And if you are doing a strictly web browser like computer and don't want to use Windows, why not just build a netbook or computer with pre-installed Linux?
In theory, to save all those processor cycles draining your battery, instead putting them on the cloud.
In practice, I think you're mostly right. Although, if they can make Linux user (as in, grandma) friendly by removing the need to update via rpm and such (because your software is on the cloud, of course) they might be able to make it work. But it's going to take a lot to convince people to switch from the familiar Windows to an OS that requires an internet connection on your netbook.
I hope they're nervous. They need a little "fear" to keep them honest (or at least as honest as they can be considering they are the some of the greediest bastards on earth).
They won't be honest, they'll just pretend to be so. That's even worse, since it hides the problems so we can't even complain to our congress critters to fix them any more.
I would actually prefer conversion to Library of Congress widths, lengths, and/or heights. I will also accept longest diagonal dimension for the minimum number of LoCs to reach this cluster.
No, the parent to my post did. I simply pointed out that using Star Trek as an example of what happens when we cut out military spending is pointless, since the series' take place on military vessels.
The military itself may not be "for profit", but MANY of the companies that supply the military with equipment have ties to various politicians and/or political groups. Iraq/Afghanistan weren't wars for oil, they were wars for profit in general...just like every other war in history.
Wars and the military are for-profit in the same way as roads and peace treaties. They all let the country (in whole or part) make (or continue making) money. Security is helpful for making money.
Much of the technology we are currently using (fighter planes, as an example) serve no purpose over in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bombers, sure...but planes designed for air-to-air combat? What, are they fighting the 47th Flying Sandies Brigade? Much of our military spending is still stuck in the Cold War. It needs to be drastically altered.
The only current air superiority fighter in development and purchasing I'm aware of is the F-22, and we've already capped the order there.
Given the lead times on military development (often measured in decades), it makes sense to anticipate future needs before they arise. The reason we continued the F-22 and similar programs (albeit in reduced form) is the same reason we have such advanced drone aircraft now. We need to be prepared for future needs, not just the current ones, unless you can go from technology demo to full-scale production in months instead of years.
Oddly enough, Star Trek just so happens to take place aboard a military vessel, and regardless of how much they attempt to be peaceful things frequently seem to come to blows at some point.
In other words, a military will always be necessary because there is always at least one crackpot who will screw things up otherwise.
So is an apple, but it is still trademarked with respect to computers as Apple. Similarly Shell, Marathon (the gas company, and the Bungie game), Bungie (the aforementioned company), Google, Sun, Mustang, and a plethora of others. The trademark system allows words to be trademarked only for specific use.
In this case, we're talking about the term Warhammer in relation to gaming. In general, infringement means you have to be intending to use the term as an identifier of a specific item (which it is, in this case) and to use it for an unrelated item or personal gain (not present, in this case).
The things have been handwaved to the public as just some magical things... and their operators are 100% profesional and would do no such thing as looking for anything else than guns anyway.
Relevent part quoted. I mean, it's one to sacrifice a little bit of privacy temporarily, but I want to know exactly what I'm getting into. At first they claimed professionalism, blurred genitals, and no permanent record of the images. Suddenly, we have unprofessional workers, starings at printed copies of well defined dangly bits.
I'm alright with someone laughing about my (relatively anonymized) genitals as long as there is a firewall between the scanner and personnel at the gate, and no images get stored. I figure they make fun of people they work with just like the rest of us. However, I'm totally not alright with it once you start lying about the technical capabilities or firewall procedures.
It is possible that they can use this system to repair underwater wires that transmit internet data.
Wait, what!?
The systems referenced in this article promote the clotting of blood and creation of scar tissue to speed the natural healing process of a body. Last time I checked, those are mechanisms that aren't present in undersea cables.
its not a catch-22, you just need a dev environment. now that might be difficult in some [most] situations, but if you work for the firm in question they will probably have one.
Even a clean environment might not be a reasonable protection. One could still run afoul of the DMCA if you break any encryption along the way. As well, such a development environment is expensive in itself, which further pushes the ideal research environment back to the very companies that don't want to fund them.
Regardless, I still only see the claims 'losses aren't real if they're hypothetical' and 'losses for piracy are hypothetical, unlike other opportunity cost losses'. If that's not correct, please make your point more clearly.
