There's a hidden scene in AIKa. If you freeze frame through the scene where she's whirling through the air, you can see her panties! Buy it now before they edit out the panty scene!
Why is it that whenever [big internet site] is cracked, many 3 letter agancies "go after" the crackers with a great zeal and spend millions to try them, and sieze their hardware, and bar them forever from a career in computers....
Yet when my box is cracked and my credit card numbers stolen, etc., calling anyone (police, FBI, etc.) gets a "why are you bothering us? You're lucky we don't prosecute *you* for wasting our time with such trivialities." attitude?
Is cracking illegal or isn't it? Who do I report it to when I'm hit? What gov't/state/municipal entity defends me as defends amazon or CNN?
(1) Not all overclockers are willing to truly RISK the desctruction of their CPU to make it run faster. (2) Once it fails, these people may return their CPU to the store as "defective". (3) The store, rightfully never trusting the word of consumers, will test the CPU. (4) The store's test is short and in a nice cool optimal climate controlled environment. And subtle problems that show up when the CPU is warm and been running for a long time will not appear on the test. (5) The CPU goes back into the glass case to be resold. (6) You (after saving up a long time): "Hi, I want to buy that CPU right there." (7) You are now on a trip through hell. Your CPU may fail later that day (if you're lucky), or next week, or "lock up" only 3 times per year. You cannot now run your unattended server on your DSL/Cablemodem line. Your system is forever unstable. (8) By the time you realize the true cause of the problem, the warranty/exchange period is long gone. (9) You are screwed. And it is the fault of overclockers.
I don't want to hear about how "most" overclockers are responsible, blah blah. One person getting screwed on a machine that takes years for him to finally save up for is one screwing too many.
Overclocking needs to be blocked by the CPU itself, where it can't be circumvented. Just as laws are set up to occasionally let many a guilty man walk free rather than wrongfully convict so much as one innocent person.
Overclocking must end for the good of the consumer.
"[I]t is well established that no agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution." Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312 (1988).
Once your business (or portions thereof) has access restricted to people age 18 or over it may be officially be declared an "adult establishment". This has dire consequences.
Typical zoning laws do not all adult businesses in all but the worst part of town, in the industrial zoned areas, far out of the way of everything, and certainly far away from schools, malls, and kids. Arcades may be forced to get rid of the violent games or see their business licenses revoked.
If they boot the games, arcades may see their customer count dwindling. So wheather by zoning laws or simple fall off in profits, arcades could find themselves forced out of business.
You earned your vacation time. You earned the ABSOLUTE RIGHT not to have to work during that time. The company OWES YOU. Your vacation time is golden. Vacation is not "permitted only when convenient for the company". Nothing is so important that someone else at the office can't handle it and needs to bother you on your vacation. On your vacation, you are God. Always remember this.
Now for the tips to avoid having your off time fucked up.
(1) Never give your personal cell number to co-workers. If you did, leave the cell phone home on vacation, or change the number or take a different phone (for *your* use on vacation). This advice also applies to personal email.
(2) Tell co workers you're unreachable because yoiu're going on a cruise to Tahiti even if you're just going to work around the house on vacation. This reduces morons trying to **STEAL** your hard earned vacation time from you.
(3) Next, get rid of your answering machine. Once I realized that my answering only serves the caller and not me, I got rid of it. With the Caller ID box, I never answer the phone unless I recognize the number and want to answer it. 999/1000 times if it says "Out of Area"/"Unavailable" it's telemarketing scum. As for everyone else, getting ring... ring... ring... ring... endlessly with no opportunity to leave messages serves them right for bothering you. Works wonders with debt collectors wrongfully trying to collect from you too.
(4) Don't capitulate. Don't listen to office voice mail on vacation. It'll just add stress or worse, may cause you to cave and solve problems.
(5) Don't accept "deals". "Come back a day early and take another day or two later." Contiguous days off is != to the sum of its parts. Work-DayOff-Work-DayOff-Work-DayOff-Work-DayOff-Wo rk (that's 4 days off) is not the same as 3 days off in a row.
Do all of these things and know that it is RIGHT for you to do them. Your hard earned vacation time takes absolute priority over all work related issues. Now quit reading this (you're dangerously close to "doing work") in your hotel room and go back to the beach!
