True, but the American developer is much easier to rein in and/or terminate. If a contractor is awful, you'll ditch him and he'll find ten more suckers around the corner. If you fire your own awful coder, that sonofabitch is out of a job, and when he has the gall to give your name as a reference to his future employers, you'll have the opportunity to keep him out of THAT job too.
The issue here is not one of race, but purely geographic / organisational. A local contractor that does a poor job, gets poor reviews, no recommendations and their income dries up. A remote contractor has a much wider audience, any bad rep gets lost in the background noise of the interweb.
Except they will never get it 100% right. Both parties will eventually settle for something that mostly-works and kinda-sucks, when the pressure from the client for fixes equals the backpressure from the idiots for "we have spent enough time on you" (sometimes written as "fuck off and die").
Hire a good coder from the start (or leverage the ones you already have), and you'll have less of this back-and-forth, where all you're really doing is reiterating the specs you gave them in the first place. The issue of code quality is subjective, but when the guy writing it knows he'll probably still be here in 6 months when it needs updates, he just might try to keep his work clean and manageable. When you're just another wealthy american sucker to a faraway sweatshop, all bets are off.
We went through this just a few months ago, as a tiny coder shop. We needed an Asterisk IVR built, had never done it before and didn't have time to learn, so we contracted out to an offshore company who were supposedly experts with Asterisk, as referred to us by a business acquaintance. We actually ended up with a working product, but it took so much hand-holding and error checking that by the time they delivered the final version, I knew more about Asterisk than they did, mostly because I read the PHPAGI docs a bit more thoroughly. And it was about 6 weeks late on a 2 week timeline. Face, meet egg.
The 10-hour timezone shift was a massive PITA. The communication hurdles led to poor quality output, because instead of asking us proper questions, they'd "play dumb" and do it wrong, seemingly on purpose hoping we wouldn't notice I guess. Every time they'd jiggle some code, we had to retest our entire flowchart and bark at them for every failure. Maybe I'm a hopeless idealist, but I like to think of contractors as a black box: work order goes in, completed work comes out. In my mind, that includes testing, especially since we had crystal clear pass/fail scenarios.
I'm sure there are some Indian shops that are worth the money (bell curve), but this one clearly wasn't. Sure, they were cheap, but I ended up doing more work to support them than had I done it all from scratch, so it ended up costing more. On the upside, I am now modestly self-sufficient in writing PHP scripts to drive Asterisk; another random skill I never wanted in the first place.
That is certainly true, pirating your own stuff doesn't automatically make your product awesome. If it sucks, it sucks and the strategy will backfire, because more people will know of the suckage. That's a risk I'm willing to take, because if my app sucks, I don't want people to be using it.
There is no piracy on the PS3, because the protection hasn't been broken yet. When someone finally cracks it, and I assure you there are quite a few groups working on it quite diligently, PS3 games will be pirated just the same as everything else. Sometimes it's a modchip, other times a firmware flash, but there's always a way to break the protection. It's all just bits on a disc, which become bits on a wire, and ultimately bits buzzing through a chip. There aren't a million ways to dress zeroes and ones.
MMOs have piracy too, but since the meaty bits are server-side, it involves a realm/shard emulator instead of a mindless bit-copy. Sure, it's complicated, but if you have access to the game, you have the ability to sniff the traffic to and from the server. It's not always easy, but then neither is making a modchip or patching encrypted firmware. It's a mental exercise, and there are quite a few people who enjoy the challenge and/or profit from the activity. World of Warcraft private servers are usually free to play, but they might sell in-game items for real-world cash, or charge fees for special tournaments (with prizes).
Now, don't get me wrong, there's something cool about the UK night life, but I would hope that beings capable of space travel are also sufficiently socially advanced to recognize monarchy as an embarrassingly archaic model of government.
I'm not saying that crock we call democracy is any better in practice, but at least we rotate our leaders around every few years... oh, and they have surnames!:P Mononyms are for attention-starved "artists", thankyouverymuch.
