what part of "Well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Since you're such a genius literalist, how about you learn that the US Second Amendment is basically based on the VA (1776) and MA (1780) bills of rights, both of whose "right to bear arms" clauses are clearly tied to the notion of a "common defense." The VA BoR even specifically refers to those having the rights to bear arms being specially trained.
Of course, this all misses the larger picture still, which is that the framers recognized their own infallability and made provisions in the constitution for it to be a living changing document EITHER through interpretation or revision.
The constitution is not the secular equivalent of the fundamentalists literal bible handed down from on high, despite the fantasies of certain sloped forehead groups.
America has problems yes, and we use the language of an orwellian state to warn us of what happens if we continue down the road that we see to be heading down. meanwhile, the vast, vast majority of people live in relative prosperity, unparalleled freedom, and peace and it seems likely that within a short amount of time a good portion of ominous legislation and action will be overturned by courts or politicians or just ignored.
it is common practice on slashdot to mark somebody a troll that points out the obvious and regular hypocricies of the slashdot crowd. see my feedback - it regularly alternates between -1 troll and +5 whatever.
I am a pilot who flies in the USA and in Europe. In the USA, weather information is free. In Europe, it is not. NO open source weather network has sprung up in europe. The TV news provides some information, but very very little of interest to pilots.
The thing is, given all the airports already in place who could benefit from this (that is to say, a distributed set of reporting stations), you'd think that your sort of community network would just spring up. Well, it hasn't and won't. Why? Because the competitive market has turned out to be a pretty efficient mechanism for bringing weather data to those who need it.
You have told a nice story. It makes sense; it's logical. It's also full of shit. It's a complete invention that you made up to tell a story that fits your world view. Unfortunately, your world view is not the real world.
Do a tiny bit of research on Toys R Us stock price over the last 5 years. Yes, it went up during the dot com days and then fell back down, but other than that it has been remarkably steady. Clearly, it is no 'sinking ship.' Actually, it is the best brand in toy retailing and the category leader there, having beaten the living snot out of Kaybee Toys, Kiddie City, and others over the years.
To call Toys-R-Us stupid is just you telling a story that does not exist; or, at least, the facts don't seem to bear it out.
You may be right about the amazon greed bit though; they did not seem to consider that a mutual exclusivity contract can cut both ways..
There is real, measurable damage when some clown in a business suit robs someone of their retirement fund
Sigh. Would it be too much to ask you to think for one minute before posting? What the hell do you think 'retirement funds' invest in? That's right - for profit businesses! So when you hurt for-profit companies, you hurt the poor old people with the retirement funds AND ultimately the set painters and whatever other lovable tramp characters you want to put in your menagerie.
The "Adapt or your business model dies" argument of yours in this case is bullshit. There is a difference between a real technological shift and new methods of crime. The existence of bricks don't obsolete car windows or cause us to scream about how the car window manufacturers need to come up with new brick-resistant windows or go out of business. Rather, we say "find the idiots who are throwing bricks through windows." Movies have kept up with technological shifts in moviemaking quite well. But piracy is still piracy, even if you try to excuse it as "some kid downloading a copy of crossroads." at the end of the day, IN AGGREGATE, that kid IS hurting your hypothetical retirement fund.
I'm not standing up for the crime, but isn't the punishment supposed to match it?
Let me guess--you're one of those people who thinks that corporate executives should get many years in prison rather than fines because of the economic damage their misdeeds cause.
Well, movie pirates likewise cause millions in economic damage.
but once they put their most recent spam guard or whatever in about 9 months ago I have received zero spam through hotmail. By zero, I mean ZERO and all my regular mail has gone through. I dont know what they did, but it was amazing.
