Quite frankly, your post does not make any sense. It doesn't seem like you're trying to troll so let me help you out.
Firstly, your right to get paid for your work actually goes hand in hand with my right to resell an item I bought. The word "resell" suggests that it has been sold in the first place and that a payment has taken place. I do have the right (under the first sale doctrine in the US and similar legal rulings in Europe) to resell an item I have bought, such as a disc containing copyrighted material.
Secondly, if I purchase a game from a friend or from a used games store, I have paid for it. Only if I steal it from my friend/store would I be a thief. I might not have paid anything to you, but then you've already had your money from the original sale of that product.
You seem to think that you are entitled to a cut from each resale of something you originally created or sold. Think for a minute how that would play out when taken to its logical conclusion; homeowners would have to pay the architect and building firm a fee when they bought or sold a house, used car owners would have to pay the manufacturer a fee when selling a used car, people selling used cell phones would have to pay the manufacturer a fee when selling it on the used market. Then you have all the people selling stuff like exercise bikes on Craigslist, used clothes on Ebay, etc.
To be honest, "morals" is the wrong choice of word. These might be your beliefs or your wants, but none of them are compatible with the legal position in the US and Europe, nor are they realistic in any way whatsoever.
Why bother to convert though? The natural way to "speak a language" such as metric is to use it as your first language; not convert between the two.
Most car manufacturers publish fuel consumption figures in metric and imperial, so the natural way would be to know what your litres per 100 would be, and what this actually means in reality.
We have a weird situation here in the UK. All fuel is sold by the litre - but no one knows what litres per 100km means or how the cost of a litre of gas will affect them. We all refer to MPG and we know that a gallon is about 4.5x the cost of a litre (yes, our gallons have more litres than yours).
For me, it's about the convenience and cost. I use a fairly high spec PC I built myself and refused to double the price by buying a top end graphics card, so I spent £100 on a 6870 instead.
I got my XBox 360 in 2008 and paid £300 for it. (The mid-life RROD resulted in repair/replacement by Microsoft free of charge). To this day, that single unit still plays all the new games released for it. In five years time, will today's top end PC still play the newest games released for the PC?
I'll probably buy the new XBox to play games, but like you I'm disappointed that saves will be in the cloud, particularly as it comes with a 500GB HDD. We saw with SIM City what can happen when this goes wrong, and its not like XBL has never had an outage either.
Sure, I could get a better PC which would probably have better graphics - at least in the short term. But for gaming I prefer the convenience of the console, being able to fit it in my TV cabinet, and the knowledge that I can buy a game and it will just work.
The XBL Gold requirement annoys me too. I used to use Sky Go (my satellite provider's version of IPTV) for when the other TVs were in use, but I soon realised that for not much more than the XBL cost I could get a proper HD box with all the channels.
Not to mention the insane amount of paid time off many Europeans get. Honestly, I have a lot of friends in these countries. Many are out of work needlessly. If the government would unpucker its asshole and allow the crap people to be fired, the companies wouldnt be so afraid to hire new ones.
I agree that it's often too difficult to fire underachievers but sometimes this is also attributable to management capability as much as anything else.
On the topic of paid time off, in the UK there is a legal minimum of 28 days paid leave. This can include bank holidays such as Christmas and New Years Day. Typically, many workplaces offer between 20-25 days depending on length of service plus the eight bank holidays on top.
When taken throughout the year, these days are usually enough to allow employees to recharge their batteries, go travelling, and deal with all those extra situations like taking a few days off for a house move etc. A healthy and refreshed workforce is often a productive workforce.
I would be concerned at the increased unemployment as farmers, abattoir workers and everyone else involved in the production of real meat are replaced by lab technicians and scientists.
On a more personal note, will the taste be the same? For medical reasons, I must follow a gluten free diet - and despite wider availability and better quality of food than in the past, they still haven't been able to come up with something exactly the same "real" bread. Why would it be any easier to replicate the taste of a fine steak?
Absolute nonsense. Some of us "idiots with no internet skills" have simply considered all the options and decided we would rather buy a device from Samsung/HTC/Apple/Nokia etc.