Sure, CDs have lots of redundancy. Only 40% or so of all the bits on the CD actually store user data. The rest is redundancy and error correcting bits to compensate for errors. Yes, you can toss that redundancy and store more data but your CD becomes increasingly susceptible to even the slightest scratches, dust, or subtle misalignments in your player. You'll get garbled data from your reads and worse, won't even be able to tell you read the disc wrong anymore!
So when your customers start bitching endlessly about how their games skip or won't play. Don't say "we didn't know!". Dreamcast games do this. They use the full redundancy on the inner 1/3 of the CD to store the game program (which obviously must read perfectly), and toss the EC data on the outer 2/3 for "non-critical data" like the FMV sequences. But do you really think players will tolerate high rates of skipping/breakups on those FMV segments? Hell no. Some people play whole games just to get to see that cool ending FMV sequence! Expect lots of bitching as their consoles age and CDs get a few minor nicks that wouldn't affect real CDs and mess up their $75 games.
Whoah there, Cowboy! Not so fast! You'll have to explain that one further. How is DVD region encoding anti-competitive?
Since I'm an anime nut, I see this a lot.
For DVDs that get released across multiple regions, THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. Extra footage [Battle Athletes], bonus scenes [Yougen Kaisha], running commentaries, removed credits [pretty much anything on DVD], hard subtitles I can't get rid of [Utena], lack of original language track [Disney's Mononoke] and outright edits of movies [Sailor Moon], etc., are made between different region's versions.
Yet I am officially [*] BLOCKED from buying a product from another region because that product would COMPETE with the local one.
If that's not anti-competitive, what is?
[*] Of course, I bought a hacked DVD player to get around this, but still want to see an end to region coding because it is unfair and anti-competitive. Audio CDs are universal. I see no harm resulting from import sales.
10,000 years? By the time that comes, Rep. Sony Bono XVXIXIVX will have extended the copyright duration to author's life = 1e6 years. Remember, the expiration keeps getting upped *just* before the first Mickey Mouse cartoon's copyright would expire. Couple this with a proprietary file format that the EULA says is illegal to reverse engineer and I can assure you that *no one* will be reading *this* disk 10,000 years from now.
Without a challenge to the law reaching completion, the law stays on the books. This allows Sony to continue to go after the little guys writing shareware/freeware/GNUware emulators. Unlike Connectix, which has deep enough pockets to fend off lawsuits, you or I do not and will lose againse Sony just because we can't afford to win.
After all, there is ample precedent of NSI unwittingly assisting domain hijackers and disregarding their own domain protection schemes.
The ever popular "I forgot my password" or "I suddenly lost my ISP (mail-from address)" cry seems to work quite well.
I know a friend who really did forget his Crypt-PW password. How did he get his domain back under his control? He faxed NSI with the new updated DNS info and and asked for a return to Mail-From security using his updated email address. And faxed with his request a photocopy of his drivers license. NSI said "good enough" and made the change.
When I first learned of this was when NSI's policies first scared the crap out of me.
Now this was a legitimate case of a forgotton password, but NSI has no power to query DMV databases in every state or any state. I could easily scan my DL, paste Rob Malda's name and address on it and fax it to NSI and steal slashdot.org. With fax quality what it is, no one would know it's a forgery.
NSI's security is PATHETIC. Everyone still with NSI is subject to domain hijacking.
You know, the really big companies that provide not only a job to employees, but housing, shopping/entertainment facilities, etc., where the company is essentially an entirely self contained city. The company isn't just a career, it's your life. Some Japanese companies are like this. Not sure if the idea would catch on elsewhere. About the only US equivalent are mining companies, which provide as I've described out of necessity since the mines are often extremely isolated from even civilization.
I love it. This is what printers were meant to be; 150lb steel behemoths that send men to their deaths; that scare bystanders when they start printing a job; that suck up paper by the 20 pound boxful in an hour. I got mine from the dumpster at my University when they threw it out. Cleaned it up, WD-40'd the hammer array, replaced a couple of burned out bulbs in the buttons, and it's worked fine for the last 5 years and counting. It was hell hauling up the stairs, though. I remember puting a fake arm and leg in the printer at school one halloween. Freaked out a freshman! Tee hee! God, do they still make line printers like this anymore?
In NYC you can get by without a car. In fact there wouldn't be enough room to park cars if everyone drove one in NYC.