Of course, I was (am) paying $19.95 a year for 10 measely gigabytes, so there has to be some other benefit:)
(I use the hotmail account strictly as a backup account.. for this reason, it is quite good that it does not fill up with junk as I routinely go weeks without checking it)
in practice, for virtually all countries, and especially all democracies (and Malaysia is one, to the first approximation), per capita GDP is a pretty good predictor of "average income" even if we understand average to mean median. The Gini (income disparity) Coefficient for Malaysia is around 0.46 - 0.49 (depending on who you believe) - a bit high, but not unreasonably so. As of a few years ago, Malaysia's poverty rate was around 5% - defined by a household earning US $134 or less a month. Even at the malaysian definition of poverty, it would not take a worker 1100 hours to afford say, $200, for a copy of XP.
Again, I repeat-- the wired article is full of shit. Of course, i got modded troll for it, but so goes slashdot.
because people overclock their systems and then try to claim warranty repair. sometimes, the overclocking is done by a middleman who re-labels chips. when the chip melts, the ball falls somewhere between intel and the innocent but bilked customer. this helps cut down on that.
Hi! And welcome to the Internet! We're glad to have you aboard.
Just to get you started, I'll give you a quick hint: virtually every internet discussion on spam includes some high and mighty moron that claims that by not giving out his email address, he never gets spam.
The problem is, that for every one of those, there are plenty more who follow the same precautions and yet get plenty of spam to those accounts for a variety of reasons. Clearly, your soution is not the answer to "how to never get spam."
A good rule for using the internet is to read a few discussions before you post. This way, you will be less likely to post something that makes you look naive. So sit back, relax, and enjoy a steaming hot cup of STFU while you read and learn!
media is locked down to prevent piracy; users lose some abilities that they previously had.
lock is broken; media is pirated.
go up two bullet points; repeat indefinately.
How to break the cycle?
Method 1 - the stupid method - rant about basic issues of copyright like whether it should exist at all. insult the RIAA/MPAA and accuse them of being worse than hitler and thus antagonizing the situation more. talk about the loophole technology of the week, be it freenet or the MIT 'on demand' system or bittorrent or whatever while giving a "substantial noninfringing uses" wink wink.
Method 2 - the reasonable method - foster a culture that respects copyrights and really and truly frowns upon piracy. rational behaviour leads to being able to enter into sane dialog with rightsholders about the future of intellectual property in a digital age, including looking at which areas of IPR are out of date or need revision. the culture of respect and no-tolerance-for-pirates allows for a wider range of useful services to be deployed that are now possible thanks to new technology. everybody wins.
Hi - thanks for your response. I mostly disagree, but at least your response was rational.
I wrote a longer response, but alas Firefox ate it. My fault. So, you're getting the abbreviated version.
First you accuse me of mischaracterizing the FFII. If you read carefully (I believe the first parenthesis in my response) I clearly wrote that this was the view of the one cambridge ffii presenter.
Next, you attempt to equate a sound bite's use of the word "trivial" with "nonobvious", which sounds to me like a bit spin-doctoring by you. But, even if you were right, the fact is that airplanes crash occasionally too, and yet it's still better than walking.
Your macroeconomic study link is very useful and your comment about software patents being an economic issue is dead-on. I will read your links for more.
Your comment about no software patents being the default argument position is dubious at best as the counter argument (which in fact you allude to using the term 'intertia') could be made quite easily - patents have worked quite well for many years. Yes, i agree the system has been flawed and needs reform, but the fundamental idea is sound. Why should software be any different? To claim that you have absolutely the default position is nonsense; it's a debate tactic, not a reality. In reality, neither side can claim absolute right to this claim.
To answer your question about my friend's patent: it is a pure mathematical manipulation to produce a result. there is no lab test equivalent, though it took deep insight into the structure of the underlyng physical mechanisms to devise this algorithm.
Put another way: if a computer scientist today devised an algorithm that could look at a computer screen and identify the people on it (say, using a database of mug shots or something) should not this person be able to patent this? this is novel, nonobvious, requires considerable expertise, has extreme commercial applicability (ignore any ominous political implications of the example--just use it as an example), and is also purely mathematical / algorithmic. why should this person not be able to benefit from such an invention any more than a man who invents a clever vaccum cleaner?
