So is the garbage collection mechanism of Java: memory is a shared resource.
The OS facilitates sharing of *system* memory between and among applications. The GC system in Java manages *application* memory for a single instance of an executing Java application. Invalid comparison. While the OS prevents resource conflicts, the GC of Java speculatively allocates/releases memory in an attempt to alleviate programmers of the task.
So is Swing: the screen is a shared resource.
The "screen" is either a hardware device, as in the graphics card and attached monitor, or a virtual facsimile of the same. At least on Linux, Swing is merely an API that interfaces with X11 for a single application instance... it is X11/Card Driver/OS ( and perhaps soon Wayland ) which is responsible for the sharing and resource conflicts of accessing the real/virtual screen device by multiple application instances. Another invalid comparison.
Operating systems are also training wheels since they provide a layer between the hardware and the programmer.
I would say the operating systems job is to facilitate access to devices and resources that are shared by multiple applications. In this regard, is it not so much a set of training wheels, as it is an arbiter of system resources.
Yes, but the executive in your example resigned voluntarily out of a sense of honor and duty. He wasn't lynched en mass because the door man cheated on his witholding.;)
I would ban day trading, and I will tell you why. It's that mentality for short gains that has lead to our economic collapse. If it was illegal from the start to securitize mortgages, or that it would require very very well documented and physical transfers of the mortgage note from one owner to the other, we would not be in this situation.
You seem to also have the mentality for "short gains" in the terms of a "quick fix" by banning day trading. It *was* illegal to securitize mortgages, but then Barnie Frank and his friends in congress repealed the Glass-Stegal act and failed to monitor the implications of allowing the US banking system more degrees of freedom. They did this because everyone thought it was a great idea that "people who can't afford a home should be able to buy a home."
It was the intense building greed of Wall Street that made the packaging and reselling of mortgage backed securities go faster and faster and faster, and eventually, the demand was so great that loans were originated that anybody with a brain new could not be repaid and would default within 4 years.
Subprime? Subprime my ass. Guaranteed 99.99% Loss Financial Loans is what I would have called them at the end.
Everyone, having the benefit of hindsight, has various different theories for what went wrong. However, at the time, everything *seemed* to be great and very very few people saw it comming. The people who did see it comming, were not in a position to prevent it. Again, this is a failure of government to monitor the industry. We have known for 100's of not 1,000's of years, that capitalism, unregulated, unmonitored, unwatched, and unaccountable, will run amuck in the pursuit of profit. This is why we don't have pure capitalism. We have regulated capitalism, and when the regulators fail, the outcome is not good.
The need to trade faster and faster only encourages this bullshit, and I don't buy for one second, that it is beneficial to the stock market by blah blah blah economist reasoning inserted here.
"The need to trade faster and faster" as you put it, is not the reason the term "daytrading" exists. The fundamental motivation today, for purchasing a stock and selling it before the close of the day, is the limited amount of leverage allowed when purchasing stocks. Due to the speculative excesses that allowed the Kennedy family to rise to power, while at the same time, causing the the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which in turn contributed to the Great Depression, margin rates on stocks have been limited to 2:1. By buying and selling within the same day, this leverage ratio can be raised to 4:1. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Daytrading for an introduction of the practice. Pay special attention to the bits on the special rules surrounding "Pattern Day Traders."
It also introduces arbitrage . Do you think they are building a multi-billion dollar fiber optical trans-Atlantic cable to reduce latency for shits and giggles? No. It is so they can link the stock exchanges and game the system even more. It won't be Call of Duty packets going across that pipe, but it will be warfare.
There is nothing wrong, or negative, with arbitrage, and it is an important factor in price discovery and market liquidity. As for linking exchanges via fiber optic cable, this reduces the opportunities for arbitrage due to price mismatches. As for you calling it warfare, that would be like someone calling your exercise of emailing 1,000 copies of your resume to potential employers warfare.
Why is it that in a certain building in New York that colocation of a server costs 50-100x that of the going rate?
Why is that some people are trying to make microsecond trading and "stock exchange on a chip"?
It's called unfair advantages far worse than insider trading and it is
It would kill day trading for one, not that I mind that one bit.
