploitation, go bark up that tree instead.
And if you're actually from one of those Big Media Companies and trying to promote their agenda, take this message to your handlers: "FUCK YOU".
The ordinary citizen in the USA has little to worry about from "piracy", it does practically nothing to them.
The media companies actually make money, they just use hollywood accounting to pretend they don't, when it suits them.
[1] directly:
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/735096--geist-record-industry-faces-liability-over-infringement
Or via Hollywood accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
See also: http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2002-11-13-stan-lee-sues-marvel_x.htm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578440/JRR-Tolkiens-estate-to-sue-New-Line-Cinema-over-Lord-of-the-Rings-trilogy-profits.html
Aside from the critical acclaim and the plethora of Oscars and other awards, the complaint claims that they have grossed over $6 billion (£3.07 billion) worldwide through box office receipts and DVD and merchandising sales.
However, the suit filed by the Trust claims that, apart from $62,500 (£32,000) paid upfront before production began, "not one penny" has changed hands.
p.s. Not related but assuming you are a US citizen, just for some perspective go divide the trillions your Government has spent bailing out ill-deserving companies by the number of US citizens. Google for Federal Reserve trillions.
The Certlock thing should help (assuming they do it right and the software itself can be trusted), but the problem could have been fixed by the browser makers long ago if they took security seriously. If I remember right, the problem was discussed years ago in a firefox bug report.
Basically the browser should have features to allow you to be warned if: ;) ).
1) The CA has changed (still vulnerable to "Gov can forge SSL certs with CA's help")
2) The cert has changed (paranoid mode- the Gov can eavesdrop only if they have the private key of the server - IIRC in the old days for some strange reason certain CAs actually made you send them everything, go figure why
Now in paranoid mode, some load balancing sites might cause warnings because the certs could be different. For example different certs were installed on the servers serving up the same sites. This could be because they are in the middle of rolling out new certs. However this is not a huge problem, if the sites with the correct certs provide suitable warning in advance the user would realize that and accept the new certs.
FWIW, I'm wondering if this addon actually is OK: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6415 :).
It may be a good life for him, and that's all he thinks he needs. But that may not be so true for the people who are providing for his needs.
No, I don't think he is providing for his needs (he doesn't look capable of doing it) - I think his mother and/or sister are/is.
So if it were up to me, I'd actually use the money to provide a monthly stipend to his mother and sister (for as long as Perelman continues to be supported by them).
Since he doesn't want the money, I think it's fair to give it to the ones who supported him, since without them he might not have survived to solve the problem.
IMO giving a monthly amount is better than a lump sum. Since it is more likely that Perelman would benefit in the long term.
I think it's also a good idea to give the mom and sister a one time sum of money as a gift - on top of that monthly amount.
> A solution then, as I mentioned above, is not to push for a global consensus on copyrights as the U.S. is doing, but to recognize the copyright claims of every world nation. This preserves the native laws of a country, while still pushing for protection of IP.
What you are suggesting is ridiculous and contradictory.
Contradictory because to do what you suggest would also require a global consensus.
> And if you value the laws of your own country, then to maintain them you must respect the laws of other nations, despite personal objections.
Why should I be required to respect the laws of some other country that I'm not staying in, nor have any voice in?
> What gives you the right to steal what is made and issued under the protection of a differing set of laws?
Copying is NOT stealing. Even the lawyers and Courts know the difference - that's why there are copyright laws in the first place.
And this is how ridiculous your ideas are:
Assuming copying is stealing, and the punishment for repeated theft in Saudi Arabia is having your hand chopped off, then I'm sure you should have no objections if in the future citizens in your country would have to have their hands chopped off if they are ever guilty of illegally copying stuff from Saudi Arabia (by Saudi laws).
I think the submitter is worrying about the wrong thing.
The answers could have remained private (as in remained within the Government), but the Japanese-Americans still rounded up.
It's not great comfort when the general public, criminals and Corporations don't have access to your census info, but the Government still kicks in your door at 3am and bundles you away just because you happened to have filled in the "race" field with the "wrong race of the day".
Race: Pikes Peak Hill Climb :).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI