In my Unix Operator days, I used to get these calls. Actually they turned out to be beneficial (to the OS world).... I got some of the users to upgrade to StartOffice/OpenOffice or even Linux.... at which point, when they came to you and asked you for help, you picked one of these from the list and shouted it at them:
Read the @#()*@ Manual
You've got the source, get coding!
Search for it on Google, I've got better things to do
Neither P, S, nor Body waves travel at the speed of sound. Their speed depends upon the medium; remember that liquid mediums do not transmit waves as fast as solid ones; liquid mediums also do not transmit shear waves. You can compute the speed of compressional waves with the formula V=sqrt((k+.75mu)/rho), where mu is the rigidity and k is the bulk modulus.
Air is typically 330 m/s at sea level whereas Granite is around 5k-7k m/s.
The values you've given are the speed of sound in air and rock.
Yes, they do travel at the speed of sound. Why? Because that's the speed at which a wave travels through a medium if the wave isn't light.
You probably meant "they don't travel at the speed of sound in air"
There are MANY other causes (insert ANY anti-war/hunger/etc... effort here) that are far more worthy of the kind of attention that this TV SHOW is garnering.
Yet you're wasting your time posting on slashdot instead of supporting those far more worthy causes.
We have laws in this country which allow prior restraint of publication for materials which a company claims it has a copyright for. The government is building a database of information about you, run by a convicted felon, in order to protect your "safety". The FBI confiscates the computers of your neighbors when the cable company accuses them of service theft. Habeas Corpus is suspended for U.S. citizens who are accused of 'terrorism', while the C.I.A. uses unmanned drones firing missiles to assassinate 'terrorists' that have been tried in no court of law. The country is run by a man who was elected purely by fraud, and the news media doesn't bother to report that in the 2002 elections (this month!) more than 100,000 legal ballots weren't counted in Florida (again!).
If you care so much about those things, start a campaign. Maybe take a few pages from the Save Farscape campaigns books and follow their lead.
Meanwhile, don't diss other people for putting their passion to good use. Is this as important as those other things? No. Does that give you the right to complain that people are wasting their time on it? No - it's their time, not yours.
That's the whole point of America. It's meant to be a free country -- which means We choose what We want to do.
managed to change the serial number and MAC address of the xbox. After the change they managed to get onto Xbox Live (with mod-chip disabled) with a previously banned xbox..."[bold my own]
This is just a general post, Zeebs -- sorry, but this was a good place to put it.
Wow. That's so difficult, especially as the MAC address is configurable in the XBOX LIVE! UI.
Ok, waitaminute. How much did you pay for Linux? Nothing? Ok, so your CD-RW diesn't work. Have you tried to write a driver for it? Have you offered to help pay for someone to develop a driver for it? Have you done anything other than whine that it still isn't supported?
Stop claiming that it's the best OS in the world, that everyone should use it, and that Microsoft sucks, and we'll stop claiming that it's crap.
Money talks! In different languages! Maybe it's as simple as giving away disks with GNU/Linux already on them, verses just saying it can be downloaded. Having the disk that can be used (by anyone) to perform an install, is a lot different than having to first download a distros ISO, and burn it to a CD.
I don't know what RMS did on his trip, he may have actually tried to give disks away...
The problem is...it's probably easier to take the hand of someone offering what appears to be the quick fix, rather than reach for the life vest that someone else tossed you.
The thing is, when you're neck deep in sewage, you don't care about a life vest. What you want is someone to pull you *out*.
That's the difference between the two philosophies. Most of the world works on short-term timescales.
Will anyone remember what you did, twenty years from now?
Which Quantum Redshift craps all over from a great height. QR is what Wipeout Fusion should have been. Which is why I traded WF a day after I got it. It looks like a PS1 game on my HDTV.
Blinx? I'd rather play me some Mario
So?
The Thing? It's on PS2 too
So what?
Rallisport ? I have WRC
Good for you. Rallisport is much better.
Burnout? I was playing Burnout 2 all last weekend
So what?
DOA3 - I have Tekken 4
And DOA3 still kicks Tekken's ass mightily.
Shenmue 2? I finished it on my Dreamcast a full year ago
Congratulations.
Spiderman? The PS2 has that too
But it doesn't have the extra levels.
You're left with Buffy, and to be honest, if we're talking must-own games, which we were; I'd rather have GTA: Vice City, Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider.
No, WE weren't talking about anything. BRock97 was the person who asked which must-own games were available for the xbox.
This is not meant as a flame either, but their games truly stink. Of course, I should have prefaced this with the fact I don't like sports games, but even those are available on all systems and not a one is an Xbox exclusive. Since Halo was release, I challenge you to show me a game that you would consider a must own game. PS2 has them in spades (GTA: Vice City, Final Fantasy, Jak and Daxter, Virtua Fighter 4, etc) and even Gamecube has a few (Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid, the Resident Evil series, etc).
Quantum Redshift. Blinx! The Time Sweeper The Thing Rallisport Burnout Dead Or Alive 3 Shenmue II Spiderman Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
IANAL, but natural processes (grass growing, wood decaying, penises becoming erect under proper stimulation) cannot affect a contract. In the case of the dancer, the man's denial of the lapdance was, in its own right, a verbal contract stating 'I will not pay you to dance naked in front of me'. Her dancing naked in front of him now cannot be charged for, under the terms of the previous verbal contract.
The thing is, lapdances aren't just dancing naked... they involve more direct stimulation:)
If you're at a strip club and you say "no thank you" to a lap dance but she performs anyway, you don't owe a thing because even though they performed a service for which you would normally expect payment, you expressly said you don't want a business relationship.
If you see a kid mowing your lawn and you wave to him (or otherwise prove you know he was doing it), you owe him money. By acknowledging that he was performing a service for which you would normally pay you agree to a business relationship./I.
But if you get an erection during the lap-dance, surely you're acknowledging that she's performing a service for which you would normally pay, nullifying the prior express denial of interest in a business relationship.
But I've said it before. Linux is now getting to the point that the clueless people who poorly run Windows boxes are now moving over to Linux.... and joining the clueless people who were already running Linux in droves.
Running Linux is not, and never has been, an IQ test. Patience test, perhaps. But it's not a measure of intelligence.
Think of it as how having a low Slashdot ID doesn't in any way make you 'cool'.
You're damn right I did. If by 'seti@home-like' you mean distributed computing. It was widely [redherring.com] reported [com.com] by many [theregister.co.uk].
Yes, I mean distributed computing.
And so what if it was widely reported? That doesn't make it realistic or any more possible than if it was only reported on www.iamaclown.com.
60 frames a second of graphics is what you should expect from a console. That's a new frame every 16ms.
It takes me 10ms just for a packet to get out of the building I work in. So there's no way of realistically doing distributed processing on a console system unless everyone's running 10Gbit fiber. Just won't happen. And then you're limited by the speed of light after that.
Streaming data, you say? Games are interactive. Only certain very specific classes of games would work like that.
And what happens if you don't want to leave your PS3 on all the time? Or everyone decides to play the games at once?
Answer: It's pie in the sky bullcrap. I'm not surprised that The Register swallowed it -- it's not like they know anything about technology at all.
UID 5k below you, at or around the kap since its introduction and well aware of Linux
Good for you. Here, have a doggy biscuit.
(I don't care about your UID's age -- it's not under 1000. And guess what? I've been at or around the kap since its introduction too!)
It was sarcasm.
It's not up to the job for most people and part of that is that there's an awful lot of software that people need that can't just be moved across to Linux and doesn't have a direct equivalent.
That's not what the most vocal Linux supporters on this site seem to claim all the time.
And now we see Sony moving fast to innovate in areas that Microsoft basically can't... namely, they've gone and asked IBM for a radically different kind of chip. MS is in no position to do this, as part of their whole pitch is the fact that it's a PC in a box, with MS's x86 programming tools
I bet you believed that story which said the PS3 was going to be a SETI@HOME-like system too.
If MS decide they want to do pretty much anything with Windows, I probably don't have a choice but to take it and live with it.
New here, aren't you?
You're on slashdot. This place is FULL of these things we call "Linux Users". Ask them about your non-Microsoft options -- although frankly, I'm surprised you haven't noticed these Linux Users yet, as they're everywhere here.
The whole reason for copyright protection is to prevent technology from 'stopping' people from writing/creating new works of art correct? To make sure that if someone wants to make the next matrix, seinfield, LOtR, mary kate and ashley olsen , brittiney spears, n'sync, or whatever, they will be compensated 'correctly' for their 'hard work'. Maybe you're right and these people deserve to be treated like gods for creating something so unique, so precious, so undenyably great that if you even think of going against their wills, and copying it, then you could be thrown in jail (yes, in jail where people who murder and rape also go). Or at least fined, because well you're stealing moneys from rock stars and that makes baby jesus cry.
With people like you arguing that we should be protecting the rights of the publishers (because they are the ones with the copyrights), it's no wonder that the Disney act was passed.
feh, I'm done arguing this topic. Maybe I'm talking to deaf ears.
I know I'm certainly talking to deaf ears. Or at least highly biased ones.
I did not say at any point that they should be treated like gods.
And yes, jail is where you will go. Why? Because it's where you go for breaking the law. Come up with a new punishment, and I'll be all for it.
And yes, publishers should be protected. Artists can assign their rights, and unfortunately, it's the rights that are protected, not the individual. Laws scale up -- badly, in some cases -- but they're written in a lot of cases to protect the individual, and are then applied across the board.
Otherwise you end up with a legal code that no-one can understand (we're getting there anyway), because you have to extrapolate the rules ad infinitum, detailing them for every single possible circumstance.
Including the circumstances that haven't yet been invented.
As for the BMW comment -- look, it wasn't a statement that they deserved that. It's rather that the work itself has innate value - even if it has value to no-one other than the author. And, by the way, it's not evil to profit from it -- today's non-utopian society means that you need money to get by - or to get cool stuff. It also means that depending on its value to *you* as a customer of that person, you can quite happily give them the finger and *not* buy it from them.
Supply and Demand isn't necessarily dictated by scarcity of resources to make new things; it can also be dictated by things that people want. If you want something, and I have that something, we can come to an agreement over it. That's supply and demand.
I really hate this victim culture we have here.
"Oh woe is me... I can't have my music... I can't have my movies... I can't have my X, my Y and my Z -- and I DESERVE THEM ALL!!!!".
Hang on while I pass out the Government Cheese.
Did you know that really poor people in the US typically have at least a car, basic cable, a telephone and two television sets?
In the UK, however, they have a roof over their head and some way of cooking and refrigerating food. No car. No cable. Possibly no television. No phone. End of story.
This country seems to be all about me me me without wanting to work for it these days.
you're still brain washed. Maybe someday you'll realize that when you copy information that you don't lose value, but rather value is created. Didn't anyone teach you about the magic penny? Next you're going to say that people shouldn't read books from the public library or something.
Digital information turns normal economics upside down, making what was scare now common. Since value is based on scarcity, it changes the way we must think about things.
If that's what you believe, then let's break it down to the kernel of your argument.
How does the information creator get paid for their work?
Yes, they deserve to have control over their work -- after all, it took time, effort and potentially money to create.
And yes, they need money - everyone needs to eat. And don't tell me that you don't want a flashy car or a nice house -- because there are some creature comforts that everyone wants.
Value is not based on scarcity *at all*. Value is based on the value it has *to the person who wants or needs it*.
Big difference.
If you copy a movie, and you wouldn't have gone to see it anyway, that's a bit of a problem. Why did you copy the movie? Obviously you must have wanted to see it. Therefore it has value. *bzzzt*.
