Lots and lots of fuel if you're going to make a safe landing at that speed. By the time you add in all the extra space needed for all of that fuel, gyros to keep you properly oriented and enough shielding to protect you on the way down, you have a landing boat, not a suit.
What speed?
Terminal velocity for something person-shaped is about 120mph. You'll build up some higher speed when you're higher in the atmosphere, but you'll bleed most of it in the low atmosphere. You're not having to stop a ton of weight from more than a couple hundred miles an hour.
Vaporware is exactly what this is. The red bull team spent years designing and prepping for their suit, and it was a one off. These guys are going to have a suit production ready by 2016? Hogwash.
Well, to be fair, it was mostly an issue of the capsule, money and not working full time on it. Space suits aren't rocket science. At 60 miles up, starting at a dead stop, you're not going to deal with things like friction heating to any great extent. You just need a pressure suit. That's not the interesting part of what Red Bull did, or what these folks are dong.
Now, if they were going full on Halo ODST style "jump from low orbit", where they're going 15k mph to start... that's a whole different kind of requirements.
Well, If they usually pay recruiters, I don't see anything wrong with this. When my friend bought his last house, he didn't use a real estate agent. So very early in the negotiations, he basically dropped the price of the house by 2.5%, because the commission on a house is usually 5% split between the agent of the seller and the buyer, and it's paid by the seller. If they don't have to pay that half of the commission to the other real estate agent, it should be subtracted from the price of the house. Same thing goes here. If the company usually pays $10,000 to a recruiter, and you manage to find the company yourself, the company should give you a $10,000 signing bonus.
Interesting your friend was able to do that -- generally its a 5% commission, which the seller's agent splits with the buyer's agent. Usually if there is no buyers agent, the seller's agent keeps all of it. (Which is why, as your friend did, its best to push on it... its possible the seller in that case did drop the price 2.5% and still got stuck paying their agent the 5%!)
While you may have been joking, that was not at all uncommon during the dot com boom. You'd basically negotiate the recruiter's fees into the signing bonus and grab $60-$80k in signing bonuses. If you were a particularly shrewd negotiator, you'd get 1/3 up front, the second 1/3 after 90 days or something and the rest at 6 months.
It is an always connected device, unless they have come up with a way for the cloud thing to work without an internet connection.
Of course this also means that if you lose your internet connection, then you have 1/4 the processing power to run your game.
Not sure if your goal was trolling, or if you legitimately hadn't read up on it, but Microsoft stated clearly that, while games *could* require full-time Internet, the intent is for the cloud resources to be used for latency-insensitive augmentation of the game, so they'll work fine offline. But that's true of games already. Some require being online while playing, some work better while online (like Borderlands 2), and some don't care.
All this is saying is they're going to scale their regional Azure datacenters at 3x the rate of Xboxes being sold.
Facts aren't really the goal of Microsoft-related discussions on Slashdot, though.
So you're saying you were making a comparison that's irrelevant to Microsoft's system of graft for their next console, and just wasting everyone's time?
No, I'm saying the discussion is ignorant trolling. You use the word graft, which is not accurate. You make claims based on things you have quite literally zero information on. Your anti-MS bias shines though. If you look up the definition of graft, you'll see that you're either mistaken about what it means, or just being ignorant for the purposes of trolling.
You have absolutely no basis for assuming that Microsoft will charge *anything* for a person-to-person transfer of a license. You have third party information from a second hand source claiming that a commercial transfer will incur a fee. If that's true (and, Microsoft would be moronic for it not to be true), that wouldn't be graft -- its their systems the licenses are maintained in, their system that needs to ensure the security on that transfer. The "graft", if there is any, comes from places like GameStop giving $5 in trade for a game they'll turn around and charge $20 for. If Microsoft tacks a buck or two onto that, are you angry that the charitable GameStop is going to lose a couple bucks? If you put it on your credit card, they're losing a buck, too. Are you mad about that?
As of this moment, you have absolutely no basis for assuming there's any negative impact to anyone on the basis of the changes, except for used game *resellers*. And, personally, I don't give two shits about GameStop and their long history of screwing gamers and independent resellers. A stock collapse couldn't happen to a more deserving company. And if I get the ability to play any of my games without getting up and digging out a disc? Win-win, as far as I'm concerned.
You've already failed at project of that size if you're letting a developer be "alone for a week to come up with something good". A developer's job, in a project like that, isn't to come up with something good. Their job is to implement a specific piece of functionality in the specific way defined by the people whose job is to have the broader view of the project.
You're going to have a hard time hiring and retaining decent developers with that kind of approach.
If I'm running a billion dollar engineering project, the engineers who can't work with the team or think -- with their extremely limited view of the project -- that they know what needs to be done aren't people I'd want on the project anyway. I might have a hard time hiring and retaining, but I'd have an easy time firing. Been there, done that. Cowboys are toxic to large scale engineering.
Just as you don't want a steel worker deciding a beam should be attached differently when you're building a skyscraper because he thinks he knows better than the architect who designed the building and did the stress analysis, you don't want a programmer thinking that way. Both are people you *do not* want working on the project. And, if they're unhappy and leave -- better for it. No hit to unemployment insurance rates that way.
What you do is try to making something good enough for everyone.
Right, which is why Mercedes should stop making luxury cars and church out Honda Civic knockoffs. Because you always want to hit the lowest common denominator and no higher.
Or, try for different market segments and be a big fish in a small pond.
That's a bad example -- Mercedes is not a luxury brand in much of the world. Their revenue comes from everything from commercial trucks, to small econo-boxes, to more traditional MB American-style luxury.
They wouldn't exist, in 2013, as an independent company that size making limited market cars. That's why virtually all limited market manufacturers are no longer independent. Lamborghini? Part of Audi. Porsche? Volkswagen. Ferrari? Owned by Fiat. Hell, Porsche and Lamborghini vehicles are basically just rebadged versions of their corporate owner's vehicles today, with the number of parts they take from the corporate parts bin.
Even in traditionally "snooty" fields like high fashion, you're seeing designers pushing their brand into the mass market.
Big fish in a small pond doesn't work in the 21st century global economy. If a company if big enough for you to know about, its too big to succeed small market.
Remember, the customer isn't the users that don't pay anything to use facebook. The customer is facebook itself and the companies that use it for advertising. From that perspective, it seems to work incredibly well.
Actually, it hasn't. Their stock is in the toilet. Their ad revenue is stagnant because the introduction of ads has done nothing but drive people away.
Facebook is a textbook example of the fundamental downside of rapid-paced, planning-free development.
Thanks for the usual puppeting insight Lord Mike. Crazy how most people who buy consoles aren't in fact interested in playing casual time wasters like the mobile crowd.
Except, of course, the usage statistics on them show the exact opposite. The "hardcore" gamer market isn't big enough for any of the three big console makers to give them much attention. When you've got 10 or 50 casual players for every "hardcore", the investment just isn't warranted. What you do is try to making something good enough for everyone. You'll lose the low end to the tablets and the high end, perhaps, to PC gaming. But you'll make an order of magnitude more revenue.
Also, What about longevity, if the thing has to phone home, what happens in 20 year when my kids want to mess around with an xbox one they got for $10 at the garage sale next door? long after all the servers are shut down, hell, for all we know, ms and sony may not even exist at that point! what then I ask?!?!
I can still fire up the Playstation (the first one had no numbers after the name kids) and play gran tourismo (again, before the numbers:) ) just like I did in grade school, but kids who get xbox one or PS3 or whatever may not have that same right.
Well, thankfully for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft -- all of which don't meet your criteria -- hundreds of millions of people don't care about those things, and as a result, none of the three care in the least about your opinion.
At least in 2013, there are all the Kickstarter consoles you can look to, I suppose.
Every gamer I know who has a Wii played Wii Sports to death, maybe played a couple other games on there, and then has let it collect dust. Every non-gamer I know who bought one only uses it as a Netflix box. The Wii may have been a financial success for Nintendo, but it was a dud of a console as far as entertainment value goes.
I find it useful, to this day. The blinking blue lights around the DVD slot keep me from tripping over things when I come down here in the middle of the night.
No idea WTF the blue blinking means, or how to make it stop. Haven't turned it on in years, but at least I can avoid stomping down on a cat toy at 2am.
All those "classic" 8-bit games -- Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Archon -- became classics not because of the awesome graphics they packed into a ROM space too small for a fucking To Do list for your mother these days but because of the gameplay. Compare and contrast with Clickfest Diablo 3.
Actually, for what its worth, we were pretty well blown away when those games were being released -- because the graphics WERE awesome. Pac Man? Holy shit color and music! Donkey Kong? Like ten things moving on the screen at once!
And the games turning into classics has more to do with nostalgia and marketing -- the games you know about from that era are the games that were marketed well, and showed up in every pizza place and bar. There were hundreds of games with the identical gameplay -- many of them better. The winner was the one that got mindshare from casual video game players, not the ones with the best gameplay. Pac Man is the Angry Birds of 1980 -- it was the game that drunk people who couldn't follow a simple game could play just long enough to not be pissed about losing their quarter.
Cowboy programming is for small companies. (And, for what its worth, I've worked directly with many hundreds of engineers in the last couple of decades, and the happiest engineers are the ones who recognize which kind of project they like to work on, and avoids working on the other.)
Small companies like Facebook?
Have you used the software they produce?
If you think that is a good example of meeting the customer's desires in a reliable way that doesn't cause implementation churn... well, you just made my point.
...since there is daily accountability and you're working on smaller pieces.
So that means it's impossible to do anything big or that requires extended planning? Sometimes a developer needs to be left alone for a week to come up with something good. Regimenting the process into days and forcing a daily bullshit update is just abusive to the creative process.
You've already failed at project of that size if you're letting a developer be "alone for a week to come up with something good". A developer's job, in a project like that, isn't to come up with something good. Their job is to implement a specific piece of functionality in the specific way defined by the people whose job is to have the broader view of the project.
Some developers may not like working in that environment, and they shouldn't be working on a project that size. Cowboy programming is for small companies. (And, for what its worth, I've worked directly with many hundreds of engineers in the last couple of decades, and the happiest engineers are the ones who recognize which kind of project they like to work on, and avoids working on the other.)
Pretty much this exactly. Also, it's tough to get programmers and managers who have never worked in an Agile environment to buy into it. My company started using it 4 years ago and we still have a few holdouts despite the obvious benefits in both productivity, cost and simply a better work environment for everyone. Hell, I think the best part about the Agile process is those one or two guys on a piece of a project that never seem to do anything and could end up causing drama simply doesn't happen in a proper Agile setup since there is daily accountability and you're working on smaller pieces.
"Waterfall" -- i.e., the "old fashioned" way of doing things -- does one thing very well that Agile loses. And that thing is something that was understood for a century of large project management planning. Waterfall ensures quality with a team of varying abilities, or large teams. Agile ensures predictable delivery, but quality is very dependent on the individual abilities of the team members.
Anyone who has done large projects would know immediately that you don't do a billion dollar project with a pure Agile methodology. You simply can't get enough people who are strong enough to deliver a quality output without a very high amount of formal planning and progress gates.
The most successful large (multi-hundred engineer) projects I've seen in the last five years tend to use waterfall for the overall project, but encourage teams to run their parts of the work in an agile manner. You get the visibility into progress that way, but the formality of process to ensure you're really building the cohesive system right.
Because they and the publishers get a cut of something they have no moral (and quite possibly no legal) right to get a cut of.
Your morals are not my morals.
As a content producer, as far as I'm concerned my right to get paid for my work trumps your right to resell something. I don't care if I don't get paid for the media -- I didn't make the media. I do care if the thing I made -- the experience of the game or application -- is something you get without compensating me.
*My* morals say that you, if you play a game having not paid for it, are a thief. You stole the experience from the person who created the game. Simple as that.
Slashdot Mirror
100km would not be doable with a balloon in the foreseeable future. The altitude record for an ultrathin-film _unmanned_ balloon is around 53km: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_altitude_record
Spacediving will require some form of suborbital rocket vehicle, as seen in this CG short by Kyle Botha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrlIB1rzlZs
I'll just put this out there: More than happy to pay to do that. I don't care about the other 50km. Baby steps.
Jet boots need fuel..
Lots and lots of fuel if you're going to make a safe landing at that speed. By the time you add in all the extra space needed for all of that fuel, gyros to keep you properly oriented and enough shielding to protect you on the way down, you have a landing boat, not a suit.
What speed?
Terminal velocity for something person-shaped is about 120mph. You'll build up some higher speed when you're higher in the atmosphere, but you'll bleed most of it in the low atmosphere. You're not having to stop a ton of weight from more than a couple hundred miles an hour.
Vaporware is exactly what this is. The red bull team spent years designing and prepping for their suit, and it was a one off. These guys are going to have a suit production ready by 2016? Hogwash.
Well, to be fair, it was mostly an issue of the capsule, money and not working full time on it. Space suits aren't rocket science. At 60 miles up, starting at a dead stop, you're not going to deal with things like friction heating to any great extent. You just need a pressure suit. That's not the interesting part of what Red Bull did, or what these folks are dong.
Now, if they were going full on Halo ODST style "jump from low orbit", where they're going 15k mph to start... that's a whole different kind of requirements.
Well, If they usually pay recruiters, I don't see anything wrong with this. When my friend bought his last house, he didn't use a real estate agent. So very early in the negotiations, he basically dropped the price of the house by 2.5%, because the commission on a house is usually 5% split between the agent of the seller and the buyer, and it's paid by the seller. If they don't have to pay that half of the commission to the other real estate agent, it should be subtracted from the price of the house. Same thing goes here. If the company usually pays $10,000 to a recruiter, and you manage to find the company yourself, the company should give you a $10,000 signing bonus.
Interesting your friend was able to do that -- generally its a 5% commission, which the seller's agent splits with the buyer's agent. Usually if there is no buyers agent, the seller's agent keeps all of it. (Which is why, as your friend did, its best to push on it... its possible the seller in that case did drop the price 2.5% and still got stuck paying their agent the 5%!)
Can I get $30k *and* the job?
While you may have been joking, that was not at all uncommon during the dot com boom. You'd basically negotiate the recruiter's fees into the signing bonus and grab $60-$80k in signing bonuses. If you were a particularly shrewd negotiator, you'd get 1/3 up front, the second 1/3 after 90 days or something and the rest at 6 months.
Those were the days ...
If he is too young to receive money for finding a bug, is he also too young to be criminally prosecuted for exploiting a bug ?
No, he's too young to enter into a contract to receive money for finding a bug.
Don't like it, change US contract law.
So you wouldn't pay the kid that found your lost dog the reward you promised?
This has nothing to do with contract law. Paypal could pay him any number of ways (ie via the parents or when he turns 18).
Sure, I would. But I'm not a multi-billion dollar business with a staff of lawyers on hand to keep me from doing things I shouldn't be doing.
If he is too young to receive money for finding a bug, is he also too young to be criminally prosecuted for exploiting a bug ?
No, he's too young to enter into a contract to receive money for finding a bug.
Don't like it, change US contract law.
Article summary should be re-written;
Console market isn't profitable because there are few games being made gamers want.
Fixed that. Seriously, Xbox one is being marketed not as a gaming console but a dvr.
Except that its:
a) Not being marketed at all yet
b) Explicitly described as not having DVR capabilities
So you're wrong on both counts. Guess you've got a case of the Tuesdays.
It is an always connected device, unless they have come up with a way for the cloud thing to work without an internet connection.
Of course this also means that if you lose your internet connection, then you have 1/4 the processing power to run your game.
Not sure if your goal was trolling, or if you legitimately hadn't read up on it, but Microsoft stated clearly that, while games *could* require full-time Internet, the intent is for the cloud resources to be used for latency-insensitive augmentation of the game, so they'll work fine offline. But that's true of games already. Some require being online while playing, some work better while online (like Borderlands 2), and some don't care.
All this is saying is they're going to scale their regional Azure datacenters at 3x the rate of Xboxes being sold.
Facts aren't really the goal of Microsoft-related discussions on Slashdot, though.
So you're saying you were making a comparison that's irrelevant to Microsoft's system of graft for their next console, and just wasting everyone's time?
No, I'm saying the discussion is ignorant trolling. You use the word graft, which is not accurate. You make claims based on things you have quite literally zero information on. Your anti-MS bias shines though. If you look up the definition of graft, you'll see that you're either mistaken about what it means, or just being ignorant for the purposes of trolling.
You have absolutely no basis for assuming that Microsoft will charge *anything* for a person-to-person transfer of a license. You have third party information from a second hand source claiming that a commercial transfer will incur a fee. If that's true (and, Microsoft would be moronic for it not to be true), that wouldn't be graft -- its their systems the licenses are maintained in, their system that needs to ensure the security on that transfer. The "graft", if there is any, comes from places like GameStop giving $5 in trade for a game they'll turn around and charge $20 for. If Microsoft tacks a buck or two onto that, are you angry that the charitable GameStop is going to lose a couple bucks? If you put it on your credit card, they're losing a buck, too. Are you mad about that?
