I don't even own a TV any more -- my computer is my media center. I became addicted to PVR technology in the US when I had DirecTV with TiVO.
When I moved back to Canada, torrents took the place of the TiVO. I'd become addicted to the idea of watching shows when I want to, instead of on some arbitrary schedule. I expected I'd watch more TV seeing as I could watch it whenever I want, but instead what happened is I started watching less -- a lot less.
For some reason, once I broke the mentality of "slave to a schedule", I soon broke the "slave to a series" mentality as well. I still download all kinds of TV series and archive them, but to be honest, I doubt I watch 2 hours of what I download per week. The rest is just archived for that inevitable some-day retirement when I expect to have time to waste time on something as unimportant as series TV.
So pay extra for skipping ads? *LMAO*
Ah well, I guess it's like an atomic weapon. Just because it can be built doesn't mean it's legal to use or would be tolerated by the public.
By the way, the reason I have absolute confidence that the robocalls happened is I received one.
Roughly two weeks after rudely informing the Conservative party pollster that I was deeply offended that they would even ask who I'm going to vote for (because it's an invasion of my right to a secret vote), and thereby would definitely NOT be voting Conservative, I received a robocall directing me to a supposed polling station west of the General Hospital here in Regina.
I did check into it, and did vote successfully. But that's because I was skeptical about my polling station changing two days before the election, not because someone didn't try to trick me into missing out on my chance to vote against these vote-frauding neanderthal jackboots.
I have many reasons for hating the Harpercrites, a list of issues built up over a decade. I'm actually glad they stuck their neck in the noose with the robocalls, regardless of whether it was a few party underlings or a "big plan" by the higher ups. Because the end result is the same: The Canadian Reform Alliance Party (the true roots of the Harpercrite Conservatives) may be dissolved as a party entirely, or subjected to fines so heavy that they can't afford to continue operations.
And in my books, that would be terrific for Canada. Because the Harpercrites have a long-standing tradition of fighting against the very Charter of Rights and Constitution which define the obligations of a sound a legally-moral Canadian government to the people of this country. And I do not like seeing any politician of any stripe violating those ethics, regardless of how "moral" their stance may be.
From my perspective, the history of violating the Charter should itself be sufficient justification for removing these "people" from power.
Many people don't understand how serious this issue is, including many of my fellow Canucks, friends, and family.
Several of the ridings which the Harper "government" won were very closely contested and were victimized by these robocalls directing people to non-existent polling stations. Whether they were smart enough to realize it was fraud, checked it out with Elections Canada, or were actually duped by the calls is irrelevant.
It was illegal for anyone to try to interfere with the vote in this fashion. The fact that there was interference invalidates the results in the affected ridings.
That means that there are more ridings that need to be re-elected than the Harpercrites had "won" to achieve their "majority." The quotes are because the only people who believe they have a legitimate majority any more are die-hard Conservatives who refuse to accept their party was involved despite the increasing evidence that not only were they responsible, but the how of the crime is being dismantled as well by investigators.
This is a serious, serious threat to the very foundation of democracy in Canada.
If the Harper "government" is allowed to continue in power after this kind of blatant vote interference, Canada will have allowed itself to be taken over by an organization using tactics no more ethical than that of any totalitarian regime or banana republic. This is as bad as or worse than the "votes" in the Ukraine and Russia, which are perpetually questioned by the entire world.
Yet sickeningly enough, it's our own Canadian observers who are requested to go and monitor elections in countries like Ukraine and Russia and to report on them.
The Elections Canada investigation is moving along as quickly as it can. While I wish it were moving faster, my one fervent hope is that they start tagging ridings as invalid and pulling the "elected officials" from power in those ridings, regardless of who is behind the calls.
That's the key point: I don't care who is behind the calls. The identity of the person, persons, organizations, companies, foreign interests, or political parties who were behind the calls does not really matter to me all that much. What matters is that the election results in those ridings are invalid and the seat-holders can not be allowed to remain in power without a re-election in those ridings. Not if Canada is to be able to continue to claim to be a "democratic" country instead of one where electoral fraud and interference are shrugged off as being "normal."
Clue: They've been doing this without this "exploit."