If you didn't want to see it, you wouldn't have copied it.
Hey presto - welcome to the new not supply-and-demand based value system. Not to mention that the argument of 'it costs nothing to copy' ignores one crucial fact -- it may cost nothing to copy, but it does cost money to create. And that, in part, is what you're paying for.
CORRECTION: Is Cool. What do you think Planned Obsolescence is? Engineers designed fridges that can last for 200 years, but that would make jobs disappear - so jobs take priority and fridges are built to last 7 years nowadays.
Actually, the reason is that a 200 year fridge costs a hell of a lot more than a 7 year fridge, and people aren't willing to pay the higher premium.
Am I the only one who sees that? If you think that pirating a movie is just like stealing, then remember that NOT WATCHING IT is almost the same. There are plenty of 'free' sources of entertainment (public libraries, going outside, talking to people).
No, it's not 'almost the same'. It's completely different.
One act (pirating) is going against someone else's wishes, which just so happens to be backed up by copyright law, and is illegal.
The other act (not going to see the movie) is going against someone else's wishes, but there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.
The not so good movies might loose some of their marked if they are heavily pirated. If I'd downloaded Reign Of Fire before I went to see it at the cimema, I would probably have seen another movie instead. That way Hollywood would still get all its money, but I wouldn't feel ripped of. I can't afford to see all movies (I don't even have time for that), so there is no money *lost* if that was the way it happened.
There's no money lost if you see it in the theatre either -- IF you leave before the end. Just go out and ask for your money back.
They're typically very good about that in any theatre worth going to.
Of course, I'm not sure quite what you do about The Ninth Gate... has to be some method of recourse for a film that doesn't end properly.
Slashdot Mirror
At which point, you were disowned.
...then why doesn't the Earth whistle as it spins?
Two reasons:
1. It's in a vacuum. It may be whistling, but you just can't hear it because there's nothing to transmit the sound.
2. Would you feel like whistling if you'd just had a hole punched through you?
Simon
Neither P, S, nor Body waves travel at the speed of sound. Their speed depends upon the medium; remember that liquid mediums do not transmit waves as fast as solid ones; liquid mediums also do not transmit shear waves.
You can compute the speed of compressional waves with the formula V=sqrt((k+.75mu)/rho), where mu is the rigidity and k is the bulk modulus.
Air is typically 330 m/s at sea level whereas Granite is around 5k-7k m/s.
The values you've given are the speed of sound in air and rock.
Yes, they do travel at the speed of sound. Why? Because that's the speed at which a wave travels through a medium if the wave isn't light.
You probably meant "they don't travel at the speed of sound in air"
Simon
There are several reasons given, depending on who you ask and when. Among the big ones are
These are all the reasons given by SciFi.
They also have all been - to greater or lesser extents - debunked.
For example - too expensive? SG1's budget was increased for their 7th season, and is way more than that of Farscape.
($2.5MM for SG1 vs. $750K for Farscape, per episode)
Simon
There are MANY other causes (insert ANY anti-war/hunger/etc... effort here) that are far more worthy of the kind of attention that this TV SHOW is garnering.
Yet you're wasting your time posting on slashdot instead of supporting those far more worthy causes.
Don't you think that's a bit hypocritical?
We have laws in this country which allow prior restraint of publication for materials which a company claims it has a copyright for. The government is building a database of information about you, run by a convicted felon, in order to protect your "safety". The FBI confiscates the computers of your neighbors when the cable company accuses them of service theft. Habeas Corpus is suspended for U.S. citizens who are accused of 'terrorism', while the C.I.A. uses unmanned drones firing missiles to assassinate 'terrorists' that have been tried in no court of law. The country is run by a man who was elected purely by fraud, and the news media doesn't bother to report that in the 2002 elections (this month!) more than 100,000 legal ballots weren't counted in Florida (again!).
If you care so much about those things, start a campaign. Maybe take a few pages from the Save Farscape campaigns books and follow their lead.