As of this moment, you have absolutely no basis for assuming there's any negative impact to anyone on the basis of the changes, except for used game *resellers*. And, personally, I don't give two shits about GameStop and their long history of screwing gamers and independent resellers. A stock collapse couldn't happen to a more deserving company. And if I get the ability to play any of my games without getting up and digging out a disc? Win-win, as far as I'm concerned.
You've already failed at project of that size if you're letting a developer be "alone for a week to come up with something good". A developer's job, in a project like that, isn't to come up with something good. Their job is to implement a specific piece of functionality in the specific way defined by the people whose job is to have the broader view of the project.
You're going to have a hard time hiring and retaining decent developers with that kind of approach.
If I'm running a billion dollar engineering project, the engineers who can't work with the team or think -- with their extremely limited view of the project -- that they know what needs to be done aren't people I'd want on the project anyway. I might have a hard time hiring and retaining, but I'd have an easy time firing. Been there, done that. Cowboys are toxic to large scale engineering.
Just as you don't want a steel worker deciding a beam should be attached differently when you're building a skyscraper because he thinks he knows better than the architect who designed the building and did the stress analysis, you don't want a programmer thinking that way. Both are people you *do not* want working on the project. And, if they're unhappy and leave -- better for it. No hit to unemployment insurance rates that way.
Fixed that.
No, you didn't. Because Ticketmaster is one of the few places that isn't doing that yet, and the places that do don't charge a fee for it.
Right, which is why Mercedes should stop making luxury cars and church out Honda Civic knockoffs. Because you always want to hit the lowest common denominator and no higher.
Or, try for different market segments and be a big fish in a small pond.
That's a bad example -- Mercedes is not a luxury brand in much of the world. Their revenue comes from everything from commercial trucks, to small econo-boxes, to more traditional MB American-style luxury.
They wouldn't exist, in 2013, as an independent company that size making limited market cars. That's why virtually all limited market manufacturers are no longer independent. Lamborghini? Part of Audi. Porsche? Volkswagen. Ferrari? Owned by Fiat. Hell, Porsche and Lamborghini vehicles are basically just rebadged versions of their corporate owner's vehicles today, with the number of parts they take from the corporate parts bin.
Even in traditionally "snooty" fields like high fashion, you're seeing designers pushing their brand into the mass market.
Big fish in a small pond doesn't work in the 21st century global economy. If a company if big enough for you to know about, its too big to succeed small market.
Remember, the customer isn't the users that don't pay anything to use facebook. The customer is facebook itself and the companies that use it for advertising. From that perspective, it seems to work incredibly well.
Actually, it hasn't. Their stock is in the toilet. Their ad revenue is stagnant because the introduction of ads has done nothing but drive people away.
Facebook is a textbook example of the fundamental downside of rapid-paced, planning-free development.
Thanks for the usual puppeting insight Lord Mike. Crazy how most people who buy consoles aren't in fact interested in playing casual time wasters like the mobile crowd.
Except, of course, the usage statistics on them show the exact opposite. The "hardcore" gamer market isn't big enough for any of the three big console makers to give them much attention. When you've got 10 or 50 casual players for every "hardcore", the investment just isn't warranted. What you do is try to making something good enough for everyone. You'll lose the low end to the tablets and the high end, perhaps, to PC gaming. But you'll make an order of magnitude more revenue.
Considering that sales of the Wii U have *spiked* since the Xbox One announcement
Unfortunately for Nintendo, a thousand extra consoles sold would be a spike...
At the numbers that Nintendo is selling at, a sale price at Walmart would spike their sales.
Also, What about longevity, if the thing has to phone home, what happens in 20 year when my kids want to mess around with an xbox one they got for $10 at the garage sale next door? long after all the servers are shut down, hell, for all we know, ms and sony may not even exist at that point! what then I ask?!?!
I can still fire up the Playstation (the first one had no numbers after the name kids) and play gran tourismo (again, before the numbers :) ) just like I did in grade school, but kids who get xbox one or PS3 or whatever may not have that same right.
Well, thankfully for Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft -- all of which don't meet your criteria -- hundreds of millions of people don't care about those things, and as a result, none of the three care in the least about your opinion.
At least in 2013, there are all the Kickstarter consoles you can look to, I suppose.
Every gamer I know who has a Wii played Wii Sports to death, maybe played a couple other games on there, and then has let it collect dust. Every non-gamer I know who bought one only uses it as a Netflix box. The Wii may have been a financial success for Nintendo, but it was a dud of a console as far as entertainment value goes.