Personally I don't see why this would be an issue. Doesn't it make sense for a web server to detect the client's plugins, addons, configurations, and to adapt the presentation HTML and XML accordingly?
i.e. How is this any different from detecting Flash? Or Java? Or whether cookies are enabled?
Where is the RISK from knowing what extensions you have installed if they're properly configured?
This reminds me of the panic people have when they first go to a test website that reports on the browser, browser version, OS, IP number, etc. for a client -- all information that is necessary for the web client/browser to function at all. Only the truly security ignorant would panic over this.
How about anyone subsequently imprisoned under the omnibus crime bill?
Seniors?
Veterans who've had their benefits cut?
"Find a victim" of the Harper government is easy. Getting the Harper government to admit that the people are being victimized to pay for "anti crime" legislation and the screwed up F-35 delivery schedule is another thing.
I really can't agree with that. Which large companies pushed perl, ruby, or python? Those who pushed were not large by the standards of the global IT market. It was the fact that many smaller companies and development houses got on board, seeding the market with programmers who knew the new languages, that made them successful.
And even the "successful" ones have had limited success. For example, show me a non-web application that was developed with Ruby and not using Rails. Now granted, the libraries and frameworks of a language (like JEE) have a great deal to do with their acceptance by the industry, but I think it speaks volumes about the supposed benefits of some of these languages that they went no where until someone was fanatical enough to write framework libraries using them.
In a sense, the role of the language itself seems to have shifted to the lower levels of the machine, almost assembly-like. In the meantime, the application framework has become the new "programming API" of the language library, rather than the boring and basic string and math functions that used to comprise language libraries. People now drop out of the framework into custom code only when they are forced to, with the bulk of the coding being more in the use of annotations and tags to tie pieces of the application together automagically rather than having to be expressly coded with multiple lines of low-level code.
Of course this all comes at a price. The more you rely on things like tags and annotations, the more your code is relying on introspection and adaptive code, which is inherently slower than code which was written specifically for the attribute accessors and data types being manipulated.
Worse, some of the framework libraries I've seen make the horrendous mistake of completely ignoring the protocols and communications styles used by legacy code. If you're going to succeed in the business arena (where most coding is done), you HAVE to deal with those old systems, and that means making it easy to deal with EDI transforms as well as XML based IOs.
By no means am I arguing that we don't need specialized languages for special purposes in the overall application stack. Tools like Ruby on Rails are needed to simplify work in their slice of the system pie. But I can't see there being another "big thing" like Java or C# any time in the near future, but rather the continued evolution of those languages.
Another factor is that people get tired of playing with new languages when they don't take off, and that speaks volumes to their fitness for a purpose. Languages like C++ took over a decade to really catch on, but their ideas were novel enough that the early adopters stuck with them and kept using them while momentum built. Nowadays if you don't have significant mindshare within a few years, people seem to give up and move on to something else/better. Were these languages really a significant improvement, their fans would stick with them and promote their use despite their unpopularity.
I wish you were right, but I have a feeling that after all these years Iran would be extremely suspicious of such moves, think they're some sort of trap, and refuse to follow along. In fact, they'd probably start ranting about the "Lies of The Great Satan" of the west.
Your comment about "novel features" is precisely the problem with keeping the inventive momentum going that Bricklin mentions.
The odds of the next "killer app" of any kind coming from people like you or me who have preconceived notions of what a "computer" is and how it gets used are slim to none. It's not that we aren't creative enough, but that our thinking is marred by too much baggage about what should be done. We already have this mental list of "rules" about what good UI design is, what people want to use computers for, and so on.
Recently there was a fellow talking about his iPad who brought up the point that he could stream the media to a PC, an Apple TV, or other devices, depending on where he was, without losing his place in a movie. This isn't an earth-shattering "killer app" like Visicalc was, but it's something I would never have thought of pointing out as a benefit. Not because it isn't a benefit, but because I would never have even tried to do it -- I would have just finished watching the movie on the tablet that I used to start watching it on a commuter train.
As I've thought about them for the past year or two, and worked on my own tools and technology, I've come up with a couple ideas that I'm keeping to myself. Will they be innovative? Yes. Will they result in "killer apps"? Probably not.