And what exactly is wrong with daytrading ? For every transaction, there is a buyer who wants to purchase, and a seller who wants to sell. If that isn't a mutually beneficial transaction between two consenting parties with predefined and clear rules and an agreed upon price, then no such thing exists. Banning daytrading would be similar to banning the purchase of milk at a restaurant with the intent of selling it by the glass to customers.
Nail the executives and leave it at that.
Even the executives that didn't know anything ? If bribery and corruption are the problem, then the solution would be to punish the people responsible, which is not necessarily, all of the executives.
Well, if you're going to have realism, I guess you'd need all the other stuff that comes in a war: not just America's Army and the Taliban, but also the Red Cross. In fact, for a multiplayer game, some people could be Red Cross personnel. And it makes perfect sense to deduct points for illegal kills (i.e., after someone has already surrendered to you).
This is an excellent idea. An online multi-player game could allow people to open accounts, and volunteer to be a Red Cross worker in the virtual world for free. If they want to play the game as a different character, they could sign up for the service and pay a fee commensurate with the amount of damage their player with material possessions can incur, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting the Red Cross directly.
My original post was a somewhat tounge-in-cheek commentary on the economics of duality. My apologies if it upset you, or was perceived to somehow minimize the efforts of the Red Cross. It goes without saying, they are a necessary and important contribution to the well being of the inhabitants on planet Earth... even if they don't like video games.;)
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is an international humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million volunteers, members and staff worldwide[2]
According to Swiss law, the ICRC is defined as a private association. According to its statutes it consists of 15 to 25 Swiss-citizen members, which it coopts for a period of four years.
The 2009 budget of the ICRC amounts more than 1 billion Swiss Francs. Most of that money comes from the States, including Switzerland in its capacity as the depositary state of the Geneva Conventions, from national Red Cross societies, the signatory states of the Geneva Conventions, and from international organizations like the European Union. All payments to the ICRC are voluntary and are received as donations based on two types of appeals issued by the Committee: an annual Headquarters Appeal to cover its internal costs and Emergency Appeals for its individual missions.
Given that the majority of its funding comes from States ( as in Countries, that print fiat money from thin air, which is essentially a tax on the productive population ), and the majority of its 97 million workers are "volunteers,"... would you consider this to be a competitive enterprise, economically speaking, same as IBM or Microsoft ? I think not.
Now that I think about it more, perhaps their actions are a form of competition.
If they force battlefield game developers to insert Red Cross trucks and field hospitals, and care for the wounded, they will gain more exposure and influence and power. So they are competing ! W00t !
The funny thing about non-profit groups is that they don't exist in a competitive environment. When people hand you money, and you sit around all day deciding how to make everyone feel good, competitive behaviors seem foreign and wrong.
When you live in the private sector, outside the bubble that non-profit organizations live in, competitive behaviors are a natural part of everyday life.
The reality is, that humans are animals, and compete with each other for resources, and it would be interesting to see what happens if the individuals in the non-profit non-performing bubble are left to their own devices to eat. The resulting mental conflict might cause them to self-implode.;)
They have a concept of Iran, but that's about it. If you're Iranian, you don't exist, in their heads, and so what happens to you *doesn't matter*.
This is pretty much true of any remote population. To the people of {A}, {B} is just a place name. To the people of {B}, {A} is just a place name. Lines in the sand and the flags we plant near them.
The difference between comedy and tragedy is ones proximity to the situation.
In this case, it's the fact that the USA Government is quite energetically condemning and demonizing the Iranian Government for doing something that said USA Government also does.
There is a degree of hypocrisy present in the actions of all governments. Society and the individual co-exist, yet, have conflicting motives, and laws / policies are the arbiter, but not the limit, of eithers actions.
The US and Iran do not have monopolies on hypocritical actions.
I'm no expert on earthquakes and tsunamis, but, if they have a general idea of locations of faults, or probabilities where earthquakes are highly likely to occur, the mathematics behind determining tsunami combinations might help them better evaluate the risk for any given location. If the old method of thinking or planning was to prepare for a single event, this could help them determine the probability of a merged wave.
From now on, I will check with the both of you, before I intentionally fan one side of the flames or the other. I see my mistake now, and it was quite foolish of me to attempt to remove some of the fuel.
So in your opinion, it's perfectly alright for intelligent rational thinking individuals to embrace propaganda and repeat it based on their individual preference for the outcome of a particular event, as opposed to, seeking the truth behind an event, such that everyone may learn from it ?