Pull your head out of ass and look beyond the confines of your own little world. Elsewhere in the nation, cities are spread out, people actually own land to go with their homes, where you don't hear the toilet flush next door or the couple above you banging away all night, and where you can sit out in the yard at night with a telescope and actually see stars and marvel at how quiet it gets instead hearing honking, cursing, and gunshots 24/7. Out here you drive 20 miles to work. The suburbs are pleasant to live in and the city is for work. Separating the two makes both, better places.
Yes, but the law doesn't care. Ever notice how hookers get busted, but the Johns do not? Ever notice how the pirate video stores get raided but no one follows up their customer list? Ever notice how they went after napster but not after its users (they nuked some nicks but never bothered real people). Ever notice how the FBI goes after bank robbers, but not after those who accepted the stolen money for various goods and services. It's all about stopping the supply, not the demand.
It is because of fiascos like this that there needs to be a Black Flag of sorts within DNS. An anarchistic wastland where all domains are first come, first served, all registrations final, and over which all lawsuits are prohibited.
DNS needs an ".alt" top level domain.
When the Big 7 newsgroups were being drafted on USENET just prior to the great flag day, this simple need was recognized practically from day one and.alt was born (and is today bigger than all the Big 7 groups combined).
Flame all you want, but without a dumping ground where anything goes without restrictions, the trash will not go away. It will seep into all areas of the "approved TLDs".
If an.alt TLD is set up, it will make rule violations in the remaining TLDs much easier to enforce because there will always be an alternative. "You didn't have to create [domain] here".
Trap the rats with no way to register their profane, controversial, questionable, or whatever-offends-whoever domains and they'll start clawing at the walls of whatever other heirarchy they can get at.
Remember, in the Big 7 newsgroups, there was no room for sex or drugs, so these because the very first two alt groups.
Even the cleanest, most orderly city still has a garbage dump.
And how will the "lawsuits prohibited against anyone in the.alt TLD" be agreed to and given teeth? Simple. Make that an agreed to condition for everyone registering OR RENEWING a domain AND for registrars renewing their registrar status, just like ICANN did with its current domain name dispute policy. After 2 years or so, the policy will trickle down to all registrants and be in full force. Anyone who disagreed will be gone from DNS. Then open up.alt to accept anything-goes registrations.
But x86 is 20 year old architecture! We keep it around *only* for compatibility reasons. It's the reason chips run so blaster hot, the architecture layout on silicon was never envisioned to operate at near GHz speeds. So it keeps getting kluged over and over to make it go faster without burning up. At some point you have to accept that the laws of physics will not allow pistons to reciprocate any faster and switch to a jet engine.
When I see the vendors sporting Linux pre-installed on LAPTOPS will support for the BUILT-IN MODEM AND BUILT-IN ETHERNET, then I will believe that a vandor is really serious about Linux. Til then, there's no medals for tossing a different CD in the box or even pre-installed Linux on a PC (which takes minutes for anyone to do).
Laptops!
Laptops!
Laptops!
I want to see laptops with Linux and in the sub $2000 category too, with DVD roms, 100 base T, v.90 modems, just like MS bribes the laptop makers into doing.
after all, if it wasn't for [Microsoft] PC's would probably be pretty much non-existant.
Nope. If MS never existed, we'd all be running Macs because PCs running CP/M would've died out long ago.
And Apple was far more controlling than Microsoft. Remember that not just any SCSI disk worked with Apple. There was exactly one maker of Apple computers, etc. (Umax was allowed for a while, then Apple changed their minds and quashed them.), etc.
Background: Atari Age magazine was a fanzine for Atari 2600 video game enthusists back in the late 70s/early 80s. A regular column was a look at the innards of various 2600 components with descriptions of chips, what wires carry what signals etc. One time they showed the insides of a game cartridge.
There was a wonderful question from a reader in a subsequent issue. It read "If all Atari games look like that inside, then why do some games cost so much more than others?"
Beautiful comment. Whacks the establishment right square on the head.
The editor did a nice dance talking about copyright, R&D expenses, paying poor overworked programmers, etc. and fully, though unintentionally I'm sure, made for a complete bullshit explanation that failed to justify the **HIGH** costs of some games over others, which is what the question asked.
Software prices are arbitrary. It's price is "whatever the market will stand". MS, the SPA, etc. will PREACH about how it pays for development costs, paying starving programmers salaries, testing, debugging, marketing, etc.
This.
Is.
False.
e.g., there's no reason the full version of windows should cost $130 (and the upgrade $90). The $$$ generated cover staff and R&D in their first 0.5% of profits. And once recovered, prices do not go down. It's just price gouging, pure and simple.
