There is a difference between 'tick this button to confirm you know what you are doing and understand this could cause damage to your phone' and 'Tick this.. hah, no, you don't get to do what you want with this phone you own. We made it, and we get to tell you what you are allowed.'
There can be multible reasons. Another is that some network operators fear the spread of VoIP, which effectively destroys the very lucrative system by which they charge hugely for long-distance and international calls.
You missed the point: That would require effort on my part. The linear search is inefficient, and slow, but it can be implimented in four lines of code. If the program wasn't for internal use only, then maybe I'd be bothered to do it right. Until either that happens or I find so many examples of Spongebob art the forbidden hashes list grows to an impractical size, I'll keep it as it is.
I considered it, but there are some depths to which I will not sink. Instead they got to see... well, I won't describe it in detail. Suffice to say it involves oral sex and a bird. Of the beaked variety.
One of the programs I wrote needs to search an array of tens of thousands of 128-bit entries to see if a particular value is in there*, then repeat this hundreds of thousands of times for different searches. I know that the tidy way to do this would be to sort the array first, but I don't - because the thing is executing on a 2.4GHz processor, and I just can't be bothered to write a sorter and binary search just to save a few miliseconds off the processing time.
*MD5sums of games, porn and lolcats. The program is used by a school to delete files the students shouldn't have.
Quite possibly. I suspect that, if you count all the people who image-searched for a pic to use for clipart, they may have directly contributed to more infringing acts than even The Pirate Bay.
I had someone hotlink to an image on my server once. I was annoyed enough to throw together a little piece of perl that checked the referer header, and if it matched their site return not the image, but furry porn. They took down the hotlink.
Whenever you think about student pricing, remember this: If a student wishes to buy legal software, they more forgo the consumption of an equivilent value of alcohol.
Ah... cheaper than I remember finding it for when I looked. Maybe that deal wasn't available back then. It's £200 for the UK equivilent - more than $300, but not hugely more.
Adobe and Autodesk certainly. No student could afford the price of their design products, and they know it. I imagine they tolerate student piracy so that those students will go on to become professional users and pay for a licence, rather than turn to free software or lower-cost competitors.
Microsoft is something of an odd case. Their situation is complicated by the extent to which their licences are via OEM. No student need ever pirate windows, for every computer comes with it - so unless they are on a development course, that only leaves office, which does have a low-cost student edition. Which is still expensive for a student, but not ridiculously so.
Sarcasm aside, that's what happens. Send a minor offender to jail - someone convicted of one of the lesser drugs offences, or petty theft. During his few months he'll make criminal friends, learn new skills, and be exposed to a culture of criminality and violence. When they do get out, non-criminal society is largely closed to them - it's extremally hard to find work, because most workplaces arn't going to hire a convict unless they are very desperate. So the only way they have to make a living is to put their new skills to use. Prison just makes more criminals. Rehabilitation programs do exist, but they are extremally expensive per-prisoner, and taxpayers are loathe to see any money spent on helping the 'criminal scum.'
But they are doing it in large enough quantities. Remember that for every one of the allied soldiers killed, many insurgents are killed. It takes a significent numerical advantage, in addition to fighting on familier ground, and still they can't achieve anything more slowing their loss.
You: Pistol, maybe a rifle, a few hundred hours on the range.
The Law: SWAT team, flashbangs, CS grenades, door-breaching revolving shotgun, high-powered sniper rifles, professional police with training in simulated urban combat.
Maybe guns were a good way to resist the government when the second amendment was written, but not now.
The problem is that very few people will accept bitcoin until it's percieved to have value, and it won't be percieved to have value until you can use it for everyday purchases. It's an interesting concept, but you can't establish a currency unless there is something to back it - at least initially, until the scale gets large enough for pure fiat to work.
Thus the US's demands that new copyright-tightening laws be passed as discretely as possible. People can't object to a law they don't even know about until after it passes.
In terms of social influence though, music has a huge advantage. Music, film, TV, news... it's all basically the same few companies. So the music labels can be assured of favorable coverage in the media, because they *are* the media. For example, ABC is sure to tell lots of news stories about how internet piracy is ruining the film industry, for it is owned by Disney.
Somewhat of a flaw in the US legal system. The foundational princibles were written to provide extensive protection from government oppression, but none from corporate oppression. At the time there just hadn't been any corporations with so much power that it was seen as a concern. The age of the multinational megacorp didn't come until much later.
They may get caught in the crossfire. I know indy bands have had terrible problems trying to sell their music in CD form on ebay, because ebay's policy is to assume that anything on CD-R is copyright infringing, no exceptions. It would cost more to investigate a claim of legality than they'd make from the auction, so they just blanket prohibit CD-Rs.
Not really. I've seen those pay sites too: They usually let you browse without paying, in order to attract customers, and only charge for the download function. It's also fairly obvious that some of their entries are fakes, as they are generated from the search string. So if you search for "alaierubgligrf" you'll see a "alaierubgligrf full [DVDRIP] [DIVX].avi" in the results.
Wouldn't need even that much: almost all of it's the same in every human. All you need to do is agree on a single 'reference human,' and then store genomes as the difference between this reference and the individual. The reference would be 800-ish meg, but after that each person will only be a couple of megabytes extra.
I imagine a whole lot more attractive to insurance companies - thus the attempts to prohibit the practice before it even comes into use. There are already fears of a future where some people are uninsurable due to genetic predispositions that no insurance company wants to risk playing out.
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There is a difference between 'tick this button to confirm you know what you are doing and understand this could cause damage to your phone' and 'Tick this.. hah, no, you don't get to do what you want with this phone you own. We made it, and we get to tell you what you are allowed.'
There can be multible reasons. Another is that some network operators fear the spread of VoIP, which effectively destroys the very lucrative system by which they charge hugely for long-distance and international calls.