Given that all governments, some of the time, tell lies and use the tactic of propaganda, how can one arbitrarily choose which government is telling the truth 100% and the other 0% ?
The story of the link you pasted, has the US admitting to losing a drone near the Afghanistan border. This does not equate to an admission that a drone was shot down after violating Iranian airspace, unless the person reading the story has an extreme emotional bias.
From all accounts thus far, it seems likely 1) the US has lost a drone and 2) the Iranian authorities probably have it. That's it.
The story will continue to unfold, and any admissions from either side, will most likely be designed to benefit the side from which they originate. Choosing 1 side of the story as absolute fact, and the other as absolute falsehood, ignores the larger truth of the issue and the realities of politics.
the company I work for keeps the phones ringing, cube noise up, and enough meetings that I'm lucky to write a few lines. Some days go by without any objective measure of success.
Remember all those people in your COBOL class that had perplexed and confused looks on their faces, and were only there because they required the class as part of their MBA coursework ? Those people are your managers, and their cost-benefit analysis said if they stuffed you at a tiny desk in the phone room, they could save $100 on floor space and cubicle walls.
Go talk to some of them about a productive engineering environment. I'd lay odds the same perplexed look re-appears.;)
then you're not the kind of user they want - you will just cost them bandwidth without helping them make money from bundled crap.
This could indeed be the case. The issue I have with wrapping the download, is that its somewhat of a below the table tactic. I, the user, want a file. I don't want spyware or adware installed, even if I'm being made aware of it, which I suspect most users aren't being made aware of it. ( Sure, its probably buried somewhere in fine print legalize, but thats not awareness, thats legal liability dismissal / transfer.)
What I wouldn't mind, is if download.com showed advertisements, and used the revenue to pay for the service. Also, I wouldn't mind some small delay, or lower transfer cap, unless I pay $10 ( or some nominal reasonable fee ) for a year of enhanced access.
The 2 options I mentioned, because, as a consumer, I am aware of them, and they aren't making changes to my system. I have the opportunity to make an informed decision and choice, as opposed to, wrapping the downloads without making me aware of them, thereby, preventing me from making an informed choice.
Commerce and transactions can be mutually beneficial and efficient, if the parties involved are able to make informed choices about their costs and benefits. When parties are denied informed choice, or tactics are used that disguise the complete nature of the transaction, I feel the result is counter productive for society as a whole, as now I have the headache and wasted time of trying to remove the changes the wrapper made.
The reason you go to the well known sites is because there's (you'd hope) less chance of them containing malware/trojans/etc.
Definitely. I would think download.com is going to suffer some degree of backlash and lost users from this. I know I wouldn't use a site that wrapped downloads, altered my local settings, etc.
There are a few reasons software repositories are popular that I can think of off the top of my head.
Much like an "app store" for smart phone apps, its convenient to have 1 place to go to look for an app, when you have general requirements or a specific type of app in mind, and not so much a specific app.
People are creatures of habit, and once they learn how to use the download.com ( or some other site like freshmeat.net ) interface, they just return to it out of habit, and the fact that they already know how to search and navigate the site.
As for why developers use sites like this, the visibility factor comes into play. Since the repositories have a returning user base, the app becomes that much more visible, as opposed to getting lost in search engine results.
Another incentive for small developers, is the bandwidth. They dont have to manage the large amount of bandwidth required to deliver apps, the repository does this. They also don't have to pay for a commercial ISP account that allows them to run servers, as most residential account agreements forbid the operation of servers ( although only in agreement, not necessarily technically prevented. )
If I was a US taxpayer I would be seriously concerned that it is viewed as acceptable to provoke yet another gulf state in this way.
My stance for this entire thread, right up until the US released a report claiming to have lost a drone, is that the US wouldn't be so foolish as to provoke Iran intentionally by flying drones into their airspace intentionally for no net gain.
It's unfortunate, regardless of the reasons or motivations behind why it happened. I'm not personally choosing sides, or betting on horses. Nor do I have any solutions on how to convince the world community to stop blaming their own problems on someone else.
You talk of products and of counterfeiting. You are once again conflating the material with the immaterial.