If you compare total revenue from software sales / R&D and programming and staff costs, you will find VAST deviations from software item to software item. It's not about programmers feeding their families, it's about gouging gouging gouging GOUGING.
A bigger box lets the SW vendors gouge a bit more than they could get away with if everything was fit into a standard CD jewel case. That's all there is too it.
IF U c4n Und3rst4nD m#, then TH3 WURDz R VaL1d. P3ri0d.
Language is about communication. If thoughts are converted to words transmitted and then reconverted into the same thoughts in the reader's mind, then the communication was 100%, absolutely, without a doubt, grade A, successful... and not "wrong" or "improper" in any way shape or form. Any complaining is thus completely idiotic since there's nothing to complain about.
What about legal bloat: Do we own SW we write?
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
Assuming I use a non GNU compiler, can I really say that all of the code I write is (C) by ME? What about all the stuff linked in from libraries provided by the compiler? In the old days, when code was tiny, yes, I could say it was all mine, but now... I wonder if even half of that.exe is really mine. Can one man own his code anymore?
Slashdot Mirror
There's a hidden scene in AIKa. If you freeze frame through the scene where she's whirling through the air, you can see her panties! Buy it now before they edit out the panty scene!
Yet when my box is cracked and my credit card numbers stolen, etc., calling anyone (police, FBI, etc.) gets a "why are you bothering us? You're lucky we don't prosecute *you* for wasting our time with such trivialities." attitude?
Is cracking illegal or isn't it? Who do I report it to when I'm hit? What gov't/state/municipal entity defends me as defends amazon or CNN?
(2) Once it fails, these people may return their CPU to the store as "defective".
(3) The store, rightfully never trusting the word of consumers, will test the CPU.
(4) The store's test is short and in a nice cool optimal climate controlled environment. And subtle problems that show up when the CPU is warm and been running for a long time will not appear on the test.
(5) The CPU goes back into the glass case to be resold.
(6) You (after saving up a long time): "Hi, I want to buy that CPU right there."
(7) You are now on a trip through hell. Your CPU may fail later that day (if you're lucky), or next week, or "lock up" only 3 times per year. You cannot now run your unattended server on your DSL/Cablemodem line. Your system is forever unstable.
(8) By the time you realize the true cause of the problem, the warranty/exchange period is long gone.
(9) You are screwed. And it is the fault of overclockers.
I don't want to hear about how "most" overclockers are responsible, blah blah. One person getting screwed on a machine that takes years for him to finally save up for is one screwing too many.
Overclocking needs to be blocked by the CPU itself, where it can't be circumvented. Just as laws are set up to occasionally let many a guilty man walk free rather than wrongfully convict so much as one innocent person.
Overclocking must end for the good of the consumer.
"[I]t is well established that no agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution." Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312 (1988).
I'd buy.
Typical zoning laws do not all adult businesses in all but the worst part of town, in the industrial zoned areas, far out of the way of everything, and certainly far away from schools, malls, and kids. Arcades may be forced to get rid of the violent games or see their business licenses revoked.
If they boot the games, arcades may see their customer count dwindling. So wheather by zoning laws or simple fall off in profits, arcades could find themselves forced out of business.
See what a tiny piece of legislation can do?
Now for the tips to avoid having your off time fucked up.
(1) Never give your personal cell number to co-workers. If you did, leave the cell phone home on vacation, or change the number or take a different phone (for *your* use on vacation). This advice also applies to personal email.
(2) Tell co workers you're unreachable because yoiu're going on a cruise to Tahiti even if you're just going to work around the house on vacation. This reduces morons trying to **STEAL** your hard earned vacation time from you.
(3) Next, get rid of your answering machine. Once I realized that my answering only serves the caller and not me, I got rid of it. With the Caller ID box, I never answer the phone unless I recognize the number and want to answer it. 999/1000 times if it says "Out of Area"/"Unavailable" it's telemarketing scum. As for everyone else, getting ring... ring... ring... ring... endlessly with no opportunity to leave messages serves them right for bothering you. Works wonders with debt collectors wrongfully trying to collect from you too.
(4) Don't capitulate. Don't listen to office voice mail on vacation. It'll just add stress or worse, may cause you to cave and solve problems.
(5) Don't accept "deals". "Come back a day early and take another day or two later." Contiguous days off is != to the sum of its parts. Work-DayOff-Work-DayOff-Work-DayOff-Work-DayOff-Wo rk (that's 4 days off) is not the same as 3 days off in a row.