Neither have any support beyond your claim that they exist. Either support what you claim, or give it up.
Exactly, and so the only way for people like us to have dependably secure systems to use (ATMs, banks, CCs, anything with a logon or PII) is for white-hat hackers to break the law. That needs to be fixed, one way or the other.
And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for.
So because you paid for the internet connection, there is no limit on what you can do with it? How does that make sense? Because I bought the car and paid for the gas, I can drive it on your land without asking?
It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.
If you're a willing participant, it has everything to do with you. I'm against exhorbanant fees for simply downloading (thousands of dollars per song, for example), but that doesn't mean I think downloaders have no liability. You should be liable for the cost of the good (about $60, plus some nominal penalty for repeat offenses), and the uploader should be liable for much more.
Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?
Not by default. Notice that is both of your cases, the law was rewritten through the process of a representative democracy. The exact reason for a representative democracy is to prevent this kind of 'everyone is doing it, so it's alright' mob-rule.
My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.
This is reasonable, but none of it justifies piracy now, since it's currently illegal. You need to change the law first.
And don't give me some bullshit that free access to a luxury entertainment item is a human right, equivalent to being treated equally regardless of the color of your skin.
My argument was to state that people use hypothetical questions too seriously (when all they are is a thought experiment, i.e., just a "What If" question/statement, and therefore should cary very little if any legal weight unless proven true, in the exact way that any actual thought experient works). Additionally, up to present, most opportunity cost arguments (at least ones i've heard) were all purely hypothetical when used in terms of piracy, and were therefore easily discountable.
See your sibling post about worker's compensation for missed work due to injury. That is a very real and common example of opportunity cost, and it does carry legal weight.
You still haven't explained why opportunity cost is any more hypothetical or less real than the opportunity cost of an injury causing missed work. Would you care to?
Right, I tried to be specific. And yes, there are inefficiencies (jobs usually have fixed hours, etc, we're ignoring this for the sake of example).
To fix the numbers: for a given 12 hour period, you can either work 8 and play 4, or skip work (unpaid sick day, for example) and play for 12 hours. Moreover, let's assume it's release day for a game, to make it realistic. If you make $10/hr, the opportunity cost of skipping work to play the new release is $80. It's a real cost because, at the end of the day, you're out an extra $80. The reason you factor it in is to make an effective decision on skipping work. If 12 hours of a new release is worth $140 to you, then go for it. Otherwise, take the 4 hours of play that day and still be up $20.
Although I am a filthy pirate, I tend to agree with most of your assessment. The problem, to me, is twofold.
Personally, I see these two pitfalls as reasons not to pirate as a response to DRM, or as a try-before-you-buy extended demo. Both are indistinguishable from piracy-in-place-of-purchase. So to the executives, it looks like theft, sounds like theft, and acts like theft.
So, if instead these pirates just didn't play the game at all, instead choosing only to support games with sufficient demos and no DRM (Stardock, for example) the justification for the bad companies would dry up, and the companies who were consumer-friendly would get the support they needed.
Instead, though, Stardock's Demigod was pirated extensively, with pirates outnumering customers 9:1. The extra load crashed the servers, even. They managed to make the tough decision to stay true to not having DRM and did make money on the game, but it's easy to see where another company would make the seemingly obvious choice to use DRM. Shouldn't we start rewarding this behavior with purchases, instead of just pirating from the companies we hate?
The problem is that it's a catch-22: usually the only way to find these vulnerabilities is to exploit them in the first place. And companies often don't grant access to white-hats because they think their systems are secure (or at least want to believe so), which can't be disproven until said hackers show them wrong.
One would hope that a company wouldn't press charges unless there was malicious intent (he dispensed and pocketed several hundred dollar for himself to 'test' the system). Of course, this is America, and I have nowhere near that much faith in our corporations or justice system...
But isn't opportunity cost just code for hypothetical questions?
No, opportunity costs are very real. For example if for a given 4 hour period you can work and make $100, but instead play video games, your opportunity cost is $100 to play games. Likewise, your opportunity cost to work is 4 hours of enjoyment. The question, of course, is if those 4 hours of enjoyment are worth $100, or if you are better off spending that time working and using the $100 at a later time for more enjoyment.
You could claim that this isn't an opportunity cost issue, but you'll have to have a better argument than 'opportunity cost is fake'.