I find it useful, to this day. The blinking blue lights around the DVD slot keep me from tripping over things when I come down here in the middle of the night.
No idea WTF the blue blinking means, or how to make it stop. Haven't turned it on in years, but at least I can avoid stomping down on a cat toy at 2am.
All those "classic" 8-bit games -- Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Archon -- became classics not because of the awesome graphics they packed into a ROM space too small for a fucking To Do list for your mother these days but because of the gameplay. Compare and contrast with Clickfest Diablo 3.
Actually, for what its worth, we were pretty well blown away when those games were being released -- because the graphics WERE awesome. Pac Man? Holy shit color and music! Donkey Kong? Like ten things moving on the screen at once!
And the games turning into classics has more to do with nostalgia and marketing -- the games you know about from that era are the games that were marketed well, and showed up in every pizza place and bar. There were hundreds of games with the identical gameplay -- many of them better. The winner was the one that got mindshare from casual video game players, not the ones with the best gameplay. Pac Man is the Angry Birds of 1980 -- it was the game that drunk people who couldn't follow a simple game could play just long enough to not be pissed about losing their quarter.
Cowboy programming is for small companies. (And, for what its worth, I've worked directly with many hundreds of engineers in the last couple of decades, and the happiest engineers are the ones who recognize which kind of project they like to work on, and avoids working on the other.)
Small companies like Facebook?
Have you used the software they produce?
If you think that is a good example of meeting the customer's desires in a reliable way that doesn't cause implementation churn ... well, you just made my point.
...since there is daily accountability and you're working on smaller pieces.
So that means it's impossible to do anything big or that requires extended planning? Sometimes a developer needs to be left alone for a week to come up with something good. Regimenting the process into days and forcing a daily bullshit update is just abusive to the creative process.
You've already failed at project of that size if you're letting a developer be "alone for a week to come up with something good". A developer's job, in a project like that, isn't to come up with something good. Their job is to implement a specific piece of functionality in the specific way defined by the people whose job is to have the broader view of the project.
Some developers may not like working in that environment, and they shouldn't be working on a project that size. Cowboy programming is for small companies. (And, for what its worth, I've worked directly with many hundreds of engineers in the last couple of decades, and the happiest engineers are the ones who recognize which kind of project they like to work on, and avoids working on the other.)
Pretty much this exactly. Also, it's tough to get programmers and managers who have never worked in an Agile environment to buy into it. My company started using it 4 years ago and we still have a few holdouts despite the obvious benefits in both productivity, cost and simply a better work environment for everyone. Hell, I think the best part about the Agile process is those one or two guys on a piece of a project that never seem to do anything and could end up causing drama simply doesn't happen in a proper Agile setup since there is daily accountability and you're working on smaller pieces.
"Waterfall" -- i.e., the "old fashioned" way of doing things -- does one thing very well that Agile loses. And that thing is something that was understood for a century of large project management planning. Waterfall ensures quality with a team of varying abilities, or large teams. Agile ensures predictable delivery, but quality is very dependent on the individual abilities of the team members.
Anyone who has done large projects would know immediately that you don't do a billion dollar project with a pure Agile methodology. You simply can't get enough people who are strong enough to deliver a quality output without a very high amount of formal planning and progress gates.
The most successful large (multi-hundred engineer) projects I've seen in the last five years tend to use waterfall for the overall project, but encourage teams to run their parts of the work in an agile manner. You get the visibility into progress that way, but the formality of process to ensure you're really building the cohesive system right.
So if they want to arrest people for having mad ramblings they could start with anyone possessing almost any religious text.
Now we're tallkin'.
Sad, really.
This isn't news for nerds, this is extreme political pandering to drive ad revenue. This is editors being trolls to start a flame fest.
What the fuck is wrong with Slashdot these days? The forced polarization of the tech stories was bad enough.
Because they and the publishers get a cut of something they have no moral (and quite possibly no legal) right to get a cut of.
Your morals are not my morals.
As a content producer, as far as I'm concerned my right to get paid for my work trumps your right to resell something. I don't care if I don't get paid for the media -- I didn't make the media. I do care if the thing I made -- the experience of the game or application -- is something you get without compensating me.
*My* morals say that you, if you play a game having not paid for it, are a thief. You stole the experience from the person who created the game. Simple as that.