Meanwhile, don't diss other people for putting their passion to good use. Is this as important as those other things? No. Does that give you the right to complain that people are wasting their time on it? No - it's their time, not yours.
That's the whole point of America. It's meant to be a free country -- which means We choose what We want to do.
This is just a general post, Zeebs -- sorry, but this was a good place to put it.
Wow. That's so difficult, especially as the MAC address is configurable in the XBOX LIVE! UI.
Simon
But hey, fuck you if you can't take a joke.
That'll get rid of all the cheaters, pirates and Linux users.
Hah!
Ok, waitaminute. How much did you pay for Linux? Nothing? Ok, so your CD-RW diesn't work. Have you tried to write a driver for it? Have you offered to help pay for someone to develop a driver for it? Have you done anything other than whine that it still isn't supported?
Stop claiming that it's the best OS in the world, that everyone should use it, and that Microsoft sucks, and we'll stop claiming that it's crap.
Is that a deal?
Money talks! In different languages!
Maybe it's as simple as giving away disks with GNU/Linux already on them, verses just saying it can be downloaded. Having the disk that can be used (by anyone) to perform an install, is a lot different than having to first download a distros ISO, and burn it to a CD.
I don't know what RMS did on his trip, he may have actually tried to give disks away...
The problem is...it's probably easier to take the hand of someone offering what appears to be the quick fix, rather than reach for the life vest that someone else tossed you.
The thing is, when you're neck deep in sewage, you don't care about a life vest. What you want is someone to pull you *out*.
That's the difference between the two philosophies. Most of the world works on short-term timescales.
Will anyone remember what you did, twenty years from now?
Simon
Quantum Redshift? I have Wipeout Fusion (PS2)
.
Which Quantum Redshift craps all over from a great height. QR is what Wipeout Fusion should have been. Which is why I traded WF a day after I got it. It looks like a PS1 game on my HDTV.
Blinx? I'd rather play me some Mario
So?
The Thing? It's on PS2 too
So what?
Rallisport ? I have WRC
Good for you. Rallisport is much better.
Burnout? I was playing Burnout 2 all last weekend
So what?
DOA3 - I have Tekken 4
And DOA3 still kicks Tekken's ass mightily.
Shenmue 2? I finished it on my Dreamcast a full year ago
Congratulations.
Spiderman? The PS2 has that too
But it doesn't have the extra levels.
You're left with Buffy, and to be honest, if we're talking must-own games, which we were; I'd rather have GTA: Vice City, Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider.
No, WE weren't talking about anything. BRock97 was the person who asked which must-own games were available for the xbox
Simon
This is not meant as a flame either, but their games truly stink. Of course, I should have prefaced this with the fact I don't like sports games, but even those are available on all systems and not a one is an Xbox exclusive. Since Halo was release, I challenge you to show me a game that you would consider a must own game. PS2 has them in spades (GTA: Vice City, Final Fantasy, Jak and Daxter, Virtua Fighter 4, etc) and even Gamecube has a few (Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid, the Resident Evil series, etc).
Quantum Redshift.
Blinx! The Time Sweeper
The Thing
Rallisport
Burnout
Dead Or Alive 3
Shenmue II
Spiderman
Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Simon
IANAL, but natural processes (grass growing, wood decaying, penises becoming erect under proper stimulation) cannot affect a contract. In the case of the dancer, the man's denial of the lapdance was, in its own right, a verbal contract stating 'I will not pay you to dance naked in front of me'. Her dancing naked in front of him now cannot be charged for, under the terms of the previous verbal contract.
:)
The thing is, lapdances aren't just dancing naked... they involve more direct stimulation
Simon
If you're at a strip club and you say "no thank you" to a lap dance but she performs anyway, you don't owe a thing because even though they performed a service for which you would normally expect payment, you expressly said you don't want a business relationship.