Open Source Note: Indeed, open source advocates should in this case WELCOME software patents: without them, the developer of the facial recognition algorithms would have to be very very selective in releasing even binaries of his algorithms in order to guarantee fair reward for his investment. with strong patent protection, he could release his work under a variety of open source licenses (not necesarily GPL) to allow people to build great systems on top of his work while, again, maintaining his fair reward.
Ignore software for a moment. Two things are bloody obvious to all but the extreme fringe: one, the patent system as we know it has deep fundamental problems and anachronisms that need to be addressed such as length of copyrights, some stupid patents being given, internationalization issues, and so forth.
Two: having a patent system is much better than not having one at all. I challenge you to find me one legitimate study that would claim that countries and regions without strong patent systems today woud be better off without them. Yes, if you're Angola it might make strategic sense as, in a manner of speaking, you've got nothing to give (sorry Angola). But for the developed world, it's just not tenable. Go back to even the ideals of the french revolution and see how far their attempt at patentlessness went (a few months, before they ran back to it).
Most of your post is uninformed bullshit. However, I will only respond to this bit:
what is the reality of patents (any patent) nowadays: 1- they don't protect the individual inventor (they're FAR too expensive and complex to get and to defend)
Bullshit. Hundreds of brilliant individual patentholders make millions of dollars every year from patents that they have transferred to large companies who make useful goods and services for the wide world out of them.
2- industrial patents don't even protect big companies (there's always a way to find another process to reach the same goal). in that case it is, at best, a commercial argument, to have a patent
So your argument then, basically, is that patents foster innovation. I thought you were arguing AGAINST patents. Asshat.
3- as no big invention happened since microcomputer revolution in 70's 80's, everything is merely "innovation", ie. rehash of old ideas. heck, i've even seen one company trying to apply for practically the same (industrial) patent that was granted to my great-grandfather almost one century ago (and tha fell into public domain long ago). and they'll probably be granted for it.
This is so stupid it's not even worth attacking. No new ideas since the 80s?
4- patent offices are run extremely extremely bad (that goes for USPTO as well a for EPO), and it'd be very very expensive to improve them. they are damn slow, too.
Define "very very" expensive. Let's say it cost a billion dollars. That's a pimple on a flea compared to the trillions of dollars involved in revenue.
5- because of 4, even "innovation" is permantently under threat of "submarine patents".
Let me guess.. you just learned about that in undergraduate business 101 today. Yes, there are areas where the patent system needs reform. But somehow, despite your ludicrous claim in point 3, innovation and invention continue. (your use of "innovation" vs "invention" is nonstandard.. I know you probably got it from some MBA for idiots lass, but I think you didn't fully understand the nuances).
6- a lot of companies start to spend more time (and money) to protect their "IP" than to actually do research and development.
so? And it costs 10 times more to promote a bottle of Dasani water than it does to make it. What's your point?
I was invited to talk in this friday's software patents forum at Cambridge University (UK) as I was one of the few people they could dig up who would actually speak on the "pro" side for software patents.
What I found out was that the FFII side (at least that presenting at cambridge, according to the position papers they have posted on the indymedia website) was not actually arguing against software patents--they are arguing against "bad" software patents, which in their view (and mine) includes certain dubious business method patents that we have all heard rehashed here a billion times and whatever else they happen to disagree with that week.
Clearly, this same argument can be made against *any* bad (overbroad, overobvious, etc) patents that from time to time patent authorities issue. however, only idiots (and I say this matter of factly--you have to be a complete idiot--not a free thinker with advanced ideas on information distribution on innovation, not an alternative genuis who sees a bigger picture and thinks outside the box, but an uninformed idiot) favor complete abolition of the patent system.