I'm with you on all points, but I agree that interventions are moronic at best, but the support I speak of is constant pressure, not a sudden blast.
Specifically with the smoking problem, I honestly believe that if we can get a significant number of people to quit, kids will be less exposed to the behavior and our ingrained "monkey see, monkey do" instincts will be spared. People don't get into smoking because they want to turn their lungs into tire rubber, they start smoking because half the people they know are smokers. Combine that with the media-fueled "cool factor" and it's more tempting than bacon-wrapped bacon.
How irritating is it to be the only non-smoker in a group ? Fuck man, I hate the smell. That kind of thing makes me want to avoid certain people, but I have zero interest in smoking. For a lot of people, it's the opposite that happens: they start smoking as a result of hanging around other smokers.
Flip it around: if you were the only smoker in a group on non-smokers, wouldn't you feel really awkward ? What if they all berated you, every time you lit one up ? Would you ditch the cancer stick, or your friends ?
Because legislators aren't (cognitively) equipped to deal with a global community. Their world is made up of districts, subdivisions and other small pockets of control. On the internet, they're just another random IP with no xerocopied influence, and that makes them sad. In the end, it's always about who gets what money. When that recipient is either unknown or "Not me", they throw hissy fits and get papers signed to lay claim to that money.
Yeah, I'm cynical, but go ahead and prove me wrong.
And as always: proxies, VPN tunnels and good old unsecured WiFi will effortlessly defeat all those dirty home-soil shit disturbers you call intelligence agencies.
Legislation never fixes anything. It just staples a form a punishment to an existing activity. Kill a man, go to jail. Molest a puppy, go to jail. Defeat the colander that is modern capitalism, now go to jail.
The only reason it's "harder to do" is because Macs don't really advertise their internal specs. When you buy a PC, they go around boasting "DDR3 this, Quickpath that". PC marketing is atrocious, but at least you have a list of jargon that says what's inside the plastic box.
It certainly doesn't help that Apple often revises the hardware without changing the name. They've been selling Mac Pros for nearly four years, but the earliest ones were Socket 771 with DDR2 FB-DIMM memory, while current models are Socket 1366 with DDR3 ECC Unbuffered memory. To many Mac users, these models are referred as "the fast Mac Pro" and "the faster Mac Pro". As a non-Apple tech, you really have to crack the thing open to figure out what goes in it.
In the end, once you know which parts will fit, it's just a computer like any other. This is also true of their consumer devices... so what if Apple doesn't sell a battery for your iPhone ? Check a message board, you'll find a bunch of unreputable accessory manufacturers in Asia selling replacement parts. You might have to work a bit harder to install them yourself, or find a local geek to do it for you, but the gear is out there. Up where I live, we have these repugnant little shops that sell all manner of junk like XS Cargo, Factory Direct, and surely others : refurbished and unlocked cell phones, no-name gadgets, gaming accessories... it's like a pawn shop minus all the bad 80's cassettes and unloved guitars. Those guys tend to have all the gray-market modding and repair stuff you could ever want, and they often have an EE flunkie on-site to do the labor rather cheaply. The stuff Apple won't do, those sketchy guys will happily do for a few bucks - that's their business model.
I'm no fanboi, but I would hazard a guess that the issues you encountered were because the Mac followed the spec more precisely than the Windows boxes. Hell, web developers have to code around M$ bugs, why would you think firmware developers don't suffer the same abuse ? It is far easier to mangle your $30 gadget until it works, than to brow-beat Microsoft and all its OEMs until they release non-retarded drivers.
I wouldn't even be surprised to find such workarounds in Apple Airport routers, to accomodate the quirks in cheap WiFi hardware found in older PC laptops. Think of it this way: if it's a challenge for Linux to support the fucked up NDIS drivers, then it has to be a real puzzle trying to make sense of mangled WiFi packets over the air.
I'll believe in 3m tall aliens long before I ever put any stock in any bible, Torah or Qur'an.
