If someone had been distributing pirated versions of Windows and only stopped 5 months after they had been contacted by Microsoft's legal team, would Microsoft applaud them?
I realise that, I was (partly) joking. The "I pirate because X" crew really are frustrating, as each time whatever their gripe is (DRM, need disk to play, etc. etc.) is fixed they shift the goalposts ("Okay, the game no longer needs the disk to play, now I want them cheaper"). The argument is a strawman, it's been refuted to the point of inanity and its frustrating that you can't skip past it on DVDs, but it does help to give people who (claim that they) pirate because pirating grants them a feature they don't have a little perspective.
For less than the price of a car (and they're only about $10,000) I can buy a crowbar and learn to hotwire which lets you steal any car you could ever want and then some *and* lets you live games like GTA in real life. No weekly repayments or repossessions, it's all just there.
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay car economy when the thief experience is far superior?
Frank McCourt, the man behind such literary marvels as Angela's Ashes, talked about that in his autobiography which was published in 2005. Idle is crap, but crap from 2005, really?
I tagged it as that in "the mysterious future" (although it's not called that anymore, it shows the time the story will appear to everyone).
It's the best way to make tags "stick". Before it appears to everyone there's very little tagging going on, so basically any tag will show up as a "top tag", as soon as it hits the mainpage other people see the tag and tag it the same. Say for example it was tagged "linux, netbook, germany, godwinslaw, amazon, it, otherstuff" and one person tagged it "morekdawsoncrap", the tag wouldn't be popular enough to show up so that everyone else does the same.
KD will probably use his infinite-editor mod points to destroy my karma now though:(
To be fair, implementing graphics by raw interface with the windowing system is so difficult that a newbie attempting it will give up in minutes
I didn't mean they should be writing their own implementations of Pygame, I meant that new programmers shouldn't be doing anything so complex that it requires them to use anything other than the standard library. Learn the language, then play with the extras.
You recommend making a 15 year old who has never programed before interface directly with the low-level OS APIs?
No, I recommend making a 15 year old who has never programmed before start with; print "Hello world";
Learning the standard library of the language, learning the language itself, not jumping into using an external toolkit.
No. New programmers should be looking at a problem and thinking "How can I solve this" not "Where can I find a third-party library or toolkit that solves this?" That doesn't teach them the language, it teaches them Google.
I'm glad to be residing across the ditch in New Zealand (where ISPs are allowed to opt out of the filtering).
Can but ain't. They're all queuing up to opt-in; we've got Telecom's CEO saying the Internet needed this years ago. It's the fallback for John "The Internet is the Wild West" Key's three-strikes-filesharing-bill, I'll bet money if they can't pass that they'll just use the filter to block the likes of the The Pirate Bay. Hopefully we IPREDator before we get the filters.
There needs to be tougher (and by tougher I mean "some") penalties to stop patent nonsense like this.
If a patent is applied for and prior art exists there should be criminal convictions (huge, EU-like fines) as a result. Then companies would have to do their homework before they file for a patent, instead of the current situation where they use an idea that was used 10+ years ago and either the patent is rejected or the USPTO misses it and they get the patent.
If the later is true (and it seems to be, quite a lot of the time) and they try to sue and prior art is turned up during the trial, there should be penalties strong enough deter cases like that, eg. If the defendant is not guilty because the patent is invalid the CEO goes to jail.
And then you may as well hang an "out of business" sign on the doors of East Texas court houses.
Slashdot Mirror
You can do it even in a suburban home if you plan well enough.
And own a lot of hamsters.
Heck, I'll even watch the commercials ... in my dreams.
You're not a true fan, I'll record the commercials and watch them twice.
If this was anything except 1984, this wouldn't have been news at all.
Bullshit.
Any class that leads into a career in politics.
Only it's not "required reading" per se, more like a text-book.
Someone patented guessing passwords?
If someone had been distributing pirated versions of Windows and only stopped 5 months after they had been contacted by Microsoft's legal team, would Microsoft applaud them?
I had been on the path for several months of buying a legitimate copy of Windows before Microsoft's lawyers got in touch. Honest.
