Alternatively, they could buy the content and not afford the system to run it on?
Certainly people do pirate things they could actually afford, but those college kids also frequently pirate more than they could afford. I've known people that pirated movies, games, and music that would have exceeded their annual income if they actually bought them.
It's not simply a matter of reality TV shows being more popular... They are really cheap to make. My impression is that they can cancel a typical (non-reality) television show, and replace it with a reality show, and still be more profitable even if the reality show gets less viewers.
The free market has many strengths, but it doesn't necessarily promote the best of the arts.
Yes, I'm aware that Opera has gone to 11 already, which is why I didn't say that Chrome would be the first browser to go to 11, just that it would beat Firefox to it, not to mention IE.
However, that really isn't important given that I believe that most of us here can agree that numbering is as arbitrary as the infamous Spinal Tap amp, and making a disclaimer to recognize Opera as already having gone to 11 would have hampered the timing in my little attempt at comedy.
Is this guy really saying "wow, look, Firefox took forever to release a version which was just 0.5 higher, while Chrome went from 9 to 10 in four weeks."?
Obviously the writer recognized the value of being able to say, "it goes to 11..." It seems Chrome will beat Firefox to that particular benchmark.
I second this. Borderlands wasn't a great game, but it was fun. It had many flaws, but it showed that this team has some potential. I at least hope that Borderlands 2 could
With a sequel, I think it's completely possible that they could drop the ball and make a game that is pure rubbish... but I think there is at least a chance that they could polish their formula and make yet another amusing game.
It also made enough of an impression on me that it made me think that these guys might be the right guys to pull off a Duke Nuke'em sequel.
I'm right there with you. I spent quite a bit of time trying to look for another plan that allowed me to either have no data plan or a very minimal and cheap one.
I recently acquired an "older" Verizon phone (slightly more than 2 years old) . I'm content to just use it as a phone that can access wi-fi access points only. However, Verizon told me I wouldn't be allowed to use it with Verizon without buying a data plan. They wouldn't let me do just voice only, and their voice plans were overpriced already before adding data.
The funny thing about it is that I was able to go to a prepaid dealer (PagePlus) and use my same phone, on the Verizon network still, and get voice, texts, and a little data for cheaper than I could get at Verizon themselves! Now, there are stories that their customer support is bad (and their hold times are long) but they give cheaper and more reasonable plans on the Verizon network than Verizon does!
I too am waiting for carriers to get a clue and start making more consumer friendly plans...but I'm not holding my breath... especially when the number of competitors shrink.
That's the only group that matters. The other people you describe all fall under the category of "people who won't pay no matter what." These people shouldn't factor into pricing decisions, nor should they factor into product design considerations like DRM. They won't buy no matter how much you wish they would, so just ignore them.
Trust me, I realize that the other groups don't matter, and many others realize this also. However, the major copyright holders don't care about this distinction, and they want to stop the others as well.
Furthermore, they like to ignore the fact that those other groups don't matter in order to inflate the impact of piracy, and to justify more draconian business practices and laws.
It's naive to think it's the only way, or to think it will actually stop it.
It will reduce piracy, at least among groups that are motivated to pirate based on the price barrier, but that's not the only type of group.
From my experience, pirates tend to be broken up into these main categories:
- People who pirate because they can't afford to be legit (at least not on everything), or simply think the prices are too high and refuse to pay the price being asked. - People who pirate because they are digital hoarders, and they wouldn't care what the price is. They just collect data for bragging rights, to explore all the data that's out there, for trading, or 'just in case' they need or want it one day (or in case someone else might want or need it.) Or maybe it's just to be rebellious. - People who pirate for trial purposes, to help them in making a buying decisions. Despite skepticism to the contrary, some of these actually buy. - People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days, and who might actually be legit if there were less hassle involved.
Why does it have to be internet specific? Can't we just have the word, 'unlimited' defined as to mean.... 'unlimited'? Regardless of what the industry is?
It can be *imitated*. Humans fake it too, but with them there is always at least the possibility that it's genuine. With robots, you always know it's fake.
