In Animal Crossing, I don't run across furry malls with gigantic fox penises on the walls and laser-lit dance clubs. So I'm pretty sure he meant Second Life.
Strange how people keep referencing Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing is only similar to Second Life on a very superficial level. It's designed so you're in it for maybe half an hour a day.
It is not, and will never be morally wrong to take part in culture by consuming and sharing popular cultural expressions. If you think so, there is something seriously wrong with your sense of morallity.
In most countries outside the US it has never been illegal to copy cultural expressions for personal use, and it has not been and hopefully never will be considered morally wrong.
Piracy is not "taking part in culture," and BitTorrent is not a "cultural expression," nor does it qualify as personal use. What you are doing is attempting to redefine taking part in culture to mean freeloading off their work. This is classic Orwellian double-speak by attempting to remove the negative connotation of something through wordplay.
Your culture argument is a common fuzzy argument used by pirates to make themselves not feel guilty about going to PirateBay and downloading somebody's work without compensation. The most common argument is that pirates are fighting bad guys--the RIAA, the MPAA, etc. If you're fighting bad guys, that makes you the good guy in your mind, right? All these arguments are psychological justifications; e.g., the redefining of piracy to mean "taking part in culture" when piracy is just people giving into natural selfish desires to get something for free if they find an easy, expense-free source for it.
The thing about piracy is that the ethical and moral issues are so deep but obvious that people must concoct enormous mythologies to justify it. Your hippie-like cultural expression claim is just one example. It's a denial of the obviousness of piracy--that it's wrong to rip people off so they don't get paid for their work. If you worked at a software company, I doubt you'd be okay with your boss coming up to you and saying he was withholding a paycheck that month because your code counts as a "cultural expression" that the company planned to "take part in."
You make the fallacy of equating every pirated instance to a lost sale. Many songs are copied that would never be bought otherwise, and the same applies to movies and software.
This is irrelevant, because you still don't have a right to something if you didn't plan on paying for it. Additionally, the people copying songs who you claim wouldn't buy it anyway aren't just copying it for themselves. P2P apps will share those downloaded chunks with millions of other "best friends" of that user, enabling piracy on astronomical levels. Your argument is one in a list of common arguments used to justify piracy and make people feel less guilty about it, but it doesn't change the fact that piracy is solely about going to PirateBay and looking for things to download so you don't have to go to a store and pay the creators for it. The ethical and moral issues run deep enough that pirates build entire mythologies around it involving cultural revolutions and civil disobedience, when the simple truth is that people are just freeloading because it's human nature to be greedy, and with no repercussions, the danger level is reduced in their minds so that it no longer feels like a legal or moral crime against artists. As much as we hated and mocked Lars Ulrich for talking about Napster...he was still right.
How is this concept so very very very hard for certain people to understand.
The concept is hard to understand because it makes no sense. If something was crappy, you wouldn't have any interest in it.
Hell I have no problem paying a subscription- I pay for a rapidshare account. It's convenience that matters to me and TPB is very very convenient for people.
That's the reason piracy is so rampant. It's not due to rebellion against business models--only the type of people to post on Slashdot care about things like that. It's more about the convenience and ease of getting something without having to pay money for it. It's an example of human selfishness and greed, really. Some people, in an attempt to feel less guilty, intellectualize it into some cultural movement in which they're fighting bad guys (the RIAA, the MPAA, Electronic Arts, etc.). If they're fighting bad guys, that makes them the good guys, see? It's an interesting psychological case.
If you honestly believe people are pirating games, movies, and music as a form of "civil disobedience" to stick it to the man, I don't know what to say. It's the same tired cultural revolution argument that's been trotted out for over a decade. The simpler truth is that human beings are selfish by nature, and if there's an easy way to get something for free without repercussion, they'll latch onto it and justify it any number of ways. Your argument, for instance, is a mental exercise in portraying other people as the bad guy, even though you're the one ripping off the artist. It's a huge leap, but people make it all the time so they don't feel like they're doing something wrong.
Besides, what "bad business model" are you referring to? The one where you make something and try to sell it? The industries have already adopted internet distribution models through iTunes, Steam, and so forth. What more do you want?
Your whole argument relies on the assumption that there is no way to compete against P2P, but there is. Simply offer your own downloads just as free. Monetize it using a means other than consumer cost, such as advertising or subscription services on top of the content. It's been done for decades, since before the internet even existed with broadcasting.
The industry has already offered music for free on the radio for decades, and they offer free singles to download all the time. If distributors attached ads to content to offset expenses, pirates would use that as another justification to pirate. People will invent any number of reasons to protect a free ride.
As I've said before, the actual losses are zero. An opportunity cost only exists when an opportunity exists in the first place. Nobody is crying foul that horse and buggy makers are out thousands of jobs and dollars due to the advent of cars.
The losses are in lost sales. The horse and buggy analogy doesn't fly because cars were a legitimate replacement of them due to advancement of technology. P2P isn't replacing music, movies, and software as a new industry in that same way. It's not an industry at all. It's people using P2P to freeload stuff so they can avoid having to pay for it. There are real human beings who create this stuff to make a living off of it, and the more that people prevent them from getting paid, the more the quality goes down because publishers have to rely on the safe bets that will get a lot of sales. Hence, tons of pop musicians like Miley Cirus, EA sports games, tired first person shooters, and dozens of Sims expansions.
To content industry: the advent of the internet results in consumer p2p. It cannot be stopped. Deal with it. Do so by competing against it, not legislating against it.
When people say this, they never offer this mythical competitive alternative, so I'll just say that the record industry has already embraced the likes of iTunes and other online music services. What more do you want? I suspect it doesn't matter, and even if the music industry had embraced the internet from the start and provided an affordable online store of their own, piracy would still exist. Why? Because it's just people wanting stuff for free, not some rebellion against the man. To build it up into something more than that is being disingenuous. It also purposely ignores the artist in the equation who is getting ripped off.
You're losing sales. That's pretty valuable to somebody trying to make a living off of it.
Besides, when has the Slashdot community ever avoided using the phrase "stolen GPL code" even though you can't steal code? People seem to split hairs only when it suits their agendas...
Again, NeXTStep had a "dock" first. The dock was not just a quick launcher. Spacing all your sentences out in seething Apple hatred may make you feel better, but it doesn't change history.
Speaking of "RTFP," you're citing one claim of a very long document that describes many things, from magnification to modifier keys to distance calculations:
When the cursor 610 enters the userbar region, two distances (d.sub.1 and d.sub.2) are calculated for each tile. More specifically, for each tile the distance d.sub.1 from the cursor 610's position to the left edge of tile and the distance d.sub.2 from the cursor to the right edge of the tile are calculated as seen in FIG. 8(c). If the value of either d.sub.1 or d.sub.2 lies outside the range {-W, W}, then the value is changed to be the closest of -W and W. Scaled values d.sub.1' and d.sub.2' are then calculated using the following sine functions: d.sub.1'=S.times.sine(.pi./2.times.d.sub.1/W) (2) d.sub.2'=S.times.sine(.pi./2.times.d.sub.2/W) (3) Each tile is then redrawn between d.sub.1' and d.sub.2' having a size which is scaled equally in both width and height from the lower left hand corner by a factor: 1+(d.sub.2'-d.sub.1')/(d.sub.2-d.sub.1) (4) Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the foregoing is merely an illustrative example of a particular, yet still exemplary, embodiment by which a variable magnification effect according to the present invention can be implemented. Moreover, although these exemplary embodiments describe user interfaces wherein the variable magnification effect is invoked when the cursor moves into the userbar 600 region, i.e., when the cursor crosses a border of one of the tiles residing in the userbar 600, those skilled in the art will further appreciate that the magnification effect can also be invoked earlier, e.g., when the cursor moves to within some predetermined distance of one of the tile borders. Userbar Functionality
It's a long read, and perhaps you should check it out rather than extracting one bit and acting like that one bit is the whole patent.
If you'd read the patent (I suspect most Slashdot readers won't), you'll see it specifically describes the Apple Dock. It even mentions running "Apple applications" as well as rollover magnification. People are overreacting.
The Dock is more than just a Windows taskbar. It's both an app launcher and a running app list. The patent in the article specifically describes other Dock-specific things like the magnification of icons when the cursor is near them as well as the Dock's physical appearance.
I believe Apple does have a patent for the Trash can, as well as several other MacOS attributes. One reason Microsoft provided Office for the Mac in the late 90s was due to a settlement deal in which all previous interface disputes between the two companies were forever resolved (in truth, Microsoft had been caught stealing QuickTime code, and Apple was threatening a lawsuit).
I have. Unfortunately, Lake Wintergrasp is a timed assault like the Spirit Towers. I've been told people just hop into their vehicles and rush straight to the boss, as in Alterac Valley. I was hoping for a free-for-all warzone where entire server populations could go for world PvP on demand, complete with siege weapons and buildings to capture 24 hours a day.