So lo and behold I would find myself arguing an unwinnable cause. If i brought up the case of my friend who started a small company based on a software algorithm that takes (the data from a lab test) and outputs (useful diagnostic information) and righly claim that the only legitimate way in his case to prevent big business from stealing his and his small staff's four years of work is with patent protection (in his particular case, which i am not going into the details of, other forms of protection would not be applicable), the FFII would say "well, that's one of the good types of patents... we're not against those."
Consequently, I denied the invitation.
However, for the rest of you who are ready to go to protests and do whatever nonsense because somebody told you that "software patents are bad." Do more research. Lobby not against software patents, but instead for overall improvements to the patent mechanism to better vet obvious and silly patents, especially in software. If you don't do this and instead stick to an indefensible line of "NO SOFTWARE PATENTS, PERIOD" there is a high probability that you will be defeated and the wosrst of all possible outcomes will become a reality.
"Marketing driven" is the technological equivalent of calling somebody a nazi in a political discussion. It's unfair.
how about "Consumer surplus driven?" When comapnies can offer a range of products, then customers can choose the model that best suits them. Of course, in order to keep everybody's costs down (including ultimately the consumer), there are bound to be similarities between a family of products. By forcing companies to spend more time on locking mechanisms to prevent this sort of shenanigan, you ultimately increase the price for everybody without increasing quality one bit.
I tried installing Zoo Tycoon on my other computer and saying 'Look honey, cute bears' but she just didn't bite."
Don't know if this was supposed to be funny or what, but I'd start to feel bad about myself if the women I dated responded to such condescention with anything other than a slap to the head.
That said, while I am not much of a gamer now, when I was an undergraduate several years ago I stayed up four straight days playing Sid Meier's Colonization while my girlfriend of the time tolerated it with good humor (as a one time thing). Ah, she was an angel..
i encourage you to go to south korea, moscow, thailand, kuala lumpur, jakarta, rome, or any other place in the world (basically, anywhere outside of the USA) where it's trivial to get pirated dvds and see what percentage of them say 'screener copy' at the bottom at some point in the film.
In the age of dvd burners, the studios should just have a machine that hand-burns each of the screener copies with the name of the recipient in about four thousand random places in the movie -- some very subtly and some very obviously.
whoever modded me a troll doesn't understand basic economics.
Not buying from one part of an oligopoly WILL make the oligopoly stronger.
Not quite economics 101, but because I posted something from economics 102 that the "i'll only give it 2 seconds thought" geniuses can't immediately grasp, i get labelled a troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you just make up these alleged rights as you go along, or is there actual thought involved?
Read very very carefully:
Hacking into a system = ILLEGAL.
not 'illegal unless they are actually good guys on the inside then it is ok'.
not 'illegal unless they are writing an article then it's ok'
not 'illegal unless they are just student 'security researchers''
just plain ILLEGAL.
Since you're such a genius literalist, how about you learn that the US Second Amendment is basically based on the VA (1776) and MA (1780) bills of rights, both of whose "right to bear arms" clauses are clearly tied to the notion of a "common defense." The VA BoR even specifically refers to those having the rights to bear arms being specially trained.
Of course, this all misses the larger picture still, which is that the framers recognized their own infallability and made provisions in the constitution for it to be a living changing document EITHER through interpretation or revision.
The constitution is not the secular equivalent of the fundamentalists literal bible handed down from on high, despite the fantasies of certain sloped forehead groups.
china, on the other hand, IS an orwellian state.
big difference.
If all he wants is to educate us, then let him do it without the karma points.
it is common practice on slashdot to mark somebody a troll that points out the obvious and regular hypocricies of the slashdot crowd. see my feedback - it regularly alternates between -1 troll and +5 whatever.
Mod parent down.
I am a pilot who flies in the USA and in Europe. In the USA, weather information is free. In Europe, it is not. NO open source weather network has sprung up in europe. The TV news provides some information, but very very little of interest to pilots.
The thing is, given all the airports already in place who could benefit from this (that is to say, a distributed set of reporting stations), you'd think that your sort of community network would just spring up. Well, it hasn't and won't. Why? Because the competitive market has turned out to be a pretty efficient mechanism for bringing weather data to those who need it.