Believing in aliens isn't necessarily stupid. Believing in aliens because the morning paper mentioned it on April fools day and not realizing for one second that maybe, just maybe, aliens would pick a nicer place to land than war-torn fundie Jordan, now THAT'S stupid.
In a civilized nation, your logic would hold water, but this is Jordan we're talking about. They gleefully murder people who are from the "wrong" side of their self-declared geopolitical boundaries and squabble over the validity of Israel as a nation. The few brains they had probably fleed the country long ago for greener pastures.
I think the issue is less about kids being kids, and more about people not being forward about these problems. If you know someone who is addicted to something, do you confront them with it (and deal with the defensive behavior that ensues), or do you talk behind their back to your mutual friends and say "someone really outta do something about him" ? People spiral out of control, it's natural to favor instant gratification over all else, so it takes someone outside of that bubble, a trusted friend to yank you out of the spiral. No amount of education can replace that human pillar of stability.
A guy not smoking is "gathering video evidence to support a future legal case against his former employer".
Fuck cigarette smokers. No, not in the sexual sense. I find the whole thing revolting from top to bottom: the habit, the smell, the health and cosmetic damage, and the billion-dollar industry that thrives on this hypocrisy. The world would be a much nicer place if everyone just smoked regular tobacco (or whatever wacky weed suits you).
People would take you more seriously, if even one of your posts were something other than an Apple love poem. I thought one of your replies to my older post was insightful, until I saw that you're just a paper-thin shill.
Being so pro-Apple without strong arguments supporting your views is actually HURTFUL to the brand. This is Slashdot, try a little harder and we just might have fruitful discussions instead of inane epeen-pointing showdowns.
Sure, but that just one (or a few ) samples. You can't say that any significant number of people will pay for software if they can't pirate it. Some will, some won't. Some people can afford it, yet still pirate because it's easier (Steam converts a lot of these). Some people can't afford it, because they live in some idiotic slave nation, and will never buy anything because that big-studio game costs more than what they earn in a year.
If they can't get something they "really" want, they will redirect their digital lust to a different product.
I'm not picking on you personally, but please, everyone, stop making these unfounded generalizations about piracy. This isn't Digg, goddamnit! We're supposed to be educated.
I don't really think it leads to more sales. Let's suppose I'm a pirate (*ahem*). If I can't play Settlers 7, or Assassin's Creed 2, or whatever hot-game-of-the-minute, I will find something else to occupy my weekend. I'm not going to feel the overwhelming urge to go "haha, ok Ubisoft you win this time" and give them $70, when there are hundreds of other recent titles available right on the first page of my torrent site. In fact, if something is known to be "uncrackable" a pirate is more likely to NOT want to buy it, for fear that it will rootkit their PC, mess with Daemon Tools, or phone home with a list of all the other ill-gotten software they have.
Now I'm going to take a rather offensive stance: I, as an occasional producer of (low budget) software, pirate my own stuff. By that, I mean I routinely package the product that I myself created, throw in a valid unlock code, and seed it on torrent trackers, push it through Usenet, stick it on Rapidshare. Why in the fuck would I do that ? Because pirates make up the oldest and largest social network of all time. I shit you not, I have been making more money and more repeat sales. The reasoning ? There are several types of pirates, I lump them into four main categories:
1. Hardcore pirates who won't pay for software, ever
2. Casual/bored pirates who will download whatever's new and try it out
3. Average Joe who shares stuff with a few friends and relatives, might do group buys
4. Try-before-you-buy types (yes they do exist)
#1 is most likely 12 years old and/or living in the 3rd world, might as well forget about them there is no hope for this category
#3 is small peas, blue-collar cheap-ass. Even legit businesses don't spend much on marketing to these types
#2 and #4 are GOLDEN. The try-before-they-buy types often become life-long supporters. These are the guys who will chat you up in the forums and spread your gospel to coworkers and acquaintances. The casual pirates are similar, but they won't buy your product: their friends will. The casual pirate will blog about your app or mention it on IRC/Facebook, proportionate to your app's quality and apparent ease-of-use.