You missed the point: That would require effort on my part. The linear search is inefficient, and slow, but it can be implimented in four lines of code. If the program wasn't for internal use only, then maybe I'd be bothered to do it right. Until either that happens or I find so many examples of Spongebob art the forbidden hashes list grows to an impractical size, I'll keep it as it is.
I considered it, but there are some depths to which I will not sink. Instead they got to see... well, I won't describe it in detail. Suffice to say it involves oral sex and a bird. Of the beaked variety.
On their hardware, they needed to be better.
One of the programs I wrote needs to search an array of tens of thousands of 128-bit entries to see if a particular value is in there*, then repeat this hundreds of thousands of times for different searches. I know that the tidy way to do this would be to sort the array first, but I don't - because the thing is executing on a 2.4GHz processor, and I just can't be bothered to write a sorter and binary search just to save a few miliseconds off the processing time.
*MD5sums of games, porn and lolcats. The program is used by a school to delete files the students shouldn't have.
Quite possibly. I suspect that, if you count all the people who image-searched for a pic to use for clipart, they may have directly contributed to more infringing acts than even The Pirate Bay.
They would care about the cost of hireing people to open all those letters, skim them for anything important, and throw them in a recycling bin.
I had someone hotlink to an image on my server once. I was annoyed enough to throw together a little piece of perl that checked the referer header, and if it matched their site return not the image, but furry porn. They took down the hotlink.
Whenever you think about student pricing, remember this: If a student wishes to buy legal software, they more forgo the consumption of an equivilent value of alcohol.
Ah... cheaper than I remember finding it for when I looked. Maybe that deal wasn't available back then. It's £200 for the UK equivilent - more than $300, but not hugely more.
It was first when I started typing.
Adobe and Autodesk certainly. No student could afford the price of their design products, and they know it. I imagine they tolerate student piracy so that those students will go on to become professional users and pay for a licence, rather than turn to free software or lower-cost competitors.
Microsoft is something of an odd case. Their situation is complicated by the extent to which their licences are via OEM. No student need ever pirate windows, for every computer comes with it - so unless they are on a development course, that only leaves office, which does have a low-cost student edition. Which is still expensive for a student, but not ridiculously so.
Every time measures to stop piracy are stepped up to an even more draconian extent, the pirates feel a little bit less guilty.
I know a lot of pirates. Some of them have now moved on from "I want free stuff" to "I want to collapse the media empire before it enslaves mankind."
Also, First!
Sarcasm aside, that's what happens. Send a minor offender to jail - someone convicted of one of the lesser drugs offences, or petty theft. During his few months he'll make criminal friends, learn new skills, and be exposed to a culture of criminality and violence. When they do get out, non-criminal society is largely closed to them - it's extremally hard to find work, because most workplaces arn't going to hire a convict unless they are very desperate. So the only way they have to make a living is to put their new skills to use. Prison just makes more criminals. Rehabilitation programs do exist, but they are extremally expensive per-prisoner, and taxpayers are loathe to see any money spent on helping the 'criminal scum.'
But they are doing it in large enough quantities. Remember that for every one of the allied soldiers killed, many insurgents are killed. It takes a significent numerical advantage, in addition to fighting on familier ground, and still they can't achieve anything more slowing their loss.
You: Pistol, maybe a rifle, a few hundred hours on the range.
The Law: SWAT team, flashbangs, CS grenades, door-breaching revolving shotgun, high-powered sniper rifles, professional police with training in simulated urban combat.
Maybe guns were a good way to resist the government when the second amendment was written, but not now.
The problem is that very few people will accept bitcoin until it's percieved to have value, and it won't be percieved to have value until you can use it for everyday purchases. It's an interesting concept, but you can't establish a currency unless there is something to back it - at least initially, until the scale gets large enough for pure fiat to work.
Thus the US's demands that new copyright-tightening laws be passed as discretely as possible. People can't object to a law they don't even know about until after it passes.
In terms of social influence though, music has a huge advantage. Music, film, TV, news... it's all basically the same few companies. So the music labels can be assured of favorable coverage in the media, because they *are* the media. For example, ABC is sure to tell lots of news stories about how internet piracy is ruining the film industry, for it is owned by Disney.
Somewhat of a flaw in the US legal system. The foundational princibles were written to provide extensive protection from government oppression, but none from corporate oppression. At the time there just hadn't been any corporations with so much power that it was seen as a concern. The age of the multinational megacorp didn't come until much later.
They may get caught in the crossfire. I know indy bands have had terrible problems trying to sell their music in CD form on ebay, because ebay's policy is to assume that anything on CD-R is copyright infringing, no exceptions. It would cost more to investigate a claim of legality than they'd make from the auction, so they just blanket prohibit CD-Rs.
At a guess, because they anticipate that if they don't do it, they'll be forced to by legislation sooner or later anyway.
Reminds me of all the companies that proudly labeled their spray cans 'CFC free' - after CFCs were prohibited by international agreement.
Not really. I've seen those pay sites too: They usually let you browse without paying, in order to attract customers, and only charge for the download function. It's also fairly obvious that some of their entries are fakes, as they are generated from the search string. So if you search for "alaierubgligrf" you'll see a "alaierubgligrf full [DVDRIP] [DIVX].avi" in the results.
Wouldn't need even that much: almost all of it's the same in every human. All you need to do is agree on a single 'reference human,' and then store genomes as the difference between this reference and the individual. The reference would be 800-ish meg, but after that each person will only be a couple of megabytes extra.
I imagine a whole lot more attractive to insurance companies - thus the attempts to prohibit the practice before it even comes into use. There are already fears of a future where some people are uninsurable due to genetic predispositions that no insurance company wants to risk playing out.