What's needed is a sorting system
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
(I wish I could see what the site has, but it's/.'d)
When it comes to books, I tend to want to read the ones that are recommended by other people who share my tastes.
No system like this will ever be complete(useful?) without a way to filter out the opinions of people with whom I'll probably never agree.
A big problem with IMDB is that you have so many widely varying opinions, that it's a pretty useless way to find movies that I might enjoy. It's only really good for seeing who starred in what, really.
You've really got to pity the legitimately deposed dictatorial families that must have a way to get their money out of the country.
They send out email to a select few upstanding citizens, hoping to be able to get their millions out of the country for a small percentage of the money. Then, no one believes that the offer is legitimate!
Yes, these deposed dictator's relatives are the real victims in all of this! Let's not forget about their tragic plight.
While I heartily encourage the full prosecution of the con artists, I don't feel all that sorry for the victims.
I mean, if you're that stupid, it's probably best for society if you don't have any economic influence anyway. Your right to vote should probably be taken away as well.:P
Keep in mind that spammers are typically bottlenecked through the open relays that they exploit, and they don't have much granularity of control on those, since they're only connected through SMTP.
So their only options for opening up many connections are to find other open relays, but that's a bit more difficult a propsect, I'd imagine.
is being framed in simplistic good vs. evil terms by our leaders is disturbing because it takes complicated issues and reduces them to trite overgeneralizations
The irony there is that if the general populace were smart enough and/or cared enough, they would see right through those trite overgeneralizations for themselves. Unfortunately, they're dumb sheep who need things simplified before they know how to think. Sucks, but that's the way it is.
The only way we are going to get broadband across the board is if the government mandates
it, and takes it upon themselves to install and run it.
Oh, Jesus Christ on a stick.
You've just mentioned the biggest way to screw it up. State run telcos are a total disaster and the last entities to innovate or run efficiently. In the 1990's, when the Internet was heating up, the rest of the world was watching the United States to figure out how to get their communications infrastructure in gear and grow nearly as quickly.
Our telco situation isn't perfect, but it beats the living shit out of anything else out there that I've heard of.
I ignored Buffy for years, thinking that the entire premise was just stupid. Then, FX started airing the reruns, 2 a day. I watched a couple of them one afternoon, and thought, "This isn't half bad." Before I knew it, I was entirely hooked on the premise, the characters, the writing, etc.
Don't ignore Buffy because of the premise. You'll thank yourself if you give the show a few episodes to grow on you.
With no cash in my wallet, I went to an ATM (Wells Fargo) a few months ago. I withdrew $200, and went along my merry way.
I pulled out my wallet about an hour later. As I was thumbing through my cash to pay for something I discovered a ten dollar bill in the middle of my stack of twenties... HUH? Damned ATM machine ripped me off.
The next time I went by a Wells Fargo branch office, I reported the problem. They mentioned that there was some complicated method for submitting a complaint. I decided that it would cost me a lot more than $10 to try to get it back.
1. Avoid Christianity and religion in general. You'll waste a lot of time over the next 10 years trying to resolve doctrinal and traditional conflicts in Christianity. Remember how stupid you felt at 7 when you caught your parents putting presents under the tree and realized that you should have put all of the clues about Santa Clause together much sooner? Ditto on Christianity, religion, belief in God, and belief in the paranormal. It's all total crap that people believe because they want to. Learn about more about science and skepticism as soon as you can. They'll be the rocks that you can depend upon to tell you about the nature of reality after the illusion of God fades away.
2. Avoid television and video games. You'll look back at the time you spent on them, and not really feel like you have anything to show for it. Play basketball, tennis, racquetball, etc. instead for recreation. Better yet, get started in flying remote control airplanes... what a kick!
3. Develop the software you want to, and go for it all the way. Do it by yourself, the way you want to, and never lose control of your pet projects until they've matured. Doing so will cost you big time.
4. Wait until you're at least 35 or so to get married, and don't do it at all unless it feels completely right. Don't get married because your friends are all married, or because some girl loves you, or because you're horny. Lots of your friends will be divorced before too much time, and it takes a lot more than that initial love to keep a marriage going. Don't marry a woman because she loves you. Marry her because you respect her completely, and she completes you. As for being horny: Hookers are much cheaper in the long run.:)
5. Travel travel travel. Learn new languages and new cultures. By the same token, don't be afraid to pack up all your crap and move to another part of the country or even the world. As you grow older, you'll treasure the things that you've learned about different people and different places.