But my ideas might result in some killer pipe glue that changes the way we connect applications to each other in a world of globalized clusters forming logical clouds. Not because it's never been done before, but because it's never been easy before.
Everyone knows about that patrol after Willie and Snoop were tagged by it. Only a complete and utter fool would try to get through that checkpoint with cannabis, medical or otherwise.
So seeing as George seems to be a pretty bright guy, I have to presume he did it as a protest to highlight the insanity of the "drug" war (which is 90% a war on cannabis, against the wishes of the people.)
Welcome to the battle, George. Good luck in court.
I've worked with a few ex-Microsoft employees over the year, including the CEO at the last company I worked for (he came up through the ranks to be one of their managers overseas.) The one thing I found surprising is not one of them complained about Microsoft as a place to work.
And from the two Microsoft-trained managers I've worked for, I can see why -- they do a damn good job of training their managers to listen to people and to prioritize rationally with a solid understanding of the importance of technical priorities when setting schedules.
I can't imagine ever working there myself, but that's more because I see my career taking a divergent path from pure programming into a more business-oriented role. The one "complaint" I heard from the two ex-managers was that it's very hard to advance beyond middle management if you stay in Microsoft. Your odds of landing a top tier job are much better if you leave the company for a while to broaden your experience.
Not that such would have been the motivator in this case as far as I'm aware.
The defendant will always claim a warrant was "rubber stamped."
But at least it's some sort of oversight on the process, and beats the heck out of the "security first" fanatics who keep wanting to remove the "obstruction" of a warrant completely.
Exactly. The legislation is inconsistent at it's core. It confirms Canadians right to format shift, time shift, and back up their media, then contradicts that with a clause that provides DMCA-style protections for DRM locking technologies.
It's just a matter of time until this inconsistency hits the courts and the DMCA provisions are struck down by a judge with a functioning brain cell (something sorely lacking in the Conservative's disputed "majority.") I have no doubt people other than me raised the issue with the government, and it's good to see that they listed to most of our concerns.
But the DMCA clauses attempt to gut the clauses that confirm our rights.
Maybe we should mandate that all politicians take at least one semester of philosophical argument classes before being allowed to open their mouths or vote on legislation. But that would be unfair to non-university-educated candidates, so maybe they need a "Logic for Dummies" manual and some online training courses as part of their "welcome package" for the job.
You mean if I pick up a $10 DVD it'll only cost 20% extra for a DRM-encumbered streaming copy that doesn't actually reside on my hard drive and can disappear at any moment the studio changes it's mind?
I agree completely. Pirating software or media to check it out and decide whether it's worth buying is one thing. As far as I'm concerned, that's free advertising for the product.
But it's another thing entirely to keep a copy and never buy the product.
I've pirated software and media all my life (since '82-'83), but I can't think of a single tool that I didn't buy after making sure it does what I needed.
The only exception was chipping in with three friends to buy a copy of Microsoft's first "C" compiler. Even at 25% of the total price (over $300 '84 dollars if I recall correctly), it was still a rip-off: the pointer calculations were screwed up, so we filed a bug report, and were told we'd have to buy the next release to get a fix. So I've had a hate-on for Microsquishy ever since -- that $100+ that I chipped in was a month's worth of living expenses for me back then, so I felt (and still feel) THOROUGHLY ripped off by them.
Yes, I do hold grudges...
Despite that grudge, I've always paid for my copies of Windows, MSVC, Office, etc. Even feeling ripped off by Microsoft wouldn't justify my stealing products from them.
I agree with most of your points, except for the presumption that you're playing a "real-life friend". Other than a dozen people, I've never met any of my Facebook friends in real life.
Furthermore, none of the "social games" I tried on Facebook during my first year were "social" at all. There was absolutely NO interaction with other players, team tactics, or any of the other aspects of a good round of an FPS with a headset.
When I see my friends playing against their buddies on their XBox or PS3, they're using headphones. They're coaching each other. They're cursing each other. They're talking to each other. It's a FAR more "social" game environment than Facebook has ever been or could ever dream to be.
So it took them a few decades to learn that a privilege escalation is only one step removed from a full intrusion. At least they did eventually learn.
The problem is the length of the games
on
Can $60 Games Survive?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When I stopped buying video games, the average game took me about 60-80 hours to finish.