If you see a kid mowing your lawn and you wave to him (or otherwise prove you know he was doing it), you owe him money. By acknowledging that he was performing a service for which you would normally pay you agree to a business relationship./I.
But if you get an erection during the lap-dance, surely you're acknowledging that she's performing a service for which you would normally pay, nullifying the prior express denial of interest in a business relationship.
Simon
But I've said it before. Linux is now getting to the point that the clueless people who poorly run Windows boxes are now moving over to Linux. ... and joining the clueless people who were already running Linux in droves.
Running Linux is not, and never has been, an IQ test. Patience test, perhaps. But it's not a measure of intelligence.
Think of it as how having a low Slashdot ID doesn't in any way make you 'cool'.
You're damn right I did. If by 'seti@home-like' you mean distributed computing. It was widely [redherring.com] reported [com.com] by many [theregister.co.uk].
Yes, I mean distributed computing.
And so what if it was widely reported? That doesn't make it realistic or any more possible than if it was only reported on www.iamaclown.com.
60 frames a second of graphics is what you should expect from a console. That's a new frame every 16ms.
It takes me 10ms just for a packet to get out of the building I work in. So there's no way of realistically doing distributed processing on a console system unless everyone's running 10Gbit fiber. Just won't happen. And then you're limited by the speed of light after that.
Streaming data, you say? Games are interactive. Only certain very specific classes of games would work like that.
And what happens if you don't want to leave your PS3 on all the time? Or everyone decides to play the games at once?
Answer: It's pie in the sky bullcrap. I'm not surprised that The Register swallowed it -- it's not like they know anything about technology at all.
Simon
UID 5k below you, at or around the kap since its introduction and well aware of Linux
Good for you. Here, have a doggy biscuit.
(I don't care about your UID's age -- it's not under 1000. And guess what? I've been at or around the kap since its introduction too!)
It was sarcasm.
It's not up to the job for most people and part of that is that there's an awful lot of software that people need that can't just be moved across to Linux and doesn't have a direct equivalent.
That's not what the most vocal Linux supporters on this site seem to claim all the time.
Simon
And now we see Sony moving fast to innovate in areas that Microsoft basically can't... namely, they've gone and asked IBM for a radically different kind of chip. MS is in no position to do this, as part of their whole pitch is the fact that it's a PC in a box, with MS's x86 programming tools
I bet you believed that story which said the PS3 was going to be a SETI@HOME-like system too.
Simon
If MS decide they want to do pretty much anything with Windows, I probably don't have a choice but to take it and live with it.
New here, aren't you?
You're on slashdot. This place is FULL of these things we call "Linux Users". Ask them about your non-Microsoft options -- although frankly, I'm surprised you haven't noticed these Linux Users yet, as they're everywhere here.
Simon
The whole reason for copyright protection is to prevent technology from 'stopping' people from writing/creating new works of art correct? To make sure that if someone wants to make the next matrix, seinfield, LOtR, mary kate and ashley olsen , brittiney spears, n'sync, or whatever, they will be compensated 'correctly' for their 'hard work'. Maybe you're right and these people deserve to be treated like gods for creating something so unique, so precious, so undenyably great that if you even think of going against their wills, and copying it, then you could be thrown in jail (yes, in jail where people who murder and rape also go). Or at least fined, because well you're stealing moneys from rock stars and that makes baby jesus cry.
With people like you arguing that we should be protecting the rights of the publishers (because they are the ones with the copyrights), it's no wonder that the Disney act was passed.
feh, I'm done arguing this topic. Maybe I'm talking to deaf ears.
I know I'm certainly talking to deaf ears. Or at least highly biased ones.
I did not say at any point that they should be treated like gods.
And yes, jail is where you will go. Why? Because it's where you go for breaking the law. Come up with a new punishment, and I'll be all for it.
And yes, publishers should be protected. Artists can assign their rights, and unfortunately, it's the rights that are protected, not the individual. Laws scale up -- badly, in some cases -- but they're written in a lot of cases to protect the individual, and are then applied across the board.