I know these observations don't directly scale to these big-name game houses. Obviously there is a greater benefit to indie guys like myself, but on some level, people will always buy a certain portion of their software... for some it's 100%, for others it's zero, and I don't think DRM has much influence on that.
Piracy is a constant. You can't kill it, no matter how clever you get, it's still just a software or hardware lock, and both can be broken by someone with a bit of smarts, time and motivation. DRM is nothing but a series of small pyrrhic victories and each incremental tightening of "security" leads to an equal or greater increment in the cracker's knowledge and skill. The only ones who truly profit from DRM are the people selling DRM.
If US citizens are working as enemy combatants, killing a few defectors won't solve the underlying problem that the nation is spiraling into madness.
Terrorism is not a cause, it's a symptom. People get desperate because they feel wronged and powerless. Whether it's due to religious fanaticism or abusive capitalism, the result is the same: angry people who have nothing left to lose.
What is more cowardly, hiding in plain sight among "civilians", or putting on a silly uniform, gathering several thousand like-minded sacks of meat and storming foreign lands with billions of dollars in vehicles and weaponry ?
I don't care what they're wearing. If someone thinks they need a gun to resolve conflict, THEY ARE COWARDS, both sides. They don't have the balls to swallow their childish angst, sit down and talk things through. It takes far more bravery to meet your adversary eye-to-eye in a civil manner, than it does to hide behind cover and spray bullets as flying extensions of your diminutive phallus.
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True, but the American developer is much easier to rein in and/or terminate. If a contractor is awful, you'll ditch him and he'll find ten more suckers around the corner. If you fire your own awful coder, that sonofabitch is out of a job, and when he has the gall to give your name as a reference to his future employers, you'll have the opportunity to keep him out of THAT job too.
The issue here is not one of race, but purely geographic / organisational. A local contractor that does a poor job, gets poor reviews, no recommendations and their income dries up. A remote contractor has a much wider audience, any bad rep gets lost in the background noise of the interweb.
Except they will never get it 100% right. Both parties will eventually settle for something that mostly-works and kinda-sucks, when the pressure from the client for fixes equals the backpressure from the idiots for "we have spent enough time on you" (sometimes written as "fuck off and die").
Hire a good coder from the start (or leverage the ones you already have), and you'll have less of this back-and-forth, where all you're really doing is reiterating the specs you gave them in the first place. The issue of code quality is subjective, but when the guy writing it knows he'll probably still be here in 6 months when it needs updates, he just might try to keep his work clean and manageable. When you're just another wealthy american sucker to a faraway sweatshop, all bets are off.
We went through this just a few months ago, as a tiny coder shop. We needed an Asterisk IVR built, had never done it before and didn't have time to learn, so we contracted out to an offshore company who were supposedly experts with Asterisk, as referred to us by a business acquaintance. We actually ended up with a working product, but it took so much hand-holding and error checking that by the time they delivered the final version, I knew more about Asterisk than they did, mostly because I read the PHPAGI docs a bit more thoroughly. And it was about 6 weeks late on a 2 week timeline. Face, meet egg.
The 10-hour timezone shift was a massive PITA. The communication hurdles led to poor quality output, because instead of asking us proper questions, they'd "play dumb" and do it wrong, seemingly on purpose hoping we wouldn't notice I guess. Every time they'd jiggle some code, we had to retest our entire flowchart and bark at them for every failure. Maybe I'm a hopeless idealist, but I like to think of contractors as a black box: work order goes in, completed work comes out. In my mind, that includes testing, especially since we had crystal clear pass/fail scenarios.
I'm sure there are some Indian shops that are worth the money (bell curve), but this one clearly wasn't. Sure, they were cheap, but I ended up doing more work to support them than had I done it all from scratch, so it ended up costing more. On the upside, I am now modestly self-sufficient in writing PHP scripts to drive Asterisk; another random skill I never wanted in the first place.