My friends now regularly finish games in as little 12-15 hours.
So where I paid $40 for my games, about $0.50/hour play time at best, my friends are now paying about $2-4/hour, and that's not even ten years later.
What's unsustainable is the presumption that gamers have infinitely deep pockets, or that people don't give damn about the value for their dollar if the game is "good enough." Sooner or later, things are going to crash. And the popularity of used and "old" games in the $20 bins is starting to prove that point, as are the number of $10-20 internet games.
Remember, the industry is now competing with "App" games that sell for $1-5 each. Sure "Angry Birds" doesn't have the visceral glory of the console games, but it's fun to the people who play it and it's not costing them an arm and a leg. Expect more of the same, or a major crash in the whole gaming industry.
When you use a system-installed codec, it's up to the USER to pay for that codec, not the developer of a third-party product that simply enables the use of the codecs installed on the system.
Do you think anyone paid for my copy of DiVX because they could use the codec in their movie player? Of course not! They only paid for the codecs they shipped with the player.
The same is true of audio codecs. The only exception I found was a Fraunhoffer MP3 codec that somehow tied itself to only be available to the application that installed it. Every other codec I've ever installed has been available to any program that supported the codec APIs. For an application like a web browser to block the use of user-installed codecs is asinine.
That's like saying "You can buy gas anywhere, but if you buy it from Shell, it won't work because you bought a Ford."
Damn straight I'm a troll when it comes to calling out American thugishness around the world. Because you interfere in Canada, too, the same as you do everywhere.
Jackboot is the KINDEST term I could have for your government and legal system.
It only stands to reason that if you're using standard system APIs to access codecs that have been purchased or installed by the user/owner, then ALL of those codecs should be usable, not just the free ones.
What's the point of having a general purpose browser if you let it get polluted by political arguments about which codecs the USER installs? Using system codecs is not "polluting the code" -- it's letting the user decide.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even own a TV any more -- my computer is my media center. I became addicted to PVR technology in the US when I had DirecTV with TiVO.
When I moved back to Canada, torrents took the place of the TiVO. I'd become addicted to the idea of watching shows when I want to, instead of on some arbitrary schedule. I expected I'd watch more TV seeing as I could watch it whenever I want, but instead what happened is I started watching less -- a lot less.
For some reason, once I broke the mentality of "slave to a schedule", I soon broke the "slave to a series" mentality as well. I still download all kinds of TV series and archive them, but to be honest, I doubt I watch 2 hours of what I download per week. The rest is just archived for that inevitable some-day retirement when I expect to have time to waste time on something as unimportant as series TV.
So pay extra for skipping ads? *LMAO*
Ah well, I guess it's like an atomic weapon. Just because it can be built doesn't mean it's legal to use or would be tolerated by the public.
By the way, the reason I have absolute confidence that the robocalls happened is I received one.
Roughly two weeks after rudely informing the Conservative party pollster that I was deeply offended that they would even ask who I'm going to vote for (because it's an invasion of my right to a secret vote), and thereby would definitely NOT be voting Conservative, I received a robocall directing me to a supposed polling station west of the General Hospital here in Regina.
I did check into it, and did vote successfully. But that's because I was skeptical about my polling station changing two days before the election, not because someone didn't try to trick me into missing out on my chance to vote against these vote-frauding neanderthal jackboots.
I have many reasons for hating the Harpercrites, a list of issues built up over a decade. I'm actually glad they stuck their neck in the noose with the robocalls, regardless of whether it was a few party underlings or a "big plan" by the higher ups. Because the end result is the same: The Canadian Reform Alliance Party (the true roots of the Harpercrite Conservatives) may be dissolved as a party entirely, or subjected to fines so heavy that they can't afford to continue operations.
And in my books, that would be terrific for Canada. Because the Harpercrites have a long-standing tradition of fighting against the very Charter of Rights and Constitution which define the obligations of a sound a legally-moral Canadian government to the people of this country. And I do not like seeing any politician of any stripe violating those ethics, regardless of how "moral" their stance may be.
From my perspective, the history of violating the Charter should itself be sufficient justification for removing these "people" from power.
Many people don't understand how serious this issue is, including many of my fellow Canucks, friends, and family.