I don't really think it's about them being too cheap to increase their infrastructure. I imagine they will do that too.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I honestly believe that it has more to do with them wanting to effectively put meters on content delivery in order to milk more money out of it. They want to get this in place during the early adopter phase so that it will be perceived as standard practice when it truly becomes mainstream. Sure, the internet is mainstream enough that even your grandmother is watching cute cat videos on YouTube, but it's not at the point where it's replacing TV's for the mainstream.
Someone high up probably thought, "if only we had thought to put meters on cable television so that we could charge people based on how many hours of television they watched!"
Lately, I've been hearing complaints about the usage of "times less" pop up quite a few times around here.
First of all, it's a common idiom. Idioms aren't always used in a way that some might find to be mathematically consistant. A bird in the hand is not the mathematical equivalent of two in the bush.
Also, this idiom is actually mathematically consistent in that it clearly suggests a multiplicative inverse (or reciprocal).
Finally, this is a very old usage. It has been documented to have existed for three centuries years. This doesn't mean that the journalist is stupid, unless you also would consider a writer such as Jonathan Swift to be stupid.
I believe, what their saying is that, a superfluid can escape a container that air can not. Not that the superfluid can escape an inescapable container.
A lot of people have the opinion that the ACLU is only about shutting down the speech of Christians/Whites/Men/*insert majority group here.
A lot of people also voluntarily subject themselves to media outlets that flood them with propaganda that tells them that ACLU, liberals, democrats, and muslims all do hate and undermine Christians, Whites, men, and American values.
A lot of people are clueless, lied to, misinformed, confused or just outright ignorant. Their views frequently don't match reality, but that doesn't stop politicians from catering to their whims.
As an example of how out of touch with reality some people are, in 2009, a Pew Research Poll that was conducted in order to study perceived media bias actually found that 14% of people though that Fox News was mostly liberal. How could someone even come up with such a conclusion? Are these people so far to the right that even Fox looks liberal to them? Have they just never seen it? Or maybe they believe Fox's own propaganda that all news media is liberal, and assume it means them too.
However, back to the main point, the ACLU is about protecting people's rights and isn't taking religious sides. They have also defended free speech of Christians when that speech was challenged as being too hostile toward muslims or gays. The ACLU has even sided with those who protested against the ACLU!
But that's neither here nor there, my joking comment is just to point out that people are making too big of a deal over "times less", which most of us realize is used to express a multiplicative inverse relationship (reciprocal).
As for the "music" comment, don't mistake my reference to ICP as me acknowledging their work as 'music'. Nothing could be further from the truth.
But that's just my 50 times less than a dollar's worth.
[quote]Then insist on paying less or not buying.[/quote]
Which is precisely what I have done. I almost never buy DRM'ed content, unless there is some other reasonable benefit to offset what is lost, or there is a significant discount. However, my personal buying habits don't really matter much if the vast majority seem to be oblivious or apathetic to these pitfalls and buying into the model. Consumers have the ultimate say, but by and large, they seem to be just accepting a crappy situation.
I've been griping about DRM for years, and it's not exclusive to ebook content. The digital distribution models currently in place are very consumer unfriendly.
We frequently pay as much for digital only as for physically distributed goods, but lack the ability to transfer ownership, are sometimes tied to certain hardware (which may be obsoleted), usually lack the ability to loan the media (or can only do so in limited or cumbersome ways), and sometimes are even tied to a specific device.
Many folks I talk to think I'm overreacting, but yet they never seem to think about the implications are if we did truly go fully digital. I have many books, CDs, records, and even some magazines that are decades old. The oldest physical media that I own is over 100 years old. Sure, these items could be lost and damaged, but as long as they are taken care of, I can still continue to enjoy these (or transfer ownership) of these as long as I please. This is not likely to be possible for current digital media.
It also makes me concerned about the impact on libraries from the transition to digital media.
I've put a lot of time into Civ 1, 3, 4, and 5 (I am in a minority that wasn't a fan of 2). Civ 5 isn't perfect, but I don't think it's as bad (currently) as many people make it out to be. The AI had issues upon the initial release (which have improved with patches), but the AI in previous versions had many holes that created severe weaknesses also.
I think that many weaknesses of the AI in some previous versions were hidden by the the AI's use of the SoD (Stack of Doom). You may find one-unit-per-tile to be questionable, but I think it's one of the greatest things about Civ 5. It has made it feel more tactical, and less about an arms race to have the biggest SoD.