It's why people from "better" backgrounds can recover from poverty quickly - why good business-people can create new businesses from catastrophes repeatedly
It could be equally argued that they were in those "better" backgrounds because of some genetic advantage. You'd really need to do a large number of controlled studies to determine the order of the cause and effect there. My suspicion is that both genetic propensities and social frameworks play a part.
Knowledge and social networks are what keeps one out of poverty, not hard work.
Hard work is an important element, and you can't just discount it out of hand.
As an aside, drug addiction exists in that gray area between choice- and not-choice
What is a choice, then? I know smart people who are "addicted" to EverQuest to the point that their work quality seriously suffers. Are they making a choice? If I go home early to watch TV or read a book, am I making a choice or just a slave to some electrochemical impulse in my brain?
I used to fly model rockets years ago, and really enjoyed it.
About 4 years ago, though, I got into remote control (RC) airplanes. That hobby kicks ass. It's not all that expensive, as far as hobbies go. You can get into it for less than $500, then your additional costs are minor if you don't wreck your plane much.
It's absolutely amazing what a good RC pilot can do with his airplane. The thrust to weight ratio of these planes is well over 1, so it's possible to hover the airplanes in midair.
Having flown both standard sized and model aircraft, I can tell you that the skills you need to develop for both are roughly the same. Flying model airplanes is a shitload cheaper and less likely to get you killed, though.
My biggest regret is that I didn't get into the hobby sooner. As with most things, the younger you are when you start, the better you'll be.
If you're interested, go by any good airplane hobby shop, and there will be some airplane geek there who can tell you how to get started. Better yet, just go to the hobby shop to look around, then ask them where the local model airplane fields are. An airfield will be run by a club that has people who can give you good advice on how to get started and train you how to fly. Plus, you'll get a really good chance to see what you're getting into, if there are some decent pilots showing off.
One word of advice regarding flying: It's a crapload harder than it looks. Everyone thinks that they'll be flying their first time out. In reality, you'll likely not be flying by yourself for your first 5 outings. Take things slowly, and you won't have to do a lot of plane rebuilding.
I have a couple of planes that I fly that I wouldn't mind if someone with a rocket took a shot at it. They were put together from ARFs (Almost Ready to Fly kits), so would have been no big deal to replace.
However, if someone takes a shot at the plane that I spent weeks building from scratch, I'd have to kill someone.
Some guys invest hundreds of hours and $10k or more in their planes, so it's probably a bit uncool to screw with them without asking first.
I don't think that it's a matter of "not wanting to be popular as much", as the author stated.
I think that being intelligent has a high correlation with a lack of social skills.
I was sort of middle-of-the-road, popularity-wise. I made good grades, was on the Quiz squad, etc. -- but I also played tennis, hung around with the "popular" kids, etc.
There were geeky people "below" me who seemed to want to be popular more than anything, but just didn't know what to say or how to act around their peers -- and there were intelligent people "above" me who were extremely popular but never seemed to try very hard at it.
Maybe there are genetic differences that produce higher intelligence at the cost of lower social skills.
Maybe, higher intelligence causes you to second-guess yourself a lot because you're too introspective, when the more neanderthal types simply behaved on instinct.
Regardless, many nerdy people that I knew wanted to be popular... very very badly. They just didn't know how to go about it.
For the record, I used to be able to type the snot out of my 1200BPS modem. I could type atleast two-three lines of text ahead of the modem, and could complete an entire BRE game (~20 turns) inside of 30 seconds, though the BBS was still sending me the screen updates. I was SO glas when Mehul made the menus 'collapse' when they were issued a command before they were drawn! When I discovered the macros, however, all bets were off! 20 turns = 30 keystrokes. {smile}
Jeez. You weren't out-typing your modem, which is exactly my point. You were out-typing some system on the other end that was bogged down processing something or other.
The original poster was claiming that he was out-typing his modem. In reality, simple math and knowledge of human typing ability shows that the modem wasn't the limiting factor that he was dealing with. While I heartily agree that you guys may have been waiting on "something" while you were typing... your modem was ready to go and waiting on that same "something".