Several of the ridings which the Harper "government" won were very closely contested and were victimized by these robocalls directing people to non-existent polling stations. Whether they were smart enough to realize it was fraud, checked it out with Elections Canada, or were actually duped by the calls is irrelevant.
It was illegal for anyone to try to interfere with the vote in this fashion. The fact that there was interference invalidates the results in the affected ridings.
That means that there are more ridings that need to be re-elected than the Harpercrites had "won" to achieve their "majority." The quotes are because the only people who believe they have a legitimate majority any more are die-hard Conservatives who refuse to accept their party was involved despite the increasing evidence that not only were they responsible, but the how of the crime is being dismantled as well by investigators.
This is a serious, serious threat to the very foundation of democracy in Canada.
If the Harper "government" is allowed to continue in power after this kind of blatant vote interference, Canada will have allowed itself to be taken over by an organization using tactics no more ethical than that of any totalitarian regime or banana republic. This is as bad as or worse than the "votes" in the Ukraine and Russia, which are perpetually questioned by the entire world.
Yet sickeningly enough, it's our own Canadian observers who are requested to go and monitor elections in countries like Ukraine and Russia and to report on them.
The Elections Canada investigation is moving along as quickly as it can. While I wish it were moving faster, my one fervent hope is that they start tagging ridings as invalid and pulling the "elected officials" from power in those ridings, regardless of who is behind the calls.
That's the key point: I don't care who is behind the calls. The identity of the person, persons, organizations, companies, foreign interests, or political parties who were behind the calls does not really matter to me all that much. What matters is that the election results in those ridings are invalid and the seat-holders can not be allowed to remain in power without a re-election in those ridings. Not if Canada is to be able to continue to claim to be a "democratic" country instead of one where electoral fraud and interference are shrugged off as being "normal."
Clue: They've been doing this without this "exploit."
Personally I don't see why this would be an issue. Doesn't it make sense for a web server to detect the client's plugins, addons, configurations, and to adapt the presentation HTML and XML accordingly?
i.e. How is this any different from detecting Flash? Or Java? Or whether cookies are enabled?
Where is the RISK from knowing what extensions you have installed if they're properly configured?
This reminds me of the panic people have when they first go to a test website that reports on the browser, browser version, OS, IP number, etc. for a client -- all information that is necessary for the web client/browser to function at all. Only the truly security ignorant would panic over this.
How about anyone subsequently imprisoned under the omnibus crime bill?
Seniors?
Veterans who've had their benefits cut?
"Find a victim" of the Harper government is easy. Getting the Harper government to admit that the people are being victimized to pay for "anti crime" legislation and the screwed up F-35 delivery schedule is another thing.
CANADA is the victim. All of it.
I really can't agree with that. Which large companies pushed perl, ruby, or python? Those who pushed were not large by the standards of the global IT market. It was the fact that many smaller companies and development houses got on board, seeding the market with programmers who knew the new languages, that made them successful.
And even the "successful" ones have had limited success. For example, show me a non-web application that was developed with Ruby and not using Rails. Now granted, the libraries and frameworks of a language (like JEE) have a great deal to do with their acceptance by the industry, but I think it speaks volumes about the supposed benefits of some of these languages that they went no where until someone was fanatical enough to write framework libraries using them.
In a sense, the role of the language itself seems to have shifted to the lower levels of the machine, almost assembly-like. In the meantime, the application framework has become the new "programming API" of the language library, rather than the boring and basic string and math functions that used to comprise language libraries. People now drop out of the framework into custom code only when they are forced to, with the bulk of the coding being more in the use of annotations and tags to tie pieces of the application together automagically rather than having to be expressly coded with multiple lines of low-level code.
Of course this all comes at a price. The more you rely on things like tags and annotations, the more your code is relying on introspection and adaptive code, which is inherently slower than code which was written specifically for the attribute accessors and data types being manipulated.
Worse, some of the framework libraries I've seen make the horrendous mistake of completely ignoring the protocols and communications styles used by legacy code. If you're going to succeed in the business arena (where most coding is done), you HAVE to deal with those old systems, and that means making it easy to deal with EDI transforms as well as XML based IOs.