I think Civ 5 made many great improvements to the game, but it falls short of Civ 4 in interface. Some of the interface changes I really like, but at the same time they have made some things rather clunky. I find myself constantly running into little things where there is a simple feature that could have really increased usability (in many cases, that existed in Civ 4) that they seemed to completely overlook or broke in Civ 5.
Examples of this would be when I'm trying to find a single unit from the unit list, and can't get it to show me where that unit is, or look at the civ/city-state list and can't have it show me where a city state is. Another frustration would be that the game allows for multiple aircraft to be in one city, but yet it has no way to select all air units in order to issue all of them the same order (such as rebase, sleep, or air strikes).
However, I feel like many people unfairly compare Civ 4 with expansions to Civ 5 with no expansions. Civ 4 was great, but it did evolve over time.
Is this really a fair comparison? Data tapes, recorders, and readers are most certainly still in existence. Variations in the size of the tapes or the format of the data are kind of a moot point.
I heard this story on the radio this morning, and I felt like they were looking in the wrong places anyway. They mostly were searching for obscure farming equipment from 100 years ago. If I were to go around searching for obsolete equipment, I would probably search in a field (no pun intended) outside of farming.
I would search for tools used in a field of study where perhaps our knowledge of the subject has changed so radically that the tools have not just become outdated, but proven to be counterproductive to the goal (such as maybe in the field of medicine). But even there, the tools might still be made not for actual use, but still produced in modern times because of historic value.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, they could buy the content and not afford the system to run it on?
Certainly people do pirate things they could actually afford, but those college kids also frequently pirate more than they could afford. I've known people that pirated movies, games, and music that would have exceeded their annual income if they actually bought them.
I don't understand the issue... Could someone give a car analogy?
As a serious question, on the issue that both sides give political money to candidates:
Why is it even legal to give money to an organization associated with a politician? Last I checked that was a 'bribe'.
The difference is simple.
Lining the pocket of a politician with a modest amount of money to get them to do one thing that you want is bribery.
Paying a large amount and putting a politician into your pocket so they do everything you want is a campaign contribution.
It doesn't take a full blown VB application... just a VB GUI.
It's not simply a matter of reality TV shows being more popular... They are really cheap to make. My impression is that they can cancel a typical (non-reality) television show, and replace it with a reality show, and still be more profitable even if the reality show gets less viewers.
The free market has many strengths, but it doesn't necessarily promote the best of the arts.
Yes, I'm aware that Opera has gone to 11 already, which is why I didn't say that Chrome would be the first browser to go to 11, just that it would beat Firefox to it, not to mention IE.
However, that really isn't important given that I believe that most of us here can agree that numbering is as arbitrary as the infamous Spinal Tap amp, and making a disclaimer to recognize Opera as already having gone to 11 would have hampered the timing in my little attempt at comedy.
Is this guy really saying "wow, look, Firefox took forever to release a version which was just 0.5 higher, while Chrome went from 9 to 10 in four weeks."?
Obviously the writer recognized the value of being able to say, "it goes to 11..." It seems Chrome will beat Firefox to that particular benchmark.
I second this. Borderlands wasn't a great game, but it was fun. It had many flaws, but it showed that this team has some potential. I at least hope that Borderlands 2 could
With a sequel, I think it's completely possible that they could drop the ball and make a game that is pure rubbish... but I think there is at least a chance that they could polish their formula and make yet another amusing game.
It also made enough of an impression on me that it made me think that these guys might be the right guys to pull off a Duke Nuke'em sequel.
I'm right there with you. I spent quite a bit of time trying to look for another plan that allowed me to either have no data plan or a very minimal and cheap one.
I recently acquired an "older" Verizon phone (slightly more than 2 years old) . I'm content to just use it as a phone that can access wi-fi access points only. However, Verizon told me I wouldn't be allowed to use it with Verizon without buying a data plan. They wouldn't let me do just voice only, and their voice plans were overpriced already before adding data.
The funny thing about it is that I was able to go to a prepaid dealer (PagePlus) and use my same phone, on the Verizon network still, and get voice, texts, and a little data for cheaper than I could get at Verizon themselves! Now, there are stories that their customer support is bad (and their hold times are long) but they give cheaper and more reasonable plans on the Verizon network than Verizon does!