Personally, I use an iPhone because I prefer the way its software operates vs Android. As a superior internet user, perhaps you would be kind enough to point me to the cheaper device from Asia which runs iOS?
You're right that a lot of people in corporations will only ever use email, however you will find that many more will also use the calendar features as well as all the other multitude of functionality supported by Exchange & Outlook. And when you have many people needing this functionality, it doesn't make sense to support multiple configurations to support both classes of users.
For many businesses, hiring competent Exchange admins is far easier than hiring multiple admins who specialise in Zarafa & Postfix (more than one specialist will naturally be required for absence cover, so the common belief that one Linux admin can replace multiple Windows admins isn't necessarily true in reality).
Then you have the additional challenge of IT Helpdesk support for users. The majority of outsourced helpdesks will be trained in Exchange/Outlook setups, as will most applicants for in-house support roles. What is the additional cost involved in training helpdesk workers in setting up, troubleshooting and supporting the Zafara Outlook connector and plugins?
But AD on Linux doesn't equate to an easy migration from Exchange. In the business world, Exchange is still king and the integration between email, calendaring and the Outlook client has not yet been replicated in an effective manner by its competitors.
Unless you avoid cellphones altogether (dumbphones included), you will be contributing towards cellular patents. In the case of dumbphones this is likely to be FRAND patents on the technology used for transmitting & receiving wireless signals as well as the tech used in the proprietary chipsets which make the phone work.
I could see changing the file system as a possibility in the medium term. More and more of the people I talk to (including non technical users) very rarely hook up their phone to a computer except for charging it and most people only ever get to insert their SD card once - when they first setup the phone.
ActiveSync is more problematic to replace, given the widespread nature of Outlook and the growing nature of BYOD in workplaces. Maybe the alternative is for manufacturers or Google to offer this functionality as an optional extra, so that those people who don't need it can save on the licensing fee and those people who use it for work can claim back the cost on expenses.
What they did was a mistake and it was wrong to do so. But are we sure it's actually a crime?
Looking at the facts:-
- ESEA released software which people downloaded and willingly installed so it would be a big stretch to call it a bot net. - The software did what it said on the tin but it also did something else without advertising this fact to the users. - What it was doing is probably only relevant if mining bitcoins was illegal anyway.
So what makes ESEA's software any different from operating systems which run processes in the background without explicitly stating which processes these are? What is the difference compared to some of the TV catch up services (e.g. Sky catch-up and BBC iPlayer) which use P2P to offload bandwidth usage from the providers onto the users of the software?
IANAL etc but I'm genuinely interested to understand what law might have been broken here and whether there is any legal precedent.
When did Google cross over to the Dark Side (TM)? Does anyone know?
1st April 2004.
It was when GMail launched. The first system that read your private email in order to advertise at you.
I never understood this argument. It is more evil to show me adverts for things I might be interested in, than to waste time and bandwidth advertising stuff I have absolutely no use for?
Of course, they have huge value to those who engage in illegal trading exactly because there is no government backing, but is that the kind of thing I want to be indirectly involved in?
Bitcoins have value to those who trade on the Silkroad and other similar websites, not because there is no government backing, but because they allow the buyer and seller to remain anonymous to each other, and the provide a degree of anonymity which is not possible with traditional methods of electronic banking (you can follow the paper trail to see that I transferred Bitcoins to the Silk Road, but you can't see whether I bought anything, or who from).
Of course, cash (notes/coins) have huge value to those who engage in illegal trading - for precisely the same reason, but you don't hear people wanting to shut down cash anytime soon...
Bitcoin's most obvious vulnerability is the 51% attack - where the attacker controls over 50% of the computing power of the Bitcoin network. Although there is not that much relative profit in doing such an attack, if it was ever to take place, it would certainly destroy confidence in Bitcoin and would probably render it useless.
There are two possible candidates for such an attack:-
1. A rouge mining pool or collection of pools decide to implement a 51% attack. The most popular Bitcoin pool (BTCGuild) currently has around 40% of the total hashing power on the Bitcoin network. The operator recognises this and has talked about raising fees as computational power increases to encourage users to move elsewhere. But as we know, not everyone is so altruistic. 2. With production of ASIC miners ramping up, there is the potential that a rogue manufacturer or user/pool could quickly gain control of the Bitcoin network.