One hit that WoW took was a drop in Arena players. Whether due to leaving for other games or due to increased ratings requirements on gear, the bottom dropped out in Arena's ranked system as people decided to just grind for the available battleground honor gear. Blizzard is now going to put Arena requirements on that gear, too, so you will be forced to do the Arena even if you don't like it just to fill out the ranks of the Arena, which depends on those lower-ranked players.
It should be noted that Blizzard stated earlier this year that they did lose players to Age of Conan. Those players, however, returned when they found out Age of Conan wasn't finished. Thankfully, Warhammer's endgame content is in the game.
I'll throw my opinion on the table--it's better than WoW. The game is full of "why didn't someone think of this before" ideas, which was the same impression WoW used to give. There's always something to do, which is really nice. However, if you are really into the EverQuest formula of raiding for gear, it is not for you. It's a large-scale PvP game.
More importantly, there's no Arena. This makes class balancing easier because the PvP is designed for group play, and you rarely come across people alone. There's also no downtime as you wait in a queue. Scenarios have queues, but you can enter those queues anywhere, so you just quest and do other things until a queue pops up. All of these things are giving you experience and renown, so you don't feel like you're wasting your time.
The Arena is Blizzard's attempt to turn WoW into Starcraft and get on Korean television. It's really affected the game in drastic ways. The criticisms have been listed countless times before, and there's no need for me to recite them. This thread on the official forums, which reached its post limit, sums it up well: Goblin In The Tuxedo (and here is a second thread that continued the discussion).
Keen and Graev have been describing their Warhammer experience as their guild hits the tier 4 content.
How am I overstating it? There's no duress here. A person doesn't have a right or need to be famous, and if they don't want to be involved with a record company, they shouldn't sign with one. If the alternative is obscurity, that's just life.
An organization like the one in this article is "after the fact." It's made up of mostly established artists who already got their wealth and fame from record companies and only now want to leave them when they have the money to fund their own distribution. I'm just not as impressed.
It certainly wasn't intended to be a troll. It was half devil's advocate, half genuine belief. A lot of the piracy arguments on Slashdot rely on the RIAA for justification. If that justification didn't exist, I strongly suspect piracy would continue anyway. It's just something to keep in mind whenever somebody tries to absolve themselves of guilty feelings by criticizing the RIAA.
Well, one should certainly expect repercussions for deviating from a contract, and one should consider not signing a contract they plan to deviate from. Just saying. Comparing the voluntary signature on an entertainment contract to slavery is pretty absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
In Animal Crossing, I don't run across furry malls with gigantic fox penises on the walls and laser-lit dance clubs. So I'm pretty sure he meant Second Life.
Strange how people keep referencing Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing is only similar to Second Life on a very superficial level. It's designed so you're in it for maybe half an hour a day.
Piracy is not "taking part in culture," and BitTorrent is not a "cultural expression," nor does it qualify as personal use. What you are doing is attempting to redefine taking part in culture to mean freeloading off their work. This is classic Orwellian double-speak by attempting to remove the negative connotation of something through wordplay.
Your culture argument is a common fuzzy argument used by pirates to make themselves not feel guilty about going to PirateBay and downloading somebody's work without compensation. The most common argument is that pirates are fighting bad guys--the RIAA, the MPAA, etc. If you're fighting bad guys, that makes you the good guy in your mind, right? All these arguments are psychological justifications; e.g., the redefining of piracy to mean "taking part in culture" when piracy is just people giving into natural selfish desires to get something for free if they find an easy, expense-free source for it.
The thing about piracy is that the ethical and moral issues are so deep but obvious that people must concoct enormous mythologies to justify it. Your hippie-like cultural expression claim is just one example. It's a denial of the obviousness of piracy--that it's wrong to rip people off so they don't get paid for their work. If you worked at a software company, I doubt you'd be okay with your boss coming up to you and saying he was withholding a paycheck that month because your code counts as a "cultural expression" that the company planned to "take part in."