I too am waiting for carriers to get a clue and start making more consumer friendly plans...but I'm not holding my breath... especially when the number of competitors shrink.
That's the only group that matters. The other people you describe all fall under the category of "people who won't pay no matter what." These people shouldn't factor into pricing decisions, nor should they factor into product design considerations like DRM. They won't buy no matter how much you wish they would, so just ignore them.
Trust me, I realize that the other groups don't matter, and many others realize this also. However, the major copyright holders don't care about this distinction, and they want to stop the others as well.
Furthermore, they like to ignore the fact that those other groups don't matter in order to inflate the impact of piracy, and to justify more draconian business practices and laws.
It's naive to think it's the only way, or to think it will actually stop it.
It will reduce piracy, at least among groups that are motivated to pirate based on the price barrier, but that's not the only type of group.
From my experience, pirates tend to be broken up into these main categories:
- People who pirate because they can't afford to be legit (at least not on everything), or simply think the prices are too high and refuse to pay the price being asked.
- People who pirate because they are digital hoarders, and they wouldn't care what the price is. They just collect data for bragging rights, to explore all the data that's out there, for trading, or 'just in case' they need or want it one day (or in case someone else might want or need it.) Or maybe it's just to be rebellious.
- People who pirate for trial purposes, to help them in making a buying decisions. Despite skepticism to the contrary, some of these actually buy.
- People who pirate in order to avoid the bad user experiences that are often associated with buying legitimately these days, and who might actually be legit if there were less hassle involved.
Why does it have to be internet specific? Can't we just have the word, 'unlimited' defined as to mean.... 'unlimited'? Regardless of what the industry is?
Empathy and kindness can be programmed
It can be *imitated*. Humans fake it too, but with them there is always at least the possibility that it's genuine. With robots, you always know it's fake.
So, they are kind of like strippers?
I always thought that a similar (and far less verbose) disclaimer was implied by the use of the word 'candidate'.
I don't really think it's about them being too cheap to increase their infrastructure. I imagine they will do that too.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I honestly believe that it has more to do with them wanting to effectively put meters on content delivery in order to milk more money out of it. They want to get this in place during the early adopter phase so that it will be perceived as standard practice when it truly becomes mainstream. Sure, the internet is mainstream enough that even your grandmother is watching cute cat videos on YouTube, but it's not at the point where it's replacing TV's for the mainstream.
Someone high up probably thought, "if only we had thought to put meters on cable television so that we could charge people based on how many hours of television they watched!"
Lately, I've been hearing complaints about the usage of "times less" pop up quite a few times around here.
First of all, it's a common idiom. Idioms aren't always used in a way that some might find to be mathematically consistant. A bird in the hand is not the mathematical equivalent of two in the bush.
Also, this idiom is actually mathematically consistent in that it clearly suggests a multiplicative inverse (or reciprocal).
Finally, this is a very old usage. It has been documented to have existed for three centuries years. This doesn't mean that the journalist is stupid, unless you also would consider a writer such as Jonathan Swift to be stupid.
I believe, what their saying is that, a superfluid can escape a container that air can not. Not that the superfluid can escape an inescapable container.
So, we should hold off on naming it 'Houdinium'?
No need for destruction, just make them pay whatever it costs to clean up. They are the fourth largest company in the world. $272.2 billion in assets.
So, they can fall under either "too big to fail", or "too messy to fail?"
A lot of people have the opinion that the ACLU is only about shutting down the speech of Christians/Whites/Men/*insert majority group here.
A lot of people also voluntarily subject themselves to media outlets that flood them with propaganda that tells them that ACLU, liberals, democrats, and muslims all do hate and undermine Christians, Whites, men, and American values.
A lot of people are clueless, lied to, misinformed, confused or just outright ignorant. Their views frequently don't match reality, but that doesn't stop politicians from catering to their whims.
As an example of how out of touch with reality some people are, in 2009, a Pew Research Poll that was conducted in order to study perceived media bias actually found that 14% of people though that Fox News was mostly liberal. How could someone even come up with such a conclusion? Are these people so far to the right that even Fox looks liberal to them? Have they just never seen it? Or maybe they believe Fox's own propaganda that all news media is liberal, and assume it means them too.