Do a tiny bit of research on Toys R Us stock price over the last 5 years. Yes, it went up during the dot com days and then fell back down, but other than that it has been remarkably steady. Clearly, it is no 'sinking ship.' Actually, it is the best brand in toy retailing and the category leader there, having beaten the living snot out of Kaybee Toys, Kiddie City, and others over the years.
To call Toys-R-Us stupid is just you telling a story that does not exist; or, at least, the facts don't seem to bear it out.
You may be right about the amazon greed bit though; they did not seem to consider that a mutual exclusivity contract can cut both ways..
Sigh. Would it be too much to ask you to think for one minute before posting? What the hell do you think 'retirement funds' invest in? That's right - for profit businesses! So when you hurt for-profit companies, you hurt the poor old people with the retirement funds AND ultimately the set painters and whatever other lovable tramp characters you want to put in your menagerie.
The "Adapt or your business model dies" argument of yours in this case is bullshit. There is a difference between a real technological shift and new methods of crime. The existence of bricks don't obsolete car windows or cause us to scream about how the car window manufacturers need to come up with new brick-resistant windows or go out of business. Rather, we say "find the idiots who are throwing bricks through windows." Movies have kept up with technological shifts in moviemaking quite well. But piracy is still piracy, even if you try to excuse it as "some kid downloading a copy of crossroads." at the end of the day, IN AGGREGATE, that kid IS hurting your hypothetical retirement fund.
Let me guess--you're one of those people who thinks that corporate executives should get many years in prison rather than fines because of the economic damage their misdeeds cause.
Well, movie pirates likewise cause millions in economic damage.
Of course, I was (am) paying $19.95 a year for 10 measely gigabytes, so there has to be some other benefit :)
(I use the hotmail account strictly as a backup account.. for this reason, it is quite good that it does not fill up with junk as I routinely go weeks without checking it)
in practice, for virtually all countries, and especially all democracies (and Malaysia is one, to the first approximation), per capita GDP is a pretty good predictor of "average income" even if we understand average to mean median. The Gini (income disparity) Coefficient for Malaysia is around 0.46 - 0.49 (depending on who you believe) - a bit high, but not unreasonably so. As of a few years ago, Malaysia's poverty rate was around 5% - defined by a household earning US $134 or less a month. Even at the malaysian definition of poverty, it would not take a worker 1100 hours to afford say, $200, for a copy of XP.
Again, I repeat-- the wired article is full of shit. Of course, i got modded troll for it, but so goes slashdot.
(of course, i got modde
Support: The Malaysia per capita GDP is around US $10k. (Source: CIA World Fact Book)
Conclusion: The wired article is full of shit.
because people overclock their systems and then try to claim warranty repair. sometimes, the overclocking is done by a middleman who re-labels chips. when the chip melts, the ball falls somewhere between intel and the innocent but bilked customer. this helps cut down on that.
Just to get you started, I'll give you a quick hint: virtually every internet discussion on spam includes some high and mighty moron that claims that by not giving out his email address, he never gets spam.
The problem is, that for every one of those, there are plenty more who follow the same precautions and yet get plenty of spam to those accounts for a variety of reasons. Clearly, your soution is not the answer to "how to never get spam."
A good rule for using the internet is to read a few discussions before you post. This way, you will be less likely to post something that makes you look naive. So sit back, relax, and enjoy a steaming hot cup of STFU while you read and learn!
explain to me again why it should be illegal to be able to pay a radio station to play your song?
How to break the cycle?
Method 1 - the stupid method - rant about basic issues of copyright like whether it should exist at all. insult the RIAA/MPAA and accuse them of being worse than hitler and thus antagonizing the situation more. talk about the loophole technology of the week, be it freenet or the MIT 'on demand' system or bittorrent or whatever while giving a "substantial noninfringing uses" wink wink.