This is irrelevant, because you still don't have a right to something if you didn't plan on paying for it. Additionally, the people copying songs who you claim wouldn't buy it anyway aren't just copying it for themselves. P2P apps will share those downloaded chunks with millions of other "best friends" of that user, enabling piracy on astronomical levels. Your argument is one in a list of common arguments used to justify piracy and make people feel less guilty about it, but it doesn't change the fact that piracy is solely about going to PirateBay and looking for things to download so you don't have to go to a store and pay the creators for it. The ethical and moral issues run deep enough that pirates build entire mythologies around it involving cultural revolutions and civil disobedience, when the simple truth is that people are just freeloading because it's human nature to be greedy, and with no repercussions, the danger level is reduced in their minds so that it no longer feels like a legal or moral crime against artists. As much as we hated and mocked Lars Ulrich for talking about Napster...he was still right.
The concept is hard to understand because it makes no sense. If something was crappy, you wouldn't have any interest in it.
That's the reason piracy is so rampant. It's not due to rebellion against business models--only the type of people to post on Slashdot care about things like that. It's more about the convenience and ease of getting something without having to pay money for it. It's an example of human selfishness and greed, really. Some people, in an attempt to feel less guilty, intellectualize it into some cultural movement in which they're fighting bad guys (the RIAA, the MPAA, Electronic Arts, etc.). If they're fighting bad guys, that makes them the good guys, see? It's an interesting psychological case.
If you honestly believe people are pirating games, movies, and music as a form of "civil disobedience" to stick it to the man, I don't know what to say. It's the same tired cultural revolution argument that's been trotted out for over a decade. The simpler truth is that human beings are selfish by nature, and if there's an easy way to get something for free without repercussion, they'll latch onto it and justify it any number of ways. Your argument, for instance, is a mental exercise in portraying other people as the bad guy, even though you're the one ripping off the artist. It's a huge leap, but people make it all the time so they don't feel like they're doing something wrong.
Besides, what "bad business model" are you referring to? The one where you make something and try to sell it? The industries have already adopted internet distribution models through iTunes, Steam, and so forth. What more do you want?
The industry has already offered music for free on the radio for decades, and they offer free singles to download all the time. If distributors attached ads to content to offset expenses, pirates would use that as another justification to pirate. People will invent any number of reasons to protect a free ride.
If it's crappy, why is getting pirated? That doesn't make sense.
The losses are in lost sales. The horse and buggy analogy doesn't fly because cars were a legitimate replacement of them due to advancement of technology. P2P isn't replacing music, movies, and software as a new industry in that same way. It's not an industry at all. It's people using P2P to freeload stuff so they can avoid having to pay for it. There are real human beings who create this stuff to make a living off of it, and the more that people prevent them from getting paid, the more the quality goes down because publishers have to rely on the safe bets that will get a lot of sales. Hence, tons of pop musicians like Miley Cirus, EA sports games, tired first person shooters, and dozens of Sims expansions.
When people say this, they never offer this mythical competitive alternative, so I'll just say that the record industry has already embraced the likes of iTunes and other online music services. What more do you want? I suspect it doesn't matter, and even if the music industry had embraced the internet from the start and provided an affordable online store of their own, piracy would still exist. Why? Because it's just people wanting stuff for free, not some rebellion against the man. To build it up into something more than that is being disingenuous. It also purposely ignores the artist in the equation who is getting ripped off.
You're losing sales. That's pretty valuable to somebody trying to make a living off of it.
Besides, when has the Slashdot community ever avoided using the phrase "stolen GPL code" even though you can't steal code? People seem to split hairs only when it suits their agendas...
It affects longevity.
Life expectancy has gone up because the high number of infant deaths we used to have has gone down, increasing the resulting average.
Again, NeXTStep had a "dock" first. The dock was not just a quick launcher. Spacing all your sentences out in seething Apple hatred may make you feel better, but it doesn't change history.
Speaking of "RTFP," you're citing one claim of a very long document that describes many things, from magnification to modifier keys to distance calculations:
When the cursor 610 enters the userbar region, two distances (d.sub.1 and d.sub.2) are calculated for each tile. More specifically, for each tile the distance d.sub.1 from the cursor 610's position to the left edge of tile and the distance d.sub.2 from the cursor to the right edge of the tile are calculated as seen in FIG. 8(c). If the value of either d.sub.1 or d.sub.2 lies outside the range {-W, W}, then the value is changed to be the closest of -W and W. Scaled values d.sub.1' and d.sub.2' are then calculated using the following sine functions: d.sub.1'=S.times.sine(.pi./2.times.d.sub.1/W) (2) d.sub.2'=S.times.sine(.pi./2.times.d.sub.2/W) (3) Each tile is then redrawn between d.sub.1' and d.sub.2' having a size which is scaled equally in both width and height from the lower left hand corner by a factor: 1+(d.sub.2'-d.sub.1')/(d.sub.2-d.sub.1) (4) Those skilled in the art will appreciate that the foregoing is merely an illustrative example of a particular, yet still exemplary, embodiment by which a variable magnification effect according to the present invention can be implemented. Moreover, although these exemplary embodiments describe user interfaces wherein the variable magnification effect is invoked when the cursor moves into the userbar 600 region, i.e., when the cursor crosses a border of one of the tiles residing in the userbar 600, those skilled in the art will further appreciate that the magnification effect can also be invoked earlier, e.g., when the cursor moves to within some predetermined distance of one of the tile borders. Userbar Functionality
It's a long read, and perhaps you should check it out rather than extracting one bit and acting like that one bit is the whole patent.