Material possessions, are protected by law, from theft, as copyrighted intellectual property, is protected by law, from piracy. There is no conflation. These two different types of property have in common the protection of law, although one has physical form while the other does not.
Although the term "product" does apply to a movie, there are better terms, such as "data".
Better [for you] in this case, because it allows you to justify the transgressions you commit when depriving the creators of the products you pirate compensation. Data, as in, formless, random, data, or data as in publicly available data, are not subject to copyright. Collections of data, including public data such as a phone book or other works of reference, are in fact subject to copyright.
You speak of "allowing", as if the default is that copying is hard,
No, I speak of allowing, as in, the creator of the original work has granted you rights for its use, or not. While you are busy getting stoned and redefining the terms used throughout the legal system to justify your own selfish behavior, you might some day get lucky and stumble upon the fact that the rules of the system are designed to protect productive behavior and the means of production, as opposed to, shifting the balance of protections to consumers such as yourself, which would result in wasted consumption of resources.
and as if some human agency has the power to grant people the ability to make copies
That would be the lawful owner of the original work. Just as you may grant someone use of the computer that you incurred an expense to acquire, the creators of original works incur expenses and have lawful protections concerning their ability to recoup said creation expenses. Once again, the rules are designed to promote and protect production, and minimize consumption for consumption sake.
Nor do you know what effect it all has on jobs.
If a person such as your self, sitting at home, smoking weed, plays video games all day, you wont be out in the world creating products, performing services, operating a business, and creating jobs. Im well aware of the destructive affects of the illegal behavior you advocate, regardless of your failed attempt to redefine all the terms for selfish purposes.
For all you know, your way would kill jobs, not create them.
It's not "my" way. Oopsy, I believe some transference is occurring here.
Your way certainly would hurt the economy
So the last 200 years of successful policy and data, because you don't agree with it, is completely invalid, because your *new* way, certainly is going to work. Nice try Einstein. If only the world would give you everything and treat you like the supreme ruler and intelligent singularity you know you are.
Slashdot Mirror
So is the garbage collection mechanism of Java: memory is a shared resource.
The OS facilitates sharing of *system* memory between and among applications. The GC system in Java manages *application* memory for a single instance of an executing Java application. Invalid comparison. While the OS prevents resource conflicts, the GC of Java speculatively allocates/releases memory in an attempt to alleviate programmers of the task.
So is Swing: the screen is a shared resource.
The "screen" is either a hardware device, as in the graphics card and attached monitor, or a virtual facsimile of the same. At least on Linux, Swing is merely an API that interfaces with X11 for a single application instance ... it is X11/Card Driver/OS ( and perhaps soon Wayland ) which is responsible for the sharing and resource conflicts of accessing the real/virtual screen device by multiple application instances. Another invalid comparison.
Operating systems are also training wheels since they provide a layer between the hardware and the programmer.
I would say the operating systems job is to facilitate access to devices and resources that are shared by multiple applications. In this regard, is it not so much a set of training wheels, as it is an arbiter of system resources.
Yes, but the executive in your example resigned voluntarily out of a sense of honor and duty. He wasn't lynched en mass because the door man cheated on his witholding. ;)
I would ban day trading, and I will tell you why. It's that mentality for short gains that has lead to our economic collapse. If it was illegal from the start to securitize mortgages, or that it would require very very well documented and physical transfers of the mortgage note from one owner to the other, we would not be in this situation.
You seem to also have the mentality for "short gains" in the terms of a "quick fix" by banning day trading. It *was* illegal to securitize mortgages, but then Barnie Frank and his friends in congress repealed the Glass-Stegal act and failed to monitor the implications of allowing the US banking system more degrees of freedom. They did this because everyone thought it was a great idea that "people who can't afford a home should be able to buy a home."
It was the intense building greed of Wall Street that made the packaging and reselling of mortgage backed securities go faster and faster and faster, and eventually, the demand was so great that loans were originated that anybody with a brain new could not be repaid and would default within 4 years.
Subprime? Subprime my ass. Guaranteed 99.99% Loss Financial Loans is what I would have called them at the end.