1. Way more than 50% of the people on the road think that they're "above average" drivers (85% last I heard)
2. Avid computer users always think they're faster typists than they are.
Every time I hear one of my co-workers drop how fast they type (100wpm, etc.), I always break out the typing tutor software. They're always at least 50% off.
Scaling typing boasts by 50% is a statistically safe bet.
I used 10 bits per character, which is what my old Hayes manual specified. If you use less bits per character, the math goes in my favor, which is why I was being generous.
4 characters per word? Not in my typing classes. Once again, though, less characters per word skews things even more in my (ridiculously fast typist) side of the argument. 4 characters per word at 1800 characters per minute is 450wpm.
Finally, out-typing a SYSTEM is completely different from out-typing a modem, which is really what the original post was claiming to have done. The system you were using was obviously bogged down. Hell, using your logic, I can claim to out-type my T1 line at work, since I often encounter situations where I'm typing ahead blindly on a command line of some distant system.
Another interesting fact I remember back in the day was being able to type faster than the 300 baud modems could send.
300bps full duplex, let's say that 9 bits per byte with parity, and I forget if the modem signal had an extra stop bit... but let's say it did, so that's 10 bits per character.
That would be 30 characters per second, meaning 1800 characters per minute. If I recall correctly from my typing days, 5 characters were considered to be a "word", but I don't think they counted spaces, but we will to be generous.
So, at 6 characters per word, that would mean that you were a 300wpm typist.
I don't disagree with anything that you said. I was in no way defending twinking. I think that twinking has been a serious problem in EQ, and basically destroyed the entertainment value of the first 45 or so levels for those who would prefer to start new characters from scratch. I could go on and on about how twinking forces you into a loot situation at the lower levels where you're never fighting mobs that can drop useable equipment. Rather, you're constantly having to farm cash at lower levels so you can buy loot from much higher level players whose mobs are dropping stuff that's too low for them anyway. The loot/mob/cash reward balance is all out of whack, and it's mostly due to twinking.
My point was simply that twinking is accepted by players in the game, and that if the original poster is having serious friction with other players in the game, then he should look at other aspects of his behavior for the cause of that friction. No one is ostracized for twinking. They are, however, frowned upon for KSing, loot whoring, and just being obnoxious in general.
osgeek, please don't tell me that you play on Innoruuk and there's any chance that I know you. please.:)
I used to do that kind of thing in everquest. Then one day the whole darn world was mad at me for 'twinking'. Unfortuantly, the worse thing that can happen to a mmorpg game is about to happen to this one.
As an experienced EQ player, I must say, "Pbptptpbptptppbptptpt" to that nonsense. Twinking is an accepted part of the game. If people suddenly started to give you crap in the game, odds are that it was for a reason. You should really rethink the way you played the game and the way that you manage your interpersonal relationships.
So what's your deal, I don't understand why you're fighting so hard. You work for DTV?
Nope.
Have the service, pay for it, jealous of hackers?
Nope. Extended basic cable at the moment, because I don't feel like I can justify spending the extra money on all of the movie channels and stuff through more cable packages or a dish.
Do you really honestly believe they're in danger of going under because of this?
At the moment? Of course not. I don't believe that I'm in serious danger of being murdered at the moment, but I wouldn't sit still if you were proposing whacking people either.
Or just like to argue and play Devil's advocate?
Like to argue? Not really. I don't usually back down from them either.
Not to be intentionally mean or anything, but I really do believe that the little bit of an argument that you have is (as I mentioned before), selfish and immature. It ignores the larger social and economic consequences of using negligible, almost imaginiary, rights infringement arguments to demolish the greater good. While completely willing to demolish that greater good, you have the nerve to accuse those wiser than you of being sheep giving in to bullies. They're not bullies if they're just protecting what's theirs, they're just companies (made up of people just like us) trying to make a reasonable profit for a service that they provide.
Slashdot Mirror
(I wish I could see what the site has, but it's /.'d)
When it comes to books, I tend to want to read the ones that are recommended by other people who share my tastes.
No system like this will ever be complete(useful?) without a way to filter out the opinions of people with whom I'll probably never agree.
A big problem with IMDB is that you have so many widely varying opinions, that it's a pretty useless way to find movies that I might enjoy. It's only really good for seeing who starred in what, really.
The poster of this story apparently Slashdotted himself?
Nice move.