"Hypothetically if he wasnt a thief, and hypothetically if he had morals, and hypothetically if he had money, he may or may not have purchased that game..."
Hypothetically they should be paying me cause hypothetically i'm the owner of the business... see, gets kinda silly quick.
Good work on the straw man, just add hypothetical to everything. Although, I find it interesting that you call pirates 'thieves' yet don't have an apparent problem with it. Usually that word is called out as pure rhetoric...
But isn't that the same way 'shrinkage' in a store works? If the person who stole the item wasn't a thief, and had money, they would have made $X more. The only difference is there is no loss of inventory, just the loss of a customer, but it still adds up over time.
The simplest proof that piracy can have a real cost? If there's 100% piracy, they make $0 in sales. That's a very real cost, even if the sales they should have had are purely 'hypothetical'.
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600). The goal is to quantify that cost accurately, and determine what is acceptable and reasonable. It seems most people on/. are angry that the game execs are being unreasonable with the numbers, yet mistakenly rail against any quantification of them.
I agree, there isn't going to be a hard and fast answer (at least, not one that's real). However, there is some number of pirates who would have bought your game, which is the real cost of piracy on your game.
The best you can do is get an upper and lower bound on the number, and compare that cost of lost sales to the cost of DRM. I guarantee that's what the game execs are doing right now.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you are doing a strictly web browser like computer and don't want to use Windows, why not just build a netbook or computer with pre-installed Linux?
In theory, to save all those processor cycles draining your battery, instead putting them on the cloud.
In practice, I think you're mostly right. Although, if they can make Linux user (as in, grandma) friendly by removing the need to update via rpm and such (because your software is on the cloud, of course) they might be able to make it work. But it's going to take a lot to convince people to switch from the familiar Windows to an OS that requires an internet connection on your netbook.
I hope they're nervous. They need a little "fear" to keep them honest (or at least as honest as they can be considering they are the some of the greediest bastards on earth).
They won't be honest, they'll just pretend to be so. That's even worse, since it hides the problems so we can't even complain to our congress critters to fix them any more.
Well, of course we define it for STP. You know, for the sake of clarity and relevence.
I would actually prefer conversion to Library of Congress widths, lengths, and/or heights. I will also accept longest diagonal dimension for the minimum number of LoCs to reach this cluster.
But what is that in Libraries of Congress?
Talk to the GP, he's the one that tried to use pop culture. I simply pointed out that his example was actually counter to his point.
No, the parent to my post did. I simply pointed out that using Star Trek as an example of what happens when we cut out military spending is pointless, since the series' take place on military vessels.
The military itself may not be "for profit", but MANY of the companies that supply the military with equipment have ties to various politicians and/or political groups. Iraq/Afghanistan weren't wars for oil, they were wars for profit in general...just like every other war in history.
Wars and the military are for-profit in the same way as roads and peace treaties. They all let the country (in whole or part) make (or continue making) money. Security is helpful for making money.
Much of the technology we are currently using (fighter planes, as an example) serve no purpose over in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bombers, sure...but planes designed for air-to-air combat? What, are they fighting the 47th Flying Sandies Brigade? Much of our military spending is still stuck in the Cold War. It needs to be drastically altered.
The only current air superiority fighter in development and purchasing I'm aware of is the F-22, and we've already capped the order there.
Given the lead times on military development (often measured in decades), it makes sense to anticipate future needs before they arise. The reason we continued the F-22 and similar programs (albeit in reduced form) is the same reason we have such advanced drone aircraft now. We need to be prepared for future needs, not just the current ones, unless you can go from technology demo to full-scale production in months instead of years.
Oddly enough, Star Trek just so happens to take place aboard a military vessel, and regardless of how much they attempt to be peaceful things frequently seem to come to blows at some point.
In other words, a military will always be necessary because there is always at least one crackpot who will screw things up otherwise.
So is an apple, but it is still trademarked with respect to computers as Apple. Similarly Shell, Marathon (the gas company, and the Bungie game), Bungie (the aforementioned company), Google, Sun, Mustang, and a plethora of others. The trademark system allows words to be trademarked only for specific use.
In this case, we're talking about the term Warhammer in relation to gaming. In general, infringement means you have to be intending to use the term as an identifier of a specific item (which it is, in this case) and to use it for an unrelated item or personal gain (not present, in this case).