I personally think this kind of attack is unlikely, as pool operators and miners (and miner manufacturers) are doing what they do for the money; if they intentionally devalue the currency, then their blank cheque evaporates. And I don't think rogue groups such as Anonymous or botnet operators would have the means to gain such a level of control; controlling a million mid-range household PCs might get you a reasonably sized profit, but they aren't going to get anywhere near 51% of the total computing power.
I have two versions of my apps in the app marketplaces. One is free and supported by ads that aren't too intrusive. The other costs money and is ad free. That way, I give potential users the choice of either seeing ads, paying a nominal amount, or simply not downloading the app at all.
You're right, us random developers aren't entitled to make constant revenue streams for devising basic apps, but when many of these basic apps you refer to are either free with ads or cost 69p (99c) without, sometimes the cost of the time it would take for me to reinvent the wheel just isn't worth it.
I use Ubuntu Server on my home file/media server and having only used Linux here and there back in the day, I selected Ubuntu because many of the easy to follow tutorials online were written with Ubuntu server in mind.
But what is fair market value? The $3.99 charged per episode by the iTunes store seems reasonable when compared against other forms of entertainment. I don't think making it DRM free should increase this price either.
The problem is, for every person like you who is prepared to pay fair market value, there are 10 people like me who pirate TV shows because a) it is free and b) there are no adverts included.
The letter is a PR stunt and reads as such. Who really puts something like this in a resignation letter?
"EA is an outstanding company with creative and talented employees, and it has been an honor to serve as the Company's CEO," Riccitiello said in a statement. "I am proud of what we have accomplished together, and after six years I feel it is the right time for me pass the baton and let new leadership take the Company into its next phase of innovation and growth. I remain very optimistic about EA's future — there is a world class team driving the Company's transition to the next generation of game consoles."
I used to use Napster and subsequently Audiogalaxy back over 28.8k dial-up and it took around 20 minutes to download an MP3 (always at 128Kbps bitrate). These days, I can get a 1080p Blu-Ray rip in that same 20 minutes. It was always a joy seeing a new track had been completed.
The thing I loved about Napster was that there was loads of cover songs and live performances on there and it was so easy to use.
Then when it all came tumbling down thanks to Metallica et al, seeing all the replacements pop up all over the place. Kazaa, Limewire etc all full of viruses and dodgy bitrate files.
These days, it's not worth the hassle to go pirate music anymore so I just pay for Spotify Premium. It is probably closest in functionality to Napster and has a great selection of mainstream and random tracks.
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Quite frankly, your post does not make any sense. It doesn't seem like you're trying to troll so let me help you out.
Firstly, your right to get paid for your work actually goes hand in hand with my right to resell an item I bought. The word "resell" suggests that it has been sold in the first place and that a payment has taken place. I do have the right (under the first sale doctrine in the US and similar legal rulings in Europe) to resell an item I have bought, such as a disc containing copyrighted material.
Secondly, if I purchase a game from a friend or from a used games store, I have paid for it. Only if I steal it from my friend/store would I be a thief. I might not have paid anything to you, but then you've already had your money from the original sale of that product.
You seem to think that you are entitled to a cut from each resale of something you originally created or sold. Think for a minute how that would play out when taken to its logical conclusion; homeowners would have to pay the architect and building firm a fee when they bought or sold a house, used car owners would have to pay the manufacturer a fee when selling a used car, people selling used cell phones would have to pay the manufacturer a fee when selling it on the used market. Then you have all the people selling stuff like exercise bikes on Craigslist, used clothes on Ebay, etc.
To be honest, "morals" is the wrong choice of word. These might be your beliefs or your wants, but none of them are compatible with the legal position in the US and Europe, nor are they realistic in any way whatsoever.
Why bother to convert though? The natural way to "speak a language" such as metric is to use it as your first language; not convert between the two.
Most car manufacturers publish fuel consumption figures in metric and imperial, so the natural way would be to know what your litres per 100 would be, and what this actually means in reality.