You've really got to pity the legitimately deposed dictatorial families that must have a way to get their money out of the country.
They send out email to a select few upstanding citizens, hoping to be able to get their millions out of the country for a small percentage of the money. Then, no one believes that the offer is legitimate!
Yes, these deposed dictator's relatives are the real victims in all of this! Let's not forget about their tragic plight.
While I heartily encourage the full prosecution of the con artists, I don't feel all that sorry for the victims.
:P
I mean, if you're that stupid, it's probably best for society if you don't have any economic influence anyway. Your right to vote should probably be taken away as well.
Keep in mind that spammers are typically bottlenecked through the open relays that they exploit, and they don't have much granularity of control on those, since they're only connected through SMTP.
So their only options for opening up many connections are to find other open relays, but that's a bit more difficult a propsect, I'd imagine.
is being framed in simplistic good vs. evil terms by our leaders is disturbing because it takes complicated issues and reduces them to trite overgeneralizations
The irony there is that if the general populace were smart enough and/or cared enough, they would see right through those trite overgeneralizations for themselves. Unfortunately, they're dumb sheep who need things simplified before they know how to think. Sucks, but that's the way it is.
The only way we are going to get broadband across the board is if the government mandates it, and takes it upon themselves to install and run it.
Oh, Jesus Christ on a stick.
You've just mentioned the biggest way to screw it up. State run telcos are a total disaster and the last entities to innovate or run efficiently. In the 1990's, when the Internet was heating up, the rest of the world was watching the United States to figure out how to get their communications infrastructure in gear and grow nearly as quickly.
Our telco situation isn't perfect, but it beats the living shit out of anything else out there that I've heard of.
I ignored Buffy for years, thinking that the entire premise was just stupid. Then, FX started airing the reruns, 2 a day. I watched a couple of them one afternoon, and thought, "This isn't half bad." Before I knew it, I was entirely hooked on the premise, the characters, the writing, etc.
Don't ignore Buffy because of the premise. You'll thank yourself if you give the show a few episodes to grow on you.
In any case, I do still lean towards nurture being the prime factor
Identical twins separated at birth studies have shown time and time again that nature is dominant, even for odd behavioral traits.
I certainly hope we're not doomed to live out our genes.
On the bright side, we might be tinkering with our own genes before many of us finish our lifespans.
We can only hope against hope that they won't suck.
Besides that one Yoda battle in EP2, exactly what part of the Star Wars universe hasn't sucked since TESB?
With no cash in my wallet, I went to an ATM (Wells Fargo) a few months ago. I withdrew $200, and went along my merry way.
I pulled out my wallet about an hour later. As I was thumbing through my cash to pay for something I discovered a ten dollar bill in the middle of my stack of twenties... HUH? Damned ATM machine ripped me off.
The next time I went by a Wells Fargo branch office, I reported the problem. They mentioned that there was some complicated method for submitting a complaint. I decided that it would cost me a lot more than $10 to try to get it back.
1. Avoid Christianity and religion in general. You'll waste a lot of time over the next 10 years trying to resolve doctrinal and traditional conflicts in Christianity. Remember how stupid you felt at 7 when you caught your parents putting presents under the tree and realized that you should have put all of the clues about Santa Clause together much sooner? Ditto on Christianity, religion, belief in God, and belief in the paranormal. It's all total crap that people believe because they want to. Learn about more about science and skepticism as soon as you can. They'll be the rocks that you can depend upon to tell you about the nature of reality after the illusion of God fades away.
:)
2. Avoid television and video games. You'll look back at the time you spent on them, and not really feel like you have anything to show for it. Play basketball, tennis, racquetball, etc. instead for recreation. Better yet, get started in flying remote control airplanes... what a kick!
3. Develop the software you want to, and go for it all the way. Do it by yourself, the way you want to, and never lose control of your pet projects until they've matured. Doing so will cost you big time.
4. Wait until you're at least 35 or so to get married, and don't do it at all unless it feels completely right. Don't get married because your friends are all married, or because some girl loves you, or because you're horny. Lots of your friends will be divorced before too much time, and it takes a lot more than that initial love to keep a marriage going. Don't marry a woman because she loves you. Marry her because you respect her completely, and she completes you. As for being horny: Hookers are much cheaper in the long run.