That is certainly true, pirating your own stuff doesn't automatically make your product awesome. If it sucks, it sucks and the strategy will backfire, because more people will know of the suckage. That's a risk I'm willing to take, because if my app sucks, I don't want people to be using it.
Your trolling is very sub-par.
There is no piracy on the PS3, because the protection hasn't been broken yet. When someone finally cracks it, and I assure you there are quite a few groups working on it quite diligently, PS3 games will be pirated just the same as everything else. Sometimes it's a modchip, other times a firmware flash, but there's always a way to break the protection. It's all just bits on a disc, which become bits on a wire, and ultimately bits buzzing through a chip. There aren't a million ways to dress zeroes and ones.
MMOs have piracy too, but since the meaty bits are server-side, it involves a realm/shard emulator instead of a mindless bit-copy. Sure, it's complicated, but if you have access to the game, you have the ability to sniff the traffic to and from the server. It's not always easy, but then neither is making a modchip or patching encrypted firmware. It's a mental exercise, and there are quite a few people who enjoy the challenge and/or profit from the activity. World of Warcraft private servers are usually free to play, but they might sell in-game items for real-world cash, or charge fees for special tournaments (with prizes).
Now, don't get me wrong, there's something cool about the UK night life, but I would hope that beings capable of space travel are also sufficiently socially advanced to recognize monarchy as an embarrassingly archaic model of government.
I'm not saying that crock we call democracy is any better in practice, but at least we rotate our leaders around every few years... oh, and they have surnames! :P Mononyms are for attention-starved "artists", thankyouverymuch.
I'm with you on all points, but I agree that interventions are moronic at best, but the support I speak of is constant pressure, not a sudden blast.
Specifically with the smoking problem, I honestly believe that if we can get a significant number of people to quit, kids will be less exposed to the behavior and our ingrained "monkey see, monkey do" instincts will be spared. People don't get into smoking because they want to turn their lungs into tire rubber, they start smoking because half the people they know are smokers. Combine that with the media-fueled "cool factor" and it's more tempting than bacon-wrapped bacon.
How irritating is it to be the only non-smoker in a group ? Fuck man, I hate the smell. That kind of thing makes me want to avoid certain people, but I have zero interest in smoking. For a lot of people, it's the opposite that happens: they start smoking as a result of hanging around other smokers.
Flip it around: if you were the only smoker in a group on non-smokers, wouldn't you feel really awkward ? What if they all berated you, every time you lit one up ? Would you ditch the cancer stick, or your friends ?
April fools or not, when something seems patently ridiculous, it should be one's duty to verify the claim before accepting it as fact.
You don't see people calling air raids every time the Onion has a bowel movement.
Protip: if you're a no-talent half-witted parasitic culture-poaching 21st century idiocrat, just pick any game OTHER THAN SCRABBLE!
The whole point of a word game like Scrabble is to exercise and expand your vocabulary. I hope the box comes lined with anthrax, it's an abomination.
Educated people have Scrabble, imbeciles have the Ouija board. That's how it's always been, and how it should always be.
Because legislators aren't (cognitively) equipped to deal with a global community. Their world is made up of districts, subdivisions and other small pockets of control. On the internet, they're just another random IP with no xerocopied influence, and that makes them sad. In the end, it's always about who gets what money. When that recipient is either unknown or "Not me", they throw hissy fits and get papers signed to lay claim to that money.
Yeah, I'm cynical, but go ahead and prove me wrong.
And as always: proxies, VPN tunnels and good old unsecured WiFi will effortlessly defeat all those dirty home-soil shit disturbers you call intelligence agencies.
Legislation never fixes anything. It just staples a form a punishment to an existing activity. Kill a man, go to jail. Molest a puppy, go to jail. Defeat the colander that is modern capitalism, now go to jail.