The things have been handwaved to the public as just some magical things ... and their operators are 100% profesional and would do no such thing as looking for anything else than guns anyway.
Relevent part quoted. I mean, it's one to sacrifice a little bit of privacy temporarily, but I want to know exactly what I'm getting into. At first they claimed professionalism, blurred genitals, and no permanent record of the images. Suddenly, we have unprofessional workers, starings at printed copies of well defined dangly bits.
I'm alright with someone laughing about my (relatively anonymized) genitals as long as there is a firewall between the scanner and personnel at the gate, and no images get stored. I figure they make fun of people they work with just like the rest of us. However, I'm totally not alright with it once you start lying about the technical capabilities or firewall procedures.
It is possible that they can use this system to repair underwater wires that transmit internet data.
Wait, what!?
The systems referenced in this article promote the clotting of blood and creation of scar tissue to speed the natural healing process of a body. Last time I checked, those are mechanisms that aren't present in undersea cables.
its not a catch-22, you just need a dev environment. now that might be difficult in some [most] situations, but if you work for the firm in question they will probably have one.
Even a clean environment might not be a reasonable protection. One could still run afoul of the DMCA if you break any encryption along the way. As well, such a development environment is expensive in itself, which further pushes the ideal research environment back to the very companies that don't want to fund them.
The point of the article was that the "opportunity cost" of the piracy of these games are significantly lower than that 80-90% figure would suggest.
Yes, but it's likewise impossible to claim that it is instead the 5-10% value that they claim. It's almost certainly somewhere between 10% and 80%.
Regardless, I still only see the claims 'losses aren't real if they're hypothetical' and 'losses for piracy are hypothetical, unlike other opportunity cost losses'. If that's not correct, please make your point more clearly.
Neither have any support beyond your claim that they exist. Either support what you claim, or give it up.
Exactly, and so the only way for people like us to have dependably secure systems to use (ATMs, banks, CCs, anything with a logon or PII) is for white-hat hackers to break the law. That needs to be fixed, one way or the other.
32GB should easily be enough for your main system drive no matter what desktop OS you're running
Tell that to the bastards who keep forcing their program installation directories to the system drive!
And you are in no way, shape or form, in any hypothetical or actual fashion, entitled to tell me what I can or can not do with my computer, and what subset of the base 256 representation of pi I can or cannot download with the internet connection I paid for.
So because you paid for the internet connection, there is no limit on what you can do with it? How does that make sense? Because I bought the car and paid for the gas, I can drive it on your land without asking?
It cost money to create it? Tough shit. Sue the guy who uploaded it. If you can't find him, that has nothing to do with me.
If you're a willing participant, it has everything to do with you. I'm against exhorbanant fees for simply downloading (thousands of dollars per song, for example), but that doesn't mean I think downloaders have no liability. You should be liable for the cost of the good (about $60, plus some nominal penalty for repeat offenses), and the uploader should be liable for much more.
Also, if the number of pirates is as high as these companies suggest (which would also mean that there are also many people who agree in principle, but don't do it for whatever reasons), shouldn't that invalidate any laws against it in a democracy by default? Think about it: how many people breaking the law does it take to change it, if the majority of the population is at least neutral to their cause?
Not by default. Notice that is both of your cases, the law was rewritten through the process of a representative democracy. The exact reason for a representative democracy is to prevent this kind of 'everyone is doing it, so it's alright' mob-rule.
My proposed solution: a) extend Fair Use to the whole of the internet for personal use (even Hungary has that fercrissake), b) slap on an optional and reasonable Entertainment Fee/Tax to designated connection plans, to be distributed among the content creators based on measurements, and possibly c) zero tolerance among those who opt out, with fines based on the tax, not $2M for an album.
This is reasonable, but none of it justifies piracy now, since it's currently illegal. You need to change the law first.
And don't give me some bullshit that free access to a luxury entertainment item is a human right, equivalent to being treated equally regardless of the color of your skin.
My argument was to state that people use hypothetical questions too seriously (when all they are is a thought experiment, i.e., just a "What If" question/statement, and therefore should cary very little if any legal weight unless proven true, in the exact way that any actual thought experient works). Additionally, up to present, most opportunity cost arguments (at least ones i've heard) were all purely hypothetical when used in terms of piracy, and were therefore easily discountable.