We have a weird situation here in the UK. All fuel is sold by the litre - but no one knows what litres per 100km means or how the cost of a litre of gas will affect them. We all refer to MPG and we know that a gallon is about 4.5x the cost of a litre (yes, our gallons have more litres than yours).
For me, it's about the convenience and cost. I use a fairly high spec PC I built myself and refused to double the price by buying a top end graphics card, so I spent £100 on a 6870 instead.
I got my XBox 360 in 2008 and paid £300 for it. (The mid-life RROD resulted in repair/replacement by Microsoft free of charge). To this day, that single unit still plays all the new games released for it. In five years time, will today's top end PC still play the newest games released for the PC?
I'll probably buy the new XBox to play games, but like you I'm disappointed that saves will be in the cloud, particularly as it comes with a 500GB HDD. We saw with SIM City what can happen when this goes wrong, and its not like XBL has never had an outage either.
Sure, I could get a better PC which would probably have better graphics - at least in the short term. But for gaming I prefer the convenience of the console, being able to fit it in my TV cabinet, and the knowledge that I can buy a game and it will just work.
The XBL Gold requirement annoys me too. I used to use Sky Go (my satellite provider's version of IPTV) for when the other TVs were in use, but I soon realised that for not much more than the XBL cost I could get a proper HD box with all the channels.
As someone who experienced the web in the early 90s and has continued to use it since, I prefer today's version.
If someone wants to see the 98% of crap, they can easily watch their cat videos. I personally find it easy enough to drown out the noise.
Not to mention the insane amount of paid time off many Europeans get. Honestly, I have a lot of friends in these countries. Many are out of work needlessly. If the government would unpucker its asshole and allow the crap people to be fired, the companies wouldnt be so afraid to hire new ones.
I agree that it's often too difficult to fire underachievers but sometimes this is also attributable to management capability as much as anything else.
On the topic of paid time off, in the UK there is a legal minimum of 28 days paid leave. This can include bank holidays such as Christmas and New Years Day. Typically, many workplaces offer between 20-25 days depending on length of service plus the eight bank holidays on top.
When taken throughout the year, these days are usually enough to allow employees to recharge their batteries, go travelling, and deal with all those extra situations like taking a few days off for a house move etc. A healthy and refreshed workforce is often a productive workforce.
If you steal billions and proceed to give that away, you should go to jail.
If you earn billions through a successful business and then proceed to give that away, then yes, you should be held in awe.
Out of interest, what percentage of your total lifetime earnings have you committed to giving to charity?
I would be concerned at the increased unemployment as farmers, abattoir workers and everyone else involved in the production of real meat are replaced by lab technicians and scientists.
On a more personal note, will the taste be the same? For medical reasons, I must follow a gluten free diet - and despite wider availability and better quality of food than in the past, they still haven't been able to come up with something exactly the same "real" bread. Why would it be any easier to replicate the taste of a fine steak?
Absolute nonsense. Some of us "idiots with no internet skills" have simply considered all the options and decided we would rather buy a device from Samsung/HTC/Apple/Nokia etc.
Personally, I use an iPhone because I prefer the way its software operates vs Android. As a superior internet user, perhaps you would be kind enough to point me to the cheaper device from Asia which runs iOS?
You're right that a lot of people in corporations will only ever use email, however you will find that many more will also use the calendar features as well as all the other multitude of functionality supported by Exchange & Outlook. And when you have many people needing this functionality, it doesn't make sense to support multiple configurations to support both classes of users.
For many businesses, hiring competent Exchange admins is far easier than hiring multiple admins who specialise in Zarafa & Postfix (more than one specialist will naturally be required for absence cover, so the common belief that one Linux admin can replace multiple Windows admins isn't necessarily true in reality).
Then you have the additional challenge of IT Helpdesk support for users. The majority of outsourced helpdesks will be trained in Exchange/Outlook setups, as will most applicants for in-house support roles. What is the additional cost involved in training helpdesk workers in setting up, troubleshooting and supporting the Zafara Outlook connector and plugins?
I believe Samba now supports Active Directory.
But AD on Linux doesn't equate to an easy migration from Exchange. In the business world, Exchange is still king and the integration between email, calendaring and the Outlook client has not yet been replicated in an effective manner by its competitors.