Method 2 - the reasonable method - foster a culture that respects copyrights and really and truly frowns upon piracy. rational behaviour leads to being able to enter into sane dialog with rightsholders about the future of intellectual property in a digital age, including looking at which areas of IPR are out of date or need revision. the culture of respect and no-tolerance-for-pirates allows for a wider range of useful services to be deployed that are now possible thanks to new technology. everybody wins.
I wrote a longer response, but alas Firefox ate it. My fault. So, you're getting the abbreviated version.
First you accuse me of mischaracterizing the FFII. If you read carefully (I believe the first parenthesis in my response) I clearly wrote that this was the view of the one cambridge ffii presenter.
Next, you attempt to equate a sound bite's use of the word "trivial" with "nonobvious", which sounds to me like a bit spin-doctoring by you. But, even if you were right, the fact is that airplanes crash occasionally too, and yet it's still better than walking.
Your macroeconomic study link is very useful and your comment about software patents being an economic issue is dead-on. I will read your links for more.
Your comment about no software patents being the default argument position is dubious at best as the counter argument (which in fact you allude to using the term 'intertia') could be made quite easily - patents have worked quite well for many years. Yes, i agree the system has been flawed and needs reform, but the fundamental idea is sound. Why should software be any different? To claim that you have absolutely the default position is nonsense; it's a debate tactic, not a reality. In reality, neither side can claim absolute right to this claim.
To answer your question about my friend's patent: it is a pure mathematical manipulation to produce a result. there is no lab test equivalent, though it took deep insight into the structure of the underlyng physical mechanisms to devise this algorithm.
Put another way: if a computer scientist today devised an algorithm that could look at a computer screen and identify the people on it (say, using a database of mug shots or something) should not this person be able to patent this? this is novel, nonobvious, requires considerable expertise, has extreme commercial applicability (ignore any ominous political implications of the example--just use it as an example), and is also purely mathematical / algorithmic. why should this person not be able to benefit from such an invention any more than a man who invents a clever vaccum cleaner?
Open Source Note: Indeed, open source advocates should in this case WELCOME software patents: without them, the developer of the facial recognition algorithms would have to be very very selective in releasing even binaries of his algorithms in order to guarantee fair reward for his investment. with strong patent protection, he could release his work under a variety of open source licenses (not necesarily GPL) to allow people to build great systems on top of his work while, again, maintaining his fair reward.
Ignore software for a moment. Two things are bloody obvious to all but the extreme fringe: one, the patent system as we know it has deep fundamental problems and anachronisms that need to be addressed such as length of copyrights, some stupid patents being given, internationalization issues, and so forth.
Two: having a patent system is much better than not having one at all. I challenge you to find me one legitimate study that would claim that countries and regions without strong patent systems today woud be better off without them. Yes, if you're Angola it might make strategic sense as, in a manner of speaking, you've got nothing to give (sorry Angola). But for the developed world, it's just not tenable. Go back to even the ideals of the french revolution and see how far their attempt at patentlessness went (a few months, before they ran back to it).
what is the reality of patents (any patent) nowadays:
1- they don't protect the individual inventor (they're FAR too expensive and complex to get and to defend)
Bullshit. Hundreds of brilliant individual patentholders make millions of dollars every year from patents that they have transferred to large companies who make useful goods and services for the wide world out of them.
2- industrial patents don't even protect big companies (there's always a way to find another process to reach the same goal). in that case it is, at best, a commercial argument, to have a patent
So your argument then, basically, is that patents foster innovation. I thought you were arguing AGAINST patents. Asshat.
3- as no big invention happened since microcomputer revolution in 70's 80's, everything is merely "innovation", ie. rehash of old ideas. heck, i've even seen one company trying to apply for practically the same (industrial) patent that was granted to my great-grandfather almost one century ago (and tha fell into public domain long ago). and they'll probably be granted for it.
This is so stupid it's not even worth attacking. No new ideas since the 80s?
4- patent offices are run extremely extremely bad (that goes for USPTO as well a for EPO), and it'd be very very expensive to improve them. they are damn slow, too.