Otherwise you end up with a legal code that no-one can understand (we're getting there anyway), because you have to extrapolate the rules ad infinitum, detailing them for every single possible circumstance.
Including the circumstances that haven't yet been invented.
As for the BMW comment -- look, it wasn't a statement that they deserved that. It's rather that the work itself has innate value - even if it has value to no-one other than the author. And, by the way, it's not evil to profit from it -- today's non-utopian society means that you need money to get by - or to get cool stuff. It also means that depending on its value to *you* as a customer of that person, you can quite happily give them the finger and *not* buy it from them.
Supply and Demand isn't necessarily dictated by scarcity of resources to make new things; it can also be dictated by things that people want. If you want something, and I have that something, we can come to an agreement over it. That's supply and demand.
I really hate this victim culture we have here.
"Oh woe is me... I can't have my music... I can't have my movies... I can't have my X, my Y and my Z -- and I DESERVE THEM ALL!!!!".
Hang on while I pass out the Government Cheese.
Did you know that really poor people in the US typically have at least a car, basic cable, a telephone and two television sets?
In the UK, however, they have a roof over their head and some way of cooking and refrigerating food. No car. No cable. Possibly no television. No phone. End of story.
This country seems to be all about me me me without wanting to work for it these days.
you're still brain washed. Maybe someday you'll realize that when you copy information that you don't lose value, but rather value is created. Didn't anyone teach you about the magic penny? Next you're going to say that people shouldn't read books from the public library or something.
Digital information turns normal economics upside down, making what was scare now common. Since value is based on scarcity, it changes the way we must think about things.
If that's what you believe, then let's break it down to the kernel of your argument.
How does the information creator get paid for their work?
Yes, they deserve to have control over their work -- after all, it took time, effort and potentially money to create.
And yes, they need money - everyone needs to eat. And don't tell me that you don't want a flashy car or a nice house -- because there are some creature comforts that everyone wants.
Value is not based on scarcity *at all*. Value is based on the value it has *to the person who wants or needs it*.
Big difference.
If you copy a movie, and you wouldn't have gone to see it anyway, that's a bit of a problem. Why did you copy the movie? Obviously you must have wanted to see it. Therefore it has value. *bzzzt*.
If you didn't want to see it, you wouldn't have copied it.
Hey presto - welcome to the new not supply-and-demand based value system. Not to mention that the argument of 'it costs nothing to copy' ignores one crucial fact -- it may cost nothing to copy, but it does cost money to create. And that, in part, is what you're paying for.
Simon
CORRECTION: Is Cool. What do you think Planned Obsolescence is? Engineers designed fridges that can last for 200 years, but that would make jobs disappear - so jobs take priority and fridges are built to last 7 years nowadays.
Actually, the reason is that a 200 year fridge costs a hell of a lot more than a 7 year fridge, and people aren't willing to pay the higher premium.
SImon
Am I the only one who sees that? If you think that pirating a movie is just like stealing, then remember that NOT WATCHING IT is almost the same. There are plenty of 'free' sources of entertainment (public libraries, going outside, talking to people).
No, it's not 'almost the same'. It's completely different.
One act (pirating) is going against someone else's wishes, which just so happens to be backed up by copyright law, and is illegal.
The other act (not going to see the movie) is going against someone else's wishes, but there isn't a damn thing they can do about it.
The not so good movies might loose some of their marked if they are heavily pirated. If I'd downloaded Reign Of Fire before I went to see it at the cimema, I would probably have seen another movie instead. That way Hollywood would still get all its money, but I wouldn't feel ripped of. I can't afford to see all movies (I don't even have time for that), so there is no money *lost* if that was the way it happened.
There's no money lost if you see it in the theatre either -- IF you leave before the end. Just go out and ask for your money back.
They're typically very good about that in any theatre worth going to.
Of course, I'm not sure quite what you do about The Ninth Gate... has to be some method of recourse for a film that doesn't end properly.
Simon