5. Travel travel travel. Learn new languages and new cultures. By the same token, don't be afraid to pack up all your crap and move to another part of the country or even the world. As you grow older, you'll treasure the things that you've learned about different people and different places.
It's why people from "better" backgrounds can recover from poverty quickly - why good business-people can create new businesses from catastrophes repeatedly
It could be equally argued that they were in those "better" backgrounds because of some genetic advantage. You'd really need to do a large number of controlled studies to determine the order of the cause and effect there. My suspicion is that both genetic propensities and social frameworks play a part.
Knowledge and social networks are what keeps one out of poverty, not hard work.
Hard work is an important element, and you can't just discount it out of hand.
As an aside, drug addiction exists in that gray area between choice- and not-choice
What is a choice, then? I know smart people who are "addicted" to EverQuest to the point that their work quality seriously suffers. Are they making a choice? If I go home early to watch TV or read a book, am I making a choice or just a slave to some electrochemical impulse in my brain?
I used to fly model rockets years ago, and really enjoyed it.
About 4 years ago, though, I got into remote control (RC) airplanes. That hobby kicks ass. It's not all that expensive, as far as hobbies go. You can get into it for less than $500, then your additional costs are minor if you don't wreck your plane much.
It's absolutely amazing what a good RC pilot can do with his airplane. The thrust to weight ratio of these planes is well over 1, so it's possible to hover the airplanes in midair.
Having flown both standard sized and model aircraft, I can tell you that the skills you need to develop for both are roughly the same. Flying model airplanes is a shitload cheaper and less likely to get you killed, though.
My biggest regret is that I didn't get into the hobby sooner. As with most things, the younger you are when you start, the better you'll be.
If you're interested, go by any good airplane hobby shop, and there will be some airplane geek there who can tell you how to get started. Better yet, just go to the hobby shop to look around, then ask them where the local model airplane fields are. An airfield will be run by a club that has people who can give you good advice on how to get started and train you how to fly. Plus, you'll get a really good chance to see what you're getting into, if there are some decent pilots showing off.
One word of advice regarding flying: It's a crapload harder than it looks. Everyone thinks that they'll be flying their first time out. In reality, you'll likely not be flying by yourself for your first 5 outings. Take things slowly, and you won't have to do a lot of plane rebuilding.
Heh, that's pretty funny.
I have a couple of planes that I fly that I wouldn't mind if someone with a rocket took a shot at it. They were put together from ARFs (Almost Ready to Fly kits), so would have been no big deal to replace.
However, if someone takes a shot at the plane that I spent weeks building from scratch, I'd have to kill someone.
Some guys invest hundreds of hours and $10k or more in their planes, so it's probably a bit uncool to screw with them without asking first.
I don't think that it's a matter of "not wanting to be popular as much", as the author stated.
I think that being intelligent has a high correlation with a lack of social skills.
I was sort of middle-of-the-road, popularity-wise. I made good grades, was on the Quiz squad, etc. -- but I also played tennis, hung around with the "popular" kids, etc.
There were geeky people "below" me who seemed to want to be popular more than anything, but just didn't know what to say or how to act around their peers -- and there were intelligent people "above" me who were extremely popular but never seemed to try very hard at it.
Maybe there are genetic differences that produce higher intelligence at the cost of lower social skills.
Maybe, higher intelligence causes you to second-guess yourself a lot because you're too introspective, when the more neanderthal types simply behaved on instinct.
Regardless, many nerdy people that I knew wanted to be popular... very very badly. They just didn't know how to go about it.
First: "If you hack it, they will crack it." Go right ahead and give us DRM, because one way or another someone will find a way to circumvent it.
But if they lock it down legally like DeCSS?
For the record, I used to be able to type the snot out of my 1200BPS modem. I could type atleast two-three lines of text ahead of the modem, and could complete an entire BRE game (~20 turns) inside of 30 seconds, though the BBS was still sending me the screen updates. I was SO glas when Mehul made the menus 'collapse' when they were issued a command before they were drawn! When I discovered the macros, however, all bets were off! 20 turns = 30 keystrokes. {smile}
Jeez. You weren't out-typing your modem, which is exactly my point. You were out-typing some system on the other end that was bogged down processing something or other.
The original poster was claiming that he was out-typing his modem. In reality, simple math and knowledge of human typing ability shows that the modem wasn't the limiting factor that he was dealing with. While I heartily agree that you guys may have been waiting on "something" while you were typing... your modem was ready to go and waiting on that same "something".
There are some certainties of statistics:
1. Way more than 50% of the people on the road think that they're "above average" drivers (85% last I heard)
2. Avid computer users always think they're faster typists than they are.
Every time I hear one of my co-workers drop how fast they type (100wpm, etc.), I always break out the typing tutor software. They're always at least 50% off.
Scaling typing boasts by 50% is a statistically safe bet.
I used 10 bits per character, which is what my old Hayes manual specified. If you use less bits per character, the math goes in my favor, which is why I was being generous.
4 characters per word? Not in my typing classes. Once again, though, less characters per word skews things even more in my (ridiculously fast typist) side of the argument. 4 characters per word at 1800 characters per minute is 450wpm.
Finally, out-typing a SYSTEM is completely different from out-typing a modem, which is really what the original post was claiming to have done. The system you were using was obviously bogged down. Hell, using your logic, I can claim to out-type my T1 line at work, since I often encounter situations where I'm typing ahead blindly on a command line of some distant system.
Another interesting fact I remember back in the day was being able to type faster than the 300 baud modems could send.
:)
300bps full duplex, let's say that 9 bits per byte with parity, and I forget if the modem signal had an extra stop bit... but let's say it did, so that's 10 bits per character.
That would be 30 characters per second, meaning 1800 characters per minute. If I recall correctly from my typing days, 5 characters were considered to be a "word", but I don't think they counted spaces, but we will to be generous.
So, at 6 characters per word, that would mean that you were a 300wpm typist.
You kicked ass!
Ah, how nostalgia changes our perspective.
But then again, it's seldom that trailers don't look good, assuming you like the actors and the genre.
God knows that having Sean in it tells us nothing about the movie's quality. He lets himself appear in some real stinkers.
Here's hoping for the best...
I don't disagree with anything that you said. I was in no way defending twinking. I think that twinking has been a serious problem in EQ, and basically destroyed the entertainment value of the first 45 or so levels for those who would prefer to start new characters from scratch. I could go on and on about how twinking forces you into a loot situation at the lower levels where you're never fighting mobs that can drop useable equipment. Rather, you're constantly having to farm cash at lower levels so you can buy loot from much higher level players whose mobs are dropping stuff that's too low for them anyway. The loot/mob/cash reward balance is all out of whack, and it's mostly due to twinking.
:)
My point was simply that twinking is accepted by players in the game, and that if the original poster is having serious friction with other players in the game, then he should look at other aspects of his behavior for the cause of that friction. No one is ostracized for twinking. They are, however, frowned upon for KSing, loot whoring, and just being obnoxious in general.
osgeek, please don't tell me that you play on Innoruuk and there's any chance that I know you. please.
Heh, nope. I'm on Luclin.
I used to do that kind of thing in everquest. Then one day the whole darn world was mad at me for 'twinking'. Unfortuantly, the worse thing that can happen to a mmorpg game is about to happen to this one.
As an experienced EQ player, I must say, "Pbptptpbptptppbptptpt" to that nonsense. Twinking is an accepted part of the game. If people suddenly started to give you crap in the game, odds are that it was for a reason. You should really rethink the way you played the game and the way that you manage your interpersonal relationships.
So what's your deal, I don't understand why you're fighting so hard. You work for DTV?
Nope.
Have the service, pay for it, jealous of hackers?
Nope. Extended basic cable at the moment, because I don't feel like I can justify spending the extra money on all of the movie channels and stuff through more cable packages or a dish.
Do you really honestly believe they're in danger of going under because of this?
At the moment? Of course not. I don't believe that I'm in serious danger of being murdered at the moment, but I wouldn't sit still if you were proposing whacking people either.
Or just like to argue and play Devil's advocate?
Like to argue? Not really. I don't usually back down from them either.
Not to be intentionally mean or anything, but I really do believe that the little bit of an argument that you have is (as I mentioned before), selfish and immature. It ignores the larger social and economic consequences of using negligible, almost imaginiary, rights infringement arguments to demolish the greater good. While completely willing to demolish that greater good, you have the nerve to accuse those wiser than you of being sheep giving in to bullies. They're not bullies if they're just protecting what's theirs, they're just companies (made up of people just like us) trying to make a reasonable profit for a service that they provide.