By no means am I arguing that we don't need specialized languages for special purposes in the overall application stack. Tools like Ruby on Rails are needed to simplify work in their slice of the system pie. But I can't see there being another "big thing" like Java or C# any time in the near future, but rather the continued evolution of those languages.
Another factor is that people get tired of playing with new languages when they don't take off, and that speaks volumes to their fitness for a purpose. Languages like C++ took over a decade to really catch on, but their ideas were novel enough that the early adopters stuck with them and kept using them while momentum built. Nowadays if you don't have significant mindshare within a few years, people seem to give up and move on to something else/better. Were these languages really a significant improvement, their fans would stick with them and promote their use despite their unpopularity.
Insightful my ass.
Bush's speech was made after North Korea began their moves.
I wish you were right, but I have a feeling that after all these years Iran would be extremely suspicious of such moves, think they're some sort of trap, and refuse to follow along. In fact, they'd probably start ranting about the "Lies of The Great Satan" of the west.
Your comment about "novel features" is precisely the problem with keeping the inventive momentum going that Bricklin mentions.
The odds of the next "killer app" of any kind coming from people like you or me who have preconceived notions of what a "computer" is and how it gets used are slim to none. It's not that we aren't creative enough, but that our thinking is marred by too much baggage about what should be done. We already have this mental list of "rules" about what good UI design is, what people want to use computers for, and so on.
Recently there was a fellow talking about his iPad who brought up the point that he could stream the media to a PC, an Apple TV, or other devices, depending on where he was, without losing his place in a movie. This isn't an earth-shattering "killer app" like Visicalc was, but it's something I would never have thought of pointing out as a benefit. Not because it isn't a benefit, but because I would never have even tried to do it -- I would have just finished watching the movie on the tablet that I used to start watching it on a commuter train.
As I've thought about them for the past year or two, and worked on my own tools and technology, I've come up with a couple ideas that I'm keeping to myself. Will they be innovative? Yes. Will they result in "killer apps"? Probably not.
But my ideas might result in some killer pipe glue that changes the way we connect applications to each other in a world of globalized clusters forming logical clouds. Not because it's never been done before, but because it's never been easy before.
Beer without alcohol. Coffee without caffeine. Tea without caffeine.
What's next?
Cannabis without the THC?
Oh yeah, we already have that. It's called "hemp". :P
Everyone knows about that patrol after Willie and Snoop were tagged by it. Only a complete and utter fool would try to get through that checkpoint with cannabis, medical or otherwise.
So seeing as George seems to be a pretty bright guy, I have to presume he did it as a protest to highlight the insanity of the "drug" war (which is 90% a war on cannabis, against the wishes of the people.)
Welcome to the battle, George. Good luck in court.
I've worked with a few ex-Microsoft employees over the year, including the CEO at the last company I worked for (he came up through the ranks to be one of their managers overseas.) The one thing I found surprising is not one of them complained about Microsoft as a place to work.
And from the two Microsoft-trained managers I've worked for, I can see why -- they do a damn good job of training their managers to listen to people and to prioritize rationally with a solid understanding of the importance of technical priorities when setting schedules.
I can't imagine ever working there myself, but that's more because I see my career taking a divergent path from pure programming into a more business-oriented role. The one "complaint" I heard from the two ex-managers was that it's very hard to advance beyond middle management if you stay in Microsoft. Your odds of landing a top tier job are much better if you leave the company for a while to broaden your experience.
Not that such would have been the motivator in this case as far as I'm aware.
The defendant will always claim a warrant was "rubber stamped."
But at least it's some sort of oversight on the process, and beats the heck out of the "security first" fanatics who keep wanting to remove the "obstruction" of a warrant completely.
Exactly. The legislation is inconsistent at it's core. It confirms Canadians right to format shift, time shift, and back up their media, then contradicts that with a clause that provides DMCA-style protections for DRM locking technologies.
It's just a matter of time until this inconsistency hits the courts and the DMCA provisions are struck down by a judge with a functioning brain cell (something sorely lacking in the Conservative's disputed "majority.") I have no doubt people other than me raised the issue with the government, and it's good to see that they listed to most of our concerns.
But the DMCA clauses attempt to gut the clauses that confirm our rights.