See your sibling post about worker's compensation for missed work due to injury. That is a very real and common example of opportunity cost, and it does carry legal weight.
You still haven't explained why opportunity cost is any more hypothetical or less real than the opportunity cost of an injury causing missed work. Would you care to?
Right, I tried to be specific. And yes, there are inefficiencies (jobs usually have fixed hours, etc, we're ignoring this for the sake of example).
To fix the numbers: for a given 12 hour period, you can either work 8 and play 4, or skip work (unpaid sick day, for example) and play for 12 hours. Moreover, let's assume it's release day for a game, to make it realistic. If you make $10/hr, the opportunity cost of skipping work to play the new release is $80. It's a real cost because, at the end of the day, you're out an extra $80. The reason you factor it in is to make an effective decision on skipping work. If 12 hours of a new release is worth $140 to you, then go for it. Otherwise, take the 4 hours of play that day and still be up $20.
Although I am a filthy pirate, I tend to agree with most of your assessment. The problem, to me, is twofold.
Personally, I see these two pitfalls as reasons not to pirate as a response to DRM, or as a try-before-you-buy extended demo. Both are indistinguishable from piracy-in-place-of-purchase. So to the executives, it looks like theft, sounds like theft, and acts like theft.
So, if instead these pirates just didn't play the game at all, instead choosing only to support games with sufficient demos and no DRM (Stardock, for example) the justification for the bad companies would dry up, and the companies who were consumer-friendly would get the support they needed.
Instead, though, Stardock's Demigod was pirated extensively, with pirates outnumering customers 9:1. The extra load crashed the servers, even. They managed to make the tough decision to stay true to not having DRM and did make money on the game, but it's easy to see where another company would make the seemingly obvious choice to use DRM. Shouldn't we start rewarding this behavior with purchases, instead of just pirating from the companies we hate?
The problem is that it's a catch-22: usually the only way to find these vulnerabilities is to exploit them in the first place. And companies often don't grant access to white-hats because they think their systems are secure (or at least want to believe so), which can't be disproven until said hackers show them wrong.
One would hope that a company wouldn't press charges unless there was malicious intent (he dispensed and pocketed several hundred dollar for himself to 'test' the system). Of course, this is America, and I have nowhere near that much faith in our corporations or justice system...
But isn't opportunity cost just code for hypothetical questions?
No, opportunity costs are very real. For example if for a given 4 hour period you can work and make $100, but instead play video games, your opportunity cost is $100 to play games. Likewise, your opportunity cost to work is 4 hours of enjoyment. The question, of course, is if those 4 hours of enjoyment are worth $100, or if you are better off spending that time working and using the $100 at a later time for more enjoyment.
You could claim that this isn't an opportunity cost issue, but you'll have to have a better argument than 'opportunity cost is fake'.
"Hypothetically if he wasnt a thief, and hypothetically if he had morals, and hypothetically if he had money, he may or may not have purchased that game..." Hypothetically they should be paying me cause hypothetically i'm the owner of the business... see, gets kinda silly quick.
Good work on the straw man, just add hypothetical to everything. Although, I find it interesting that you call pirates 'thieves' yet don't have an apparent problem with it. Usually that word is called out as pure rhetoric...
But isn't that the same way 'shrinkage' in a store works? If the person who stole the item wasn't a thief, and had money, they would have made $X more. The only difference is there is no loss of inventory, just the loss of a customer, but it still adds up over time.
The simplest proof that piracy can have a real cost? If there's 100% piracy, they make $0 in sales. That's a very real cost, even if the sales they should have had are purely 'hypothetical'.
Even if only 10 people out of the 1 million who pirated would otherwise have purchased the game, the company has still lost money to piracy (about $600). The goal is to quantify that cost accurately, and determine what is acceptable and reasonable. It seems most people on /. are angry that the game execs are being unreasonable with the numbers, yet mistakenly rail against any quantification of them.
I agree, there isn't going to be a hard and fast answer (at least, not one that's real). However, there is some number of pirates who would have bought your game, which is the real cost of piracy on your game.
The best you can do is get an upper and lower bound on the number, and compare that cost of lost sales to the cost of DRM. I guarantee that's what the game execs are doing right now.
I think he ran out of energy to distort reality and justify his piracy as acceptable.