However, back to the main point, the ACLU is about protecting people's rights and isn't taking religious sides. They have also defended free speech of Christians when that speech was challenged as being too hostile toward muslims or gays. The ACLU has even sided with those who protested against the ACLU!
http://www.aclufightsforchristians.com/
And sure, a lot of people don't acknowledge this or care, but a lot of people also suffer from confirmation bias
The Tides references are about Bill O'Reilly, who has cited the behavior of the tides as evidence that there is a god.
"Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BCipg71LbI
But that's neither here nor there, my joking comment is just to point out that people are making too big of a deal over "times less", which most of us realize is used to express a multiplicative inverse relationship (reciprocal).
As for the "music" comment, don't mistake my reference to ICP as me acknowledging their work as 'music'. Nothing could be further from the truth.
But that's just my 50 times less than a dollar's worth.
Fucking Multiplicative inverses.... how do they work?
[quote]Then insist on paying less or not buying.[/quote]
Which is precisely what I have done. I almost never buy DRM'ed content, unless there is some other reasonable benefit to offset what is lost, or there is a significant discount. However, my personal buying habits don't really matter much if the vast majority seem to be oblivious or apathetic to these pitfalls and buying into the model. Consumers have the ultimate say, but by and large, they seem to be just accepting a crappy situation.
I've been griping about DRM for years, and it's not exclusive to ebook content. The digital distribution models currently in place are very consumer unfriendly.
We frequently pay as much for digital only as for physically distributed goods, but lack the ability to transfer ownership, are sometimes tied to certain hardware (which may be obsoleted), usually lack the ability to loan the media (or can only do so in limited or cumbersome ways), and sometimes are even tied to a specific device.
Many folks I talk to think I'm overreacting, but yet they never seem to think about the implications are if we did truly go fully digital. I have many books, CDs, records, and even some magazines that are decades old. The oldest physical media that I own is over 100 years old. Sure, these items could be lost and damaged, but as long as they are taken care of, I can still continue to enjoy these (or transfer ownership) of these as long as I please. This is not likely to be possible for current digital media.
It also makes me concerned about the impact on libraries from the transition to digital media.
I've put a lot of time into Civ 1, 3, 4, and 5 (I am in a minority that wasn't a fan of 2). Civ 5 isn't perfect, but I don't think it's as bad (currently) as many people make it out to be. The AI had issues upon the initial release (which have improved with patches), but the AI in previous versions had many holes that created severe weaknesses also.
I think that many weaknesses of the AI in some previous versions were hidden by the the AI's use of the SoD (Stack of Doom). You may find one-unit-per-tile to be questionable, but I think it's one of the greatest things about Civ 5. It has made it feel more tactical, and less about an arms race to have the biggest SoD.
I think Civ 5 made many great improvements to the game, but it falls short of Civ 4 in interface. Some of the interface changes I really like, but at the same time they have made some things rather clunky. I find myself constantly running into little things where there is a simple feature that could have really increased usability (in many cases, that existed in Civ 4) that they seemed to completely overlook or broke in Civ 5.
Examples of this would be when I'm trying to find a single unit from the unit list, and can't get it to show me where that unit is, or look at the civ/city-state list and can't have it show me where a city state is. Another frustration would be that the game allows for multiple aircraft to be in one city, but yet it has no way to select all air units in order to issue all of them the same order (such as rebase, sleep, or air strikes).
However, I feel like many people unfairly compare Civ 4 with expansions to Civ 5 with no expansions. Civ 4 was great, but it did evolve over time.
Is this really a fair comparison? Data tapes, recorders, and readers are most certainly still in existence. Variations in the size of the tapes or the format of the data are kind of a moot point.
I heard this story on the radio this morning, and I felt like they were looking in the wrong places anyway. They mostly were searching for obscure farming equipment from 100 years ago. If I were to go around searching for obsolete equipment, I would probably search in a field (no pun intended) outside of farming.
I would search for tools used in a field of study where perhaps our knowledge of the subject has changed so radically that the tools have not just become outdated, but proven to be counterproductive to the goal (such as maybe in the field of medicine). But even there, the tools might still be made not for actual use, but still produced in modern times because of historic value.