Maybe we should mandate that all politicians take at least one semester of philosophical argument classes before being allowed to open their mouths or vote on legislation. But that would be unfair to non-university-educated candidates, so maybe they need a "Logic for Dummies" manual and some online training courses as part of their "welcome package" for the job.
You mean if I pick up a $10 DVD it'll only cost 20% extra for a DRM-encumbered streaming copy that doesn't actually reside on my hard drive and can disappear at any moment the studio changes it's mind?
I'm IN!
NOT.
I agree completely. Pirating software or media to check it out and decide whether it's worth buying is one thing. As far as I'm concerned, that's free advertising for the product.
But it's another thing entirely to keep a copy and never buy the product.
I've pirated software and media all my life (since '82-'83), but I can't think of a single tool that I didn't buy after making sure it does what I needed.
The only exception was chipping in with three friends to buy a copy of Microsoft's first "C" compiler. Even at 25% of the total price (over $300 '84 dollars if I recall correctly), it was still a rip-off: the pointer calculations were screwed up, so we filed a bug report, and were told we'd have to buy the next release to get a fix. So I've had a hate-on for Microsquishy ever since -- that $100+ that I chipped in was a month's worth of living expenses for me back then, so I felt (and still feel) THOROUGHLY ripped off by them.
Yes, I do hold grudges...
Despite that grudge, I've always paid for my copies of Windows, MSVC, Office, etc. Even feeling ripped off by Microsoft wouldn't justify my stealing products from them.
I agree with most of your points, except for the presumption that you're playing a "real-life friend". Other than a dozen people, I've never met any of my Facebook friends in real life.
Furthermore, none of the "social games" I tried on Facebook during my first year were "social" at all. There was absolutely NO interaction with other players, team tactics, or any of the other aspects of a good round of an FPS with a headset.
When I see my friends playing against their buddies on their XBox or PS3, they're using headphones. They're coaching each other. They're cursing each other. They're talking to each other. It's a FAR more "social" game environment than Facebook has ever been or could ever dream to be.
So it took them a few decades to learn that a privilege escalation is only one step removed from a full intrusion. At least they did eventually learn.
When I stopped buying video games, the average game took me about 60-80 hours to finish.
My friends now regularly finish games in as little 12-15 hours.
So where I paid $40 for my games, about $0.50/hour play time at best, my friends are now paying about $2-4/hour, and that's not even ten years later.
What's unsustainable is the presumption that gamers have infinitely deep pockets, or that people don't give damn about the value for their dollar if the game is "good enough." Sooner or later, things are going to crash. And the popularity of used and "old" games in the $20 bins is starting to prove that point, as are the number of $10-20 internet games.
Remember, the industry is now competing with "App" games that sell for $1-5 each. Sure "Angry Birds" doesn't have the visceral glory of the console games, but it's fun to the people who play it and it's not costing them an arm and a leg. Expect more of the same, or a major crash in the whole gaming industry.
When you use a system-installed codec, it's up to the USER to pay for that codec, not the developer of a third-party product that simply enables the use of the codecs installed on the system.
Do you think anyone paid for my copy of DiVX because they could use the codec in their movie player? Of course not! They only paid for the codecs they shipped with the player.
The same is true of audio codecs. The only exception I found was a Fraunhoffer MP3 codec that somehow tied itself to only be available to the application that installed it. Every other codec I've ever installed has been available to any program that supported the codec APIs. For an application like a web browser to block the use of user-installed codecs is asinine.
That's like saying "You can buy gas anywhere, but if you buy it from Shell, it won't work because you bought a Ford."
And you don't think 20 years of operation just might demonstrate that it hasn't been defended in a timely fashion?
Troll?
Damn straight I'm a troll when it comes to calling out American thugishness around the world. Because you interfere in Canada, too, the same as you do everywhere.
Jackboot is the KINDEST term I could have for your government and legal system.
It's an American company doing the suing.
Zieg Heil, mein American Jackboot!
America stomps on the world again, and you wonder why the world HATES you.
It only stands to reason that if you're using standard system APIs to access codecs that have been purchased or installed by the user/owner, then ALL of those codecs should be usable, not just the free ones.
What's the point of having a general purpose browser if you let it get polluted by political arguments about which codecs the USER installs? Using system codecs is not "polluting the code" -- it's letting the user decide.