Do all of these things and know that it is RIGHT for you to do them. Your hard earned vacation time takes absolute priority over all work related issues. Now quit reading this (you're dangerously close to "doing work") in your hotel room and go back to the beach!
So when your customers start bitching endlessly about how their games skip or won't play. Don't say "we didn't know!". Dreamcast games do this. They use the full redundancy on the inner 1/3 of the CD to store the game program (which obviously must read perfectly), and toss the EC data on the outer 2/3 for "non-critical data" like the FMV sequences. But do you really think players will tolerate high rates of skipping/breakups on those FMV segments? Hell no. Some people play whole games just to get to see that cool ending FMV sequence! Expect lots of bitching as their consoles age and CDs get a few minor nicks that wouldn't affect real CDs and mess up their $75 games.
Whoah there, Cowboy! Not so fast! You'll have to explain that one further. How is DVD region encoding anti-competitive?
Since I'm an anime nut, I see this a lot.
For DVDs that get released across multiple regions, THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. Extra footage [Battle Athletes], bonus scenes [Yougen Kaisha], running commentaries, removed credits [pretty much anything on DVD], hard subtitles I can't get rid of [Utena], lack of original language track [Disney's Mononoke] and outright edits of movies [Sailor Moon], etc., are made between different region's versions.
Yet I am officially [*] BLOCKED from buying a product from another region because that product would COMPETE with the local one.
If that's not anti-competitive, what is?
[*] Of course, I bought a hacked DVD player to get around this, but still want to see an end to region coding because it is unfair and anti-competitive. Audio CDs are universal. I see no harm resulting from import sales.
(1) Using a copyright to achieve an anti-competitive goal causes you to lose the copyright.
(2) DVD region coding is anti-competitive.
(3) Therefore, all DVDs with region coding have, by using it, relinquished their copyrights to those movies.
Cool!
10,000 years? By the time that comes, Rep. Sony Bono XVXIXIVX will have extended the copyright duration to author's life = 1e6 years. Remember, the expiration keeps getting upped *just* before the first Mickey Mouse cartoon's copyright would expire. Couple this with a proprietary file format that the EULA says is illegal to reverse engineer and I can assure you that *no one* will be reading *this* disk 10,000 years from now.
This is therefore, a Bad Thing.
The ever popular "I forgot my password" or "I suddenly lost my ISP (mail-from address)" cry seems to work quite well.
I know a friend who really did forget his Crypt-PW password. How did he get his domain back under his control? He faxed NSI with the new updated DNS info and and asked for a return to Mail-From security using his updated email address. And faxed with his request a photocopy of his drivers license. NSI said "good enough" and made the change.
When I first learned of this was when NSI's policies first scared the crap out of me.
Now this was a legitimate case of a forgotton password, but NSI has no power to query DMV databases in every state or any state. I could easily scan my DL, paste Rob Malda's name and address on it and fax it to NSI and steal slashdot.org. With fax quality what it is, no one would know it's a forgery.
NSI's security is PATHETIC. Everyone still with NSI is subject to domain hijacking.
Any /. geeks in *.jp care to comment?
You know, the really big companies that provide not only a job to employees, but housing, shopping/entertainment facilities, etc., where the company is essentially an entirely self contained city. The company isn't just a career, it's your life. Some Japanese companies are like this. Not sure if the idea would catch on elsewhere. About the only US equivalent are mining companies, which provide as I've described out of necessity since the mines are often extremely isolated from even civilization.
I love it. This is what printers were meant to be; 150lb steel behemoths that send men to their deaths; that scare bystanders when they start printing a job; that suck up paper by the 20 pound boxful in an hour. I got mine from the dumpster at my University when they threw it out. Cleaned it up, WD-40'd the hammer array, replaced a couple of burned out bulbs in the buttons, and it's worked fine for the last 5 years and counting. It was hell hauling up the stairs, though. I remember puting a fake arm and leg in the printer at school one halloween. Freaked out a freshman! Tee hee! God, do they still make line printers like this anymore?
Pull your head out of ass and look beyond the confines of your own little world. Elsewhere in the nation, cities are spread out, people actually own land to go with their homes, where you don't hear the toilet flush next door or the couple above you banging away all night, and where you can sit out in the yard at night with a telescope and actually see stars and marvel at how quiet it gets instead hearing honking, cursing, and gunshots 24/7. Out here you drive 20 miles to work. The suburbs are pleasant to live in and the city is for work. Separating the two makes both, better places.