Heard of NeXTStep?
If you'd read the patent (I suspect most Slashdot readers won't), you'll see it specifically describes the Apple Dock. It even mentions running "Apple applications" as well as rollover magnification. People are overreacting.
The Dock is more than just a Windows taskbar. It's both an app launcher and a running app list. The patent in the article specifically describes other Dock-specific things like the magnification of icons when the cursor is near them as well as the Dock's physical appearance.
I believe Apple does have a patent for the Trash can, as well as several other MacOS attributes. One reason Microsoft provided Office for the Mac in the late 90s was due to a settlement deal in which all previous interface disputes between the two companies were forever resolved (in truth, Microsoft had been caught stealing QuickTime code, and Apple was threatening a lawsuit).
Like I said before, I don't see how that's different from auto-healing to full health like you're some mutant Wolverine.
I have. Unfortunately, Lake Wintergrasp is a timed assault like the Spirit Towers. I've been told people just hop into their vehicles and rush straight to the boss, as in Alterac Valley. I was hoping for a free-for-all warzone where entire server populations could go for world PvP on demand, complete with siege weapons and buildings to capture 24 hours a day.
One hit that WoW took was a drop in Arena players. Whether due to leaving for other games or due to increased ratings requirements on gear, the bottom dropped out in Arena's ranked system as people decided to just grind for the available battleground honor gear. Blizzard is now going to put Arena requirements on that gear, too, so you will be forced to do the Arena even if you don't like it just to fill out the ranks of the Arena, which depends on those lower-ranked players.
It should be noted that Blizzard stated earlier this year that they did lose players to Age of Conan. Those players, however, returned when they found out Age of Conan wasn't finished. Thankfully, Warhammer's endgame content is in the game.
I'll throw my opinion on the table--it's better than WoW. The game is full of "why didn't someone think of this before" ideas, which was the same impression WoW used to give. There's always something to do, which is really nice. However, if you are really into the EverQuest formula of raiding for gear, it is not for you. It's a large-scale PvP game.
More importantly, there's no Arena. This makes class balancing easier because the PvP is designed for group play, and you rarely come across people alone. There's also no downtime as you wait in a queue. Scenarios have queues, but you can enter those queues anywhere, so you just quest and do other things until a queue pops up. All of these things are giving you experience and renown, so you don't feel like you're wasting your time.
The Arena is Blizzard's attempt to turn WoW into Starcraft and get on Korean television. It's really affected the game in drastic ways. The criticisms have been listed countless times before, and there's no need for me to recite them. This thread on the official forums, which reached its post limit, sums it up well: Goblin In The Tuxedo (and here is a second thread that continued the discussion).
Keen and Graev have been describing their Warhammer experience as their guild hits the tier 4 content.
How am I overstating it? There's no duress here. A person doesn't have a right or need to be famous, and if they don't want to be involved with a record company, they shouldn't sign with one. If the alternative is obscurity, that's just life.
An organization like the one in this article is "after the fact." It's made up of mostly established artists who already got their wealth and fame from record companies and only now want to leave them when they have the money to fund their own distribution. I'm just not as impressed.
It certainly wasn't intended to be a troll. It was half devil's advocate, half genuine belief. A lot of the piracy arguments on Slashdot rely on the RIAA for justification. If that justification didn't exist, I strongly suspect piracy would continue anyway. It's just something to keep in mind whenever somebody tries to absolve themselves of guilty feelings by criticizing the RIAA.
Indeed, which is why our freedom to do so is that much more precious.
Well, one should certainly expect repercussions for deviating from a contract, and one should consider not signing a contract they plan to deviate from. Just saying. Comparing the voluntary signature on an entertainment contract to slavery is pretty absurd.