The only reason it's "harder to do" is because Macs don't really advertise their internal specs. When you buy a PC, they go around boasting "DDR3 this, Quickpath that". PC marketing is atrocious, but at least you have a list of jargon that says what's inside the plastic box.
It certainly doesn't help that Apple often revises the hardware without changing the name. They've been selling Mac Pros for nearly four years, but the earliest ones were Socket 771 with DDR2 FB-DIMM memory, while current models are Socket 1366 with DDR3 ECC Unbuffered memory. To many Mac users, these models are referred as "the fast Mac Pro" and "the faster Mac Pro". As a non-Apple tech, you really have to crack the thing open to figure out what goes in it.
In the end, once you know which parts will fit, it's just a computer like any other. This is also true of their consumer devices... so what if Apple doesn't sell a battery for your iPhone ? Check a message board, you'll find a bunch of unreputable accessory manufacturers in Asia selling replacement parts. You might have to work a bit harder to install them yourself, or find a local geek to do it for you, but the gear is out there. Up where I live, we have these repugnant little shops that sell all manner of junk like XS Cargo, Factory Direct, and surely others : refurbished and unlocked cell phones, no-name gadgets, gaming accessories... it's like a pawn shop minus all the bad 80's cassettes and unloved guitars. Those guys tend to have all the gray-market modding and repair stuff you could ever want, and they often have an EE flunkie on-site to do the labor rather cheaply. The stuff Apple won't do, those sketchy guys will happily do for a few bucks - that's their business model.
I'm no fanboi, but I would hazard a guess that the issues you encountered were because the Mac followed the spec more precisely than the Windows boxes. Hell, web developers have to code around M$ bugs, why would you think firmware developers don't suffer the same abuse ? It is far easier to mangle your $30 gadget until it works, than to brow-beat Microsoft and all its OEMs until they release non-retarded drivers.
I wouldn't even be surprised to find such workarounds in Apple Airport routers, to accomodate the quirks in cheap WiFi hardware found in older PC laptops. Think of it this way: if it's a challenge for Linux to support the fucked up NDIS drivers, then it has to be a real puzzle trying to make sense of mangled WiFi packets over the air.
I dunno man, I wouldn't mind watching "OW my balls!" once in a while, just to see idiots getting hurt, that is.
You should have said that to SCO a while back.
I'll believe in 3m tall aliens long before I ever put any stock in any bible, Torah or Qur'an.
Believing in aliens isn't necessarily stupid. Believing in aliens because the morning paper mentioned it on April fools day and not realizing for one second that maybe, just maybe, aliens would pick a nicer place to land than war-torn fundie Jordan, now THAT'S stupid.
In a civilized nation, your logic would hold water, but this is Jordan we're talking about. They gleefully murder people who are from the "wrong" side of their self-declared geopolitical boundaries and squabble over the validity of Israel as a nation. The few brains they had probably fleed the country long ago for greener pastures.
I think the issue is less about kids being kids, and more about people not being forward about these problems. If you know someone who is addicted to something, do you confront them with it (and deal with the defensive behavior that ensues), or do you talk behind their back to your mutual friends and say "someone really outta do something about him" ? People spiral out of control, it's natural to favor instant gratification over all else, so it takes someone outside of that bubble, a trusted friend to yank you out of the spiral. No amount of education can replace that human pillar of stability.
A guy not smoking is "gathering video evidence to support a future legal case against his former employer".
Fuck cigarette smokers. No, not in the sexual sense. I find the whole thing revolting from top to bottom: the habit, the smell, the health and cosmetic damage, and the billion-dollar industry that thrives on this hypocrisy. The world would be a much nicer place if everyone just smoked regular tobacco (or whatever wacky weed suits you).
People would take you more seriously, if even one of your posts were something other than an Apple love poem. I thought one of your replies to my older post was insightful, until I saw that you're just a paper-thin shill.
Being so pro-Apple without strong arguments supporting your views is actually HURTFUL to the brand. This is Slashdot, try a little harder and we just might have fruitful discussions instead of inane epeen-pointing showdowns.