You mean like National Geographic? They are launching National Geographic Kids on Youtube Pay TV.
Unless you avoid cellphones altogether (dumbphones included), you will be contributing towards cellular patents. In the case of dumbphones this is likely to be FRAND patents on the technology used for transmitting & receiving wireless signals as well as the tech used in the proprietary chipsets which make the phone work.
I could see changing the file system as a possibility in the medium term. More and more of the people I talk to (including non technical users) very rarely hook up their phone to a computer except for charging it and most people only ever get to insert their SD card once - when they first setup the phone.
ActiveSync is more problematic to replace, given the widespread nature of Outlook and the growing nature of BYOD in workplaces. Maybe the alternative is for manufacturers or Google to offer this functionality as an optional extra, so that those people who don't need it can save on the licensing fee and those people who use it for work can claim back the cost on expenses.
What they did was a mistake and it was wrong to do so. But are we sure it's actually a crime?
Looking at the facts:-
- ESEA released software which people downloaded and willingly installed so it would be a big stretch to call it a bot net.
- The software did what it said on the tin but it also did something else without advertising this fact to the users.
- What it was doing is probably only relevant if mining bitcoins was illegal anyway.
So what makes ESEA's software any different from operating systems which run processes in the background without explicitly stating which processes these are? What is the difference compared to some of the TV catch up services (e.g. Sky catch-up and BBC iPlayer) which use P2P to offload bandwidth usage from the providers onto the users of the software?
IANAL etc but I'm genuinely interested to understand what law might have been broken here and whether there is any legal precedent.
When did Google cross over to the Dark Side (TM)? Does anyone know?
1st April 2004.
It was when GMail launched. The first system that read your private email in order to advertise at you.
I never understood this argument. It is more evil to show me adverts for things I might be interested in, than to waste time and bandwidth advertising stuff I have absolutely no use for?
Of course, they have huge value to those who engage in illegal trading exactly because there is no government backing, but is that the kind of thing I want to be indirectly involved in?
Bitcoins have value to those who trade on the Silkroad and other similar websites, not because there is no government backing, but because they allow the buyer and seller to remain anonymous to each other, and the provide a degree of anonymity which is not possible with traditional methods of electronic banking (you can follow the paper trail to see that I transferred Bitcoins to the Silk Road, but you can't see whether I bought anything, or who from).
Of course, cash (notes/coins) have huge value to those who engage in illegal trading - for precisely the same reason, but you don't hear people wanting to shut down cash anytime soon...
Bitcoin's most obvious vulnerability is the 51% attack - where the attacker controls over 50% of the computing power of the Bitcoin network. Although there is not that much relative profit in doing such an attack, if it was ever to take place, it would certainly destroy confidence in Bitcoin and would probably render it useless.
There are two possible candidates for such an attack:-
1. A rouge mining pool or collection of pools decide to implement a 51% attack. The most popular Bitcoin pool (BTCGuild) currently has around 40% of the total hashing power on the Bitcoin network. The operator recognises this and has talked about raising fees as computational power increases to encourage users to move elsewhere. But as we know, not everyone is so altruistic.
2. With production of ASIC miners ramping up, there is the potential that a rogue manufacturer or user/pool could quickly gain control of the Bitcoin network.
I personally think this kind of attack is unlikely, as pool operators and miners (and miner manufacturers) are doing what they do for the money; if they intentionally devalue the currency, then their blank cheque evaporates. And I don't think rogue groups such as Anonymous or botnet operators would have the means to gain such a level of control; controlling a million mid-range household PCs might get you a reasonably sized profit, but they aren't going to get anywhere near 51% of the total computing power.
I have two versions of my apps in the app marketplaces. One is free and supported by ads that aren't too intrusive. The other costs money and is ad free. That way, I give potential users the choice of either seeing ads, paying a nominal amount, or simply not downloading the app at all.
You're right, us random developers aren't entitled to make constant revenue streams for devising basic apps, but when many of these basic apps you refer to are either free with ads or cost 69p (99c) without, sometimes the cost of the time it would take for me to reinvent the wheel just isn't worth it.
I use Ubuntu Server on my home file/media server and having