Everyone, having the benefit of hindsight, has various different theories for what went wrong. However, at the time, everything *seemed* to be great and very very few people saw it comming. The people who did see it comming, were not in a position to prevent it. Again, this is a failure of government to monitor the industry. We have known for 100's of not 1,000's of years, that capitalism, unregulated, unmonitored, unwatched, and unaccountable, will run amuck in the pursuit of profit. This is why we don't have pure capitalism. We have regulated capitalism, and when the regulators fail, the outcome is not good.
The need to trade faster and faster only encourages this bullshit, and I don't buy for one second, that it is beneficial to the stock market by blah blah blah economist reasoning inserted here.
"The need to trade faster and faster" as you put it, is not the reason the term "daytrading" exists. The fundamental motivation today, for purchasing a stock and selling it before the close of the day, is the limited amount of leverage allowed when purchasing stocks. Due to the speculative excesses that allowed the Kennedy family to rise to power, while at the same time, causing the the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which in turn contributed to the Great Depression, margin rates on stocks have been limited to 2:1. By buying and selling within the same day, this leverage ratio can be raised to 4:1. See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Daytrading for an introduction of the practice. Pay special attention to the bits on the special rules surrounding "Pattern Day Traders."
It also introduces arbitrage . Do you think they are building a multi-billion dollar fiber optical trans-Atlantic cable to reduce latency for shits and giggles? No. It is so they can link the stock exchanges and game the system even more. It won't be Call of Duty packets going across that pipe, but it will be warfare.
There is nothing wrong, or negative, with arbitrage, and it is an important factor in price discovery and market liquidity. As for linking exchanges via fiber optic cable, this reduces the opportunities for arbitrage due to price mismatches. As for you calling it warfare, that would be like someone calling your exercise of emailing 1,000 copies of your resume to potential employers warfare.
Why is it that in a certain building in New York that colocation of a server costs 50-100x that of the going rate?
Why is that some people are trying to make microsecond trading and "stock exchange on a chip"?
It's called unfair advantages far worse than insider trading and it is
It would kill day trading for one, not that I mind that one bit.
And what exactly is wrong with daytrading ? For every transaction, there is a buyer who wants to purchase, and a seller who wants to sell. If that isn't a mutually beneficial transaction between two consenting parties with predefined and clear rules and an agreed upon price, then no such thing exists. Banning daytrading would be similar to banning the purchase of milk at a restaurant with the intent of selling it by the glass to customers.
Nail the executives and leave it at that.
Even the executives that didn't know anything ? If bribery and corruption are the problem, then the solution would be to punish the people responsible, which is not necessarily, all of the executives.
Well, if you're going to have realism, I guess you'd need all the other stuff that comes in a war: not just America's Army and the Taliban, but also the Red Cross. In fact, for a multiplayer game, some people could be Red Cross personnel. And it makes perfect sense to deduct points for illegal kills (i.e., after someone has already surrendered to you).
This is an excellent idea. An online multi-player game could allow people to open accounts, and volunteer to be a Red Cross worker in the virtual world for free. If they want to play the game as a different character, they could sign up for the service and pay a fee commensurate with the amount of damage their player with material possessions can incur, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting the Red Cross directly.
Perhaps in WebGL or some similar environment.
My original post was a somewhat tounge-in-cheek commentary on the economics of duality. My apologies if it upset you, or was perceived to somehow minimize the efforts of the Red Cross. It goes without saying, they are a necessary and important contribution to the well being of the inhabitants on planet Earth ... even if they don't like video games. ;)
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is an international humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million volunteers, members and staff worldwide[2]
According to Swiss law, the ICRC is defined as a private association. According to its statutes it consists of 15 to 25 Swiss-citizen members, which it coopts for a period of four years.
The 2009 budget of the ICRC amounts more than 1 billion Swiss Francs. Most of that money comes from the States, including Switzerland in its capacity as the depositary state of the Geneva Conventions, from national Red Cross societies, the signatory states of the Geneva Conventions, and from international organizations like the European Union. All payments to the ICRC are voluntary and are received as donations based on two types of appeals issued by the Committee: an annual Headquarters Appeal to cover its internal costs and Emergency Appeals for its individual missions.
Given that the majority of its funding comes from States ( as in Countries, that print fiat money from thin air, which is essentially a tax on the productive population ), and the majority of its 97 million workers are "volunteers," ... would you consider this to be a competitive enterprise, economically speaking, same as IBM or Microsoft ? I think not.