I realise that, I was (partly) joking. The "I pirate because X" crew really are frustrating, as each time whatever their gripe is (DRM, need disk to play, etc. etc.) is fixed they shift the goalposts ("Okay, the game no longer needs the disk to play, now I want them cheaper"). The argument is a strawman, it's been refuted to the point of inanity and its frustrating that you can't skip past it on DVDs, but it does help to give people who (claim that they) pirate because pirating grants them a feature they don't have a little perspective.
For less than the price of a car (and they're only about $10,000) I can buy a crowbar and learn to hotwire which lets you steal any car you could ever want and then some *and* lets you live games like GTA in real life. No weekly repayments or repossessions, it's all just there.
Why would I want to participate in the for-pay car economy when the thief experience is far superior?
There are plenty of reasons why your product will not sell piracy is not one of them.
The fact that people can get a product for free isn't a reason for it's sales to drop?
It is a reason, just not as big a reason as they want us to believe.
Edit -> Find and Replace
Search for: Usenet
Replace with: torrent
[ ] Match case
[*] Match entire word only
[ ] Search backwards
[ ] Wrap around
[Replace all]
Welcome to 1995.
Sport is a game. People take sport seriously.
Frank McCourt, the man behind such literary marvels as Angela's Ashes, talked about that in his autobiography which was published in 2005. Idle is crap, but crap from 2005, really?
I tagged it as that in "the mysterious future" (although it's not called that anymore, it shows the time the story will appear to everyone).
:(
It's the best way to make tags "stick". Before it appears to everyone there's very little tagging going on, so basically any tag will show up as a "top tag", as soon as it hits the mainpage other people see the tag and tag it the same. Say for example it was tagged "linux, netbook, germany, godwinslaw, amazon, it, otherstuff" and one person tagged it "morekdawsoncrap", the tag wouldn't be popular enough to show up so that everyone else does the same.
KD will probably use his infinite-editor mod points to destroy my karma now though
Menus are so 2006, what to order is now printed on the ribbon they wrap the presents with.
No, you'll have to buy that separately.
Or one of the Office guys that thought getting rid of menus would be a great idea?
They'll be there.
They need someone to put the ribbon on the presents.
Bad music is a virus.
It spreads like wildfire and everyone has it.
To be fair, implementing graphics by raw interface with the windowing system is so difficult that a newbie attempting it will give up in minutes
I didn't mean they should be writing their own implementations of Pygame, I meant that new programmers shouldn't be doing anything so complex that it requires them to use anything other than the standard library. Learn the language, then play with the extras.
You recommend making a 15 year old who has never programed before interface directly with the low-level OS APIs?
No, I recommend making a 15 year old who has never programmed before start with;
print "Hello world";
Learning the standard library of the language, learning the language itself, not jumping into using an external toolkit.
No. New programmers should be looking at a problem and thinking "How can I solve this" not "Where can I find a third-party library or toolkit that solves this?" That doesn't teach them the language, it teaches them Google.
No, it's *my* favourite language. Your favourite language is awful.
minister ... commited to being a total idiot
Person in Government is a total idiot, more news at 11.
I'm glad to be residing across the ditch in New Zealand (where ISPs are allowed to opt out of the filtering).
Can but ain't. They're all queuing up to opt-in; we've got Telecom's CEO saying the Internet needed this years ago. It's the fallback for John "The Internet is the Wild West" Key's three-strikes-filesharing-bill, I'll bet money if they can't pass that they'll just use the filter to block the likes of the The Pirate Bay. Hopefully we IPREDator before we get the filters.
There needs to be tougher (and by tougher I mean "some") penalties to stop patent nonsense like this. If a patent is applied for and prior art exists there should be criminal convictions (huge, EU-like fines) as a result. Then companies would have to do their homework before they file for a patent, instead of the current situation where they use an idea that was used 10+ years ago and either the patent is rejected or the USPTO misses it and they get the patent.
If the later is true (and it seems to be, quite a lot of the time) and they try to sue and prior art is turned up during the trial, there should be penalties strong enough deter cases like that, eg. If the defendant is not guilty because the patent is invalid the CEO goes to jail.
And then you may as well hang an "out of business" sign on the doors of East Texas court houses.