Define "very very" expensive. Let's say it cost a billion dollars. That's a pimple on a flea compared to the trillions of dollars involved in revenue.
5- because of 4, even "innovation" is permantently under threat of "submarine patents".
Let me guess.. you just learned about that in undergraduate business 101 today. Yes, there are areas where the patent system needs reform. But somehow, despite your ludicrous claim in point 3, innovation and invention continue. (your use of "innovation" vs "invention" is nonstandard.. I know you probably got it from some MBA for idiots lass, but I think you didn't fully understand the nuances).
6- a lot of companies start to spend more time (and money) to protect their "IP" than to actually do research and development.
so? And it costs 10 times more to promote a bottle of Dasani water than it does to make it. What's your point?
I wrote about a specific incident happening this friday that is directly relevant to the event with which i am peripherally connected.
God slashdot is full of morons sometmes.
What I found out was that the FFII side (at least that presenting at cambridge, according to the position papers they have posted on the indymedia website) was not actually arguing against software patents--they are arguing against "bad" software patents, which in their view (and mine) includes certain dubious business method patents that we have all heard rehashed here a billion times and whatever else they happen to disagree with that week.
Clearly, this same argument can be made against *any* bad (overbroad, overobvious, etc) patents that from time to time patent authorities issue. however, only idiots (and I say this matter of factly--you have to be a complete idiot--not a free thinker with advanced ideas on information distribution on innovation, not an alternative genuis who sees a bigger picture and thinks outside the box, but an uninformed idiot) favor complete abolition of the patent system.
So lo and behold I would find myself arguing an unwinnable cause. If i brought up the case of my friend who started a small company based on a software algorithm that takes (the data from a lab test) and outputs (useful diagnostic information) and righly claim that the only legitimate way in his case to prevent big business from stealing his and his small staff's four years of work is with patent protection (in his particular case, which i am not going into the details of, other forms of protection would not be applicable), the FFII would say "well, that's one of the good types of patents... we're not against those."
Consequently, I denied the invitation.
However, for the rest of you who are ready to go to protests and do whatever nonsense because somebody told you that "software patents are bad." Do more research. Lobby not against software patents, but instead for overall improvements to the patent mechanism to better vet obvious and silly patents, especially in software. If you don't do this and instead stick to an indefensible line of "NO SOFTWARE PATENTS, PERIOD" there is a high probability that you will be defeated and the wosrst of all possible outcomes will become a reality.
how about "Consumer surplus driven?" When comapnies can offer a range of products, then customers can choose the model that best suits them. Of course, in order to keep everybody's costs down (including ultimately the consumer), there are bound to be similarities between a family of products. By forcing companies to spend more time on locking mechanisms to prevent this sort of shenanigan, you ultimately increase the price for everybody without increasing quality one bit.
Don't know if this was supposed to be funny or what, but I'd start to feel bad about myself if the women I dated responded to such condescention with anything other than a slap to the head.
That said, while I am not much of a gamer now, when I was an undergraduate several years ago I stayed up four straight days playing Sid Meier's Colonization while my girlfriend of the time tolerated it with good humor (as a one time thing). Ah, she was an angel..
i encourage you to go to south korea, moscow, thailand, kuala lumpur, jakarta, rome, or any other place in the world (basically, anywhere outside of the USA) where it's trivial to get pirated dvds and see what percentage of them say 'screener copy' at the bottom at some point in the film.
Screener copy != Studio itself.
learn the difference.
In the age of dvd burners, the studios should just have a machine that hand-burns each of the screener copies with the name of the recipient in about four thousand random places in the movie -- some very subtly and some very obviously.
whoever modded me a troll doesn't understand basic economics.
Not buying from one part of an oligopoly WILL make the oligopoly stronger.
Not quite economics 101, but because I posted something from economics 102 that the "i'll only give it 2 seconds thought" geniuses can't immediately grasp, i get labelled a troll.