Yes, but the law doesn't care. Ever notice how hookers get busted, but the Johns do not? Ever notice how the pirate video stores get raided but no one follows up their customer list? Ever notice how they went after napster but not after its users (they nuked some nicks but never bothered real people). Ever notice how the FBI goes after bank robbers, but not after those who accepted the stolen money for various goods and services. It's all about stopping the supply, not the demand.
DNS needs an ".alt" top level domain.
When the Big 7 newsgroups were being drafted on USENET just prior to the great flag day, this simple need was recognized practically from day one and .alt was born (and is today bigger than all the Big 7 groups combined).
Flame all you want, but without a dumping ground where anything goes without restrictions, the trash will not go away. It will seep into all areas of the "approved TLDs".
If an .alt TLD is set up, it will make rule violations in the remaining TLDs much easier to enforce because there will always be an alternative. "You didn't have to create [domain] here".
Trap the rats with no way to register their profane, controversial, questionable, or whatever-offends-whoever domains and they'll start clawing at the walls of whatever other heirarchy they can get at.
Remember, in the Big 7 newsgroups, there was no room for sex or drugs, so these because the very first two alt groups.
Even the cleanest, most orderly city still has a garbage dump.
And how will the "lawsuits prohibited against anyone in the .alt TLD" be agreed to and given teeth? Simple. Make that an agreed to condition for everyone registering OR RENEWING a domain AND for registrars renewing their registrar status, just like ICANN did with its current domain name dispute policy. After 2 years or so, the policy will trickle down to all registrants and be in full force. Anyone who disagreed will be gone from DNS. Then open up .alt to accept anything-goes registrations.
.
But x86 is 20 year old architecture! We keep it around *only* for compatibility reasons. It's the reason chips run so blaster hot, the architecture layout on silicon was never envisioned to operate at near GHz speeds. So it keeps getting kluged over and over to make it go faster without burning up. At some point you have to accept that the laws of physics will not allow pistons to reciprocate any faster and switch to a jet engine.
Laptops!
Laptops!
Laptops!
I want to see laptops with Linux and in the sub $2000 category too, with DVD roms, 100 base T, v.90 modems, just like MS bribes the laptop makers into doing.
Nope. If MS never existed, we'd all be running Macs because PCs running CP/M would've died out long ago.
And Apple was far more controlling than Microsoft. Remember that not just any SCSI disk worked with Apple. There was exactly one maker of Apple computers, etc. (Umax was allowed for a while, then Apple changed their minds and quashed them.), etc.
There was a wonderful question from a reader in a subsequent issue. It read "If all Atari games look like that inside, then why do some games cost so much more than others?"
Beautiful comment. Whacks the establishment right square on the head.
The editor did a nice dance talking about copyright, R&D expenses, paying poor overworked programmers, etc. and fully, though unintentionally I'm sure, made for a complete bullshit explanation that failed to justify the **HIGH** costs of some games over others, which is what the question asked.
Software prices are arbitrary. It's price is "whatever the market will stand". MS, the SPA, etc. will PREACH about how it pays for development costs, paying starving programmers salaries, testing, debugging, marketing, etc.
This.
Is.
False.
e.g., there's no reason the full version of windows should cost $130 (and the upgrade $90). The $$$ generated cover staff and R&D in their first 0.5% of profits. And once recovered, prices do not go down. It's just price gouging, pure and simple.
If you compare total revenue from software sales / R&D and programming and staff costs, you will find VAST deviations from software item to software item. It's not about programmers feeding their families, it's about gouging gouging gouging GOUGING.
A bigger box lets the SW vendors gouge a bit more than they could get away with if everything was fit into a standard CD jewel case. That's all there is too it.
Language is about communication. If thoughts are converted to words transmitted and then reconverted into the same thoughts in the reader's mind, then the communication was 100%, absolutely, without a doubt, grade A, successful... and not "wrong" or "improper" in any way shape or form. Any complaining is thus completely idiotic since there's nothing to complain about.
Assuming I use a non GNU compiler, can I really say that all of the code I write is (C) by ME? What about all the stuff linked in from libraries provided by the compiler? In the old days, when code was tiny, yes, I could say it was all mine, but now... I wonder if even half of that .exe is really mine. Can one man own his code anymore?