Sure, but that just one (or a few ) samples. You can't say that any significant number of people will pay for software if they can't pirate it. Some will, some won't. Some people can afford it, yet still pirate because it's easier (Steam converts a lot of these). Some people can't afford it, because they live in some idiotic slave nation, and will never buy anything because that big-studio game costs more than what they earn in a year.
If they can't get something they "really" want, they will redirect their digital lust to a different product.
I'm not picking on you personally, but please, everyone, stop making these unfounded generalizations about piracy. This isn't Digg, goddamnit! We're supposed to be educated.
I don't really think it leads to more sales. Let's suppose I'm a pirate (*ahem*). If I can't play Settlers 7, or Assassin's Creed 2, or whatever hot-game-of-the-minute, I will find something else to occupy my weekend. I'm not going to feel the overwhelming urge to go "haha, ok Ubisoft you win this time" and give them $70, when there are hundreds of other recent titles available right on the first page of my torrent site. In fact, if something is known to be "uncrackable" a pirate is more likely to NOT want to buy it, for fear that it will rootkit their PC, mess with Daemon Tools, or phone home with a list of all the other ill-gotten software they have.
Now I'm going to take a rather offensive stance: I, as an occasional producer of (low budget) software, pirate my own stuff. By that, I mean I routinely package the product that I myself created, throw in a valid unlock code, and seed it on torrent trackers, push it through Usenet, stick it on Rapidshare. Why in the fuck would I do that ? Because pirates make up the oldest and largest social network of all time. I shit you not, I have been making more money and more repeat sales. The reasoning ? There are several types of pirates, I lump them into four main categories:
1. Hardcore pirates who won't pay for software, ever
2. Casual/bored pirates who will download whatever's new and try it out
3. Average Joe who shares stuff with a few friends and relatives, might do group buys
4. Try-before-you-buy types (yes they do exist)
#1 is most likely 12 years old and/or living in the 3rd world, might as well forget about them there is no hope for this category
#3 is small peas, blue-collar cheap-ass. Even legit businesses don't spend much on marketing to these types
#2 and #4 are GOLDEN. The try-before-they-buy types often become life-long supporters. These are the guys who will chat you up in the forums and spread your gospel to coworkers and acquaintances. The casual pirates are similar, but they won't buy your product: their friends will. The casual pirate will blog about your app or mention it on IRC/Facebook, proportionate to your app's quality and apparent ease-of-use.
I know these observations don't directly scale to these big-name game houses. Obviously there is a greater benefit to indie guys like myself, but on some level, people will always buy a certain portion of their software... for some it's 100%, for others it's zero, and I don't think DRM has much influence on that.
Piracy is a constant. You can't kill it, no matter how clever you get, it's still just a software or hardware lock, and both can be broken by someone with a bit of smarts, time and motivation. DRM is nothing but a series of small pyrrhic victories and each incremental tightening of "security" leads to an equal or greater increment in the cracker's knowledge and skill. The only ones who truly profit from DRM are the people selling DRM.
If US citizens are working as enemy combatants, killing a few defectors won't solve the underlying problem that the nation is spiraling into madness.
Terrorism is not a cause, it's a symptom. People get desperate because they feel wronged and powerless. Whether it's due to religious fanaticism or abusive capitalism, the result is the same: angry people who have nothing left to lose.
What is more cowardly, hiding in plain sight among "civilians", or putting on a silly uniform, gathering several thousand like-minded sacks of meat and storming foreign lands with billions of dollars in vehicles and weaponry ?
I don't care what they're wearing. If someone thinks they need a gun to resolve conflict, THEY ARE COWARDS, both sides. They don't have the balls to swallow their childish angst, sit down and talk things through. It takes far more bravery to meet your adversary eye-to-eye in a civil manner, than it does to hide behind cover and spray bullets as flying extensions of your diminutive phallus.