Now that I think about it more, perhaps their actions are a form of competition.
If they force battlefield game developers to insert Red Cross trucks and field hospitals, and care for the wounded, they will gain more exposure and influence and power. So they are competing ! W00t !
The funny thing about non-profit groups is that they don't exist in a competitive environment. When people hand you money, and you sit around all day deciding how to make everyone feel good, competitive behaviors seem foreign and wrong.
;)
When you live in the private sector, outside the bubble that non-profit organizations live in, competitive behaviors are a natural part of everyday life.
The reality is, that humans are animals, and compete with each other for resources, and it would be interesting to see what happens if the individuals in the non-profit non-performing bubble are left to their own devices to eat. The resulting mental conflict might cause them to self-implode.
They have a concept of Iran, but that's about it. If you're Iranian, you don't exist, in their heads, and so what happens to you *doesn't matter*.
This is pretty much true of any remote population. To the people of {A}, {B} is just a place name. To the people of {B}, {A} is just a place name. Lines in the sand and the flags we plant near them.
The difference between comedy and tragedy is ones proximity to the situation.
In this case, it's the fact that the USA Government is quite energetically condemning and demonizing the Iranian Government for doing something that said USA Government also does.
There is a degree of hypocrisy present in the actions of all governments. Society and the individual co-exist, yet, have conflicting motives, and laws / policies are the arbiter, but not the limit, of eithers actions.
The US and Iran do not have monopolies on hypocritical actions.
I'm no expert on earthquakes and tsunamis, but, if they have a general idea of locations of faults, or probabilities where earthquakes are highly likely to occur, the mathematics behind determining tsunami combinations might help them better evaluate the risk for any given location. If the old method of thinking or planning was to prepare for a single event, this could help them determine the probability of a merged wave.
Barely educated speculation on my part.
From now on, I will check with the both of you, before I intentionally fan one side of the flames or the other. I see my mistake now, and it was quite foolish of me to attempt to remove some of the fuel.
The ghost of Richard Nixon will turn up in many strange places...
Yeah, I hate it when that happens.
So in your opinion, it's perfectly alright for intelligent rational thinking individuals to embrace propaganda and repeat it based on their individual preference for the outcome of a particular event, as opposed to, seeking the truth behind an event, such that everyone may learn from it ?
Given that all governments, some of the time, tell lies and use the tactic of propaganda, how can one arbitrarily choose which government is telling the truth 100% and the other 0% ?
The story of the link you pasted, has the US admitting to losing a drone near the Afghanistan border. This does not equate to an admission that a drone was shot down after violating Iranian airspace, unless the person reading the story has an extreme emotional bias.
From all accounts thus far, it seems likely 1) the US has lost a drone and 2) the Iranian authorities probably have it. That's it.
The story will continue to unfold, and any admissions from either side, will most likely be designed to benefit the side from which they originate. Choosing 1 side of the story as absolute fact, and the other as absolute falsehood, ignores the larger truth of the issue and the realities of politics.
1953 was 58 years ago. What are the odds the people in office in 1953 are still in office and that nothing has changed since ?
A spy plane gets shot down over their airspace ...
There is no evidence of this.
the company I work for keeps the phones ringing, cube noise up, and enough meetings that I'm lucky to write a few lines. Some days go by without any objective measure of success.
Remember all those people in your COBOL class that had perplexed and confused looks on their faces, and were only there because they required the class as part of their MBA coursework ? Those people are your managers, and their cost-benefit analysis said if they stuffed you at a tiny desk in the phone room, they could save $100 on floor space and cubicle walls.
;)
Go talk to some of them about a productive engineering environment. I'd lay odds the same perplexed look re-appears.
then you're not the kind of user they want - you will just cost them bandwidth without helping them make money from bundled crap.
This could indeed be the case. The issue I have with wrapping the download, is that its somewhat of a below the table tactic. I, the user, want a file. I don't want spyware or adware installed, even if I'm being made aware of it, which I suspect most users aren't being made aware of it. ( Sure, its probably buried somewhere in fine print legalize, but thats not awareness, thats legal liability dismissal / transfer.)
What I wouldn't mind, is if download.com showed advertisements, and used the revenue to pay for the service. Also, I wouldn't mind some small delay, or lower transfer cap, unless I pay $10 ( or some nominal reasonable fee ) for a year of enhanced access.
The 2 options I mentioned, because, as a consumer, I am aware of them, and they aren't making changes to my system. I have the opportunity to make an informed decision and choice, as opposed to, wrapping the downloads without making me aware of them, thereby, preventing me from making an informed choice.
Commerce and transactions can be mutually beneficial and efficient, if the parties involved are able to make informed choices about their costs and benefits. When parties are denied informed choice, or tactics are used that disguise the complete nature of the transaction, I feel the result is counter productive for society as a whole, as now I have the headache and wasted time of trying to remove the changes the wrapper made.
The reason you go to the well known sites is because there's (you'd hope) less chance of them containing malware/trojans/etc.
Definitely. I would think download.com is going to suffer some degree of backlash and lost users from this. I know I wouldn't use a site that wrapped downloads, altered my local settings, etc.
There are a few reasons software repositories are popular that I can think of off the top of my head.
Much like an "app store" for smart phone apps, its convenient to have 1 place to go to look for an app, when you have general requirements or a specific type of app in mind, and not so much a specific app.
People are creatures of habit, and once they learn how to use the download.com ( or some other site like freshmeat.net ) interface, they just return to it out of habit, and the fact that they already know how to search and navigate the site.
As for why developers use sites like this, the visibility factor comes into play. Since the repositories have a returning user base, the app becomes that much more visible, as opposed to getting lost in search engine results.
Another incentive for small developers, is the bandwidth. They dont have to manage the large amount of bandwidth required to deliver apps, the repository does this. They also don't have to pay for a commercial ISP account that allows them to run servers, as most residential account agreements forbid the operation of servers ( although only in agreement, not necessarily technically prevented. )
If I was a US taxpayer I would be seriously concerned that it is viewed as acceptable to provoke yet another gulf state in this way.
My stance for this entire thread, right up until the US released a report claiming to have lost a drone, is that the US wouldn't be so foolish as to provoke Iran intentionally by flying drones into their airspace intentionally for no net gain.
It's unfortunate, regardless of the reasons or motivations behind why it happened. I'm not personally choosing sides, or betting on horses. Nor do I have any solutions on how to convince the world community to stop blaming their own problems on someone else.
You talk of products and of counterfeiting. You are once again conflating the material with the immaterial.
Material possessions, are protected by law, from theft, as copyrighted intellectual property, is protected by law, from piracy. There is no conflation. These two different types of property have in common the protection of law, although one has physical form while the other does not.
Although the term "product" does apply to a movie, there are better terms, such as "data".
Better [for you] in this case, because it allows you to justify the transgressions you commit when depriving the creators of the products you pirate compensation. Data, as in, formless, random, data, or data as in publicly available data, are not subject to copyright. Collections of data, including public data such as a phone book or other works of reference, are in fact subject to copyright.
You speak of "allowing", as if the default is that copying is hard,
No, I speak of allowing, as in, the creator of the original work has granted you rights for its use, or not. While you are busy getting stoned and redefining the terms used throughout the legal system to justify your own selfish behavior, you might some day get lucky and stumble upon the fact that the rules of the system are designed to protect productive behavior and the means of production, as opposed to, shifting the balance of protections to consumers such as yourself, which would result in wasted consumption of resources.
and as if some human agency has the power to grant people the ability to make copies
That would be the lawful owner of the original work. Just as you may grant someone use of the computer that you incurred an expense to acquire, the creators of original works incur expenses and have lawful protections concerning their ability to recoup said creation expenses. Once again, the rules are designed to promote and protect production, and minimize consumption for consumption sake.
Nor do you know what effect it all has on jobs.
If a person such as your self, sitting at home, smoking weed, plays video games all day, you wont be out in the world creating products, performing services, operating a business, and creating jobs. Im well aware of the destructive affects of the illegal behavior you advocate, regardless of your failed attempt to redefine all the terms for selfish purposes.
For all you know, your way would kill jobs, not create them.
It's not "my" way. Oopsy, I believe some transference is occurring here.
Your way certainly would hurt the economy
So the last 200 years of successful policy and data, because you don't agree with it, is completely invalid, because your *new* way, certainly is going to work. Nice try Einstein. If only the world would give you everything and treat you like the supreme ruler and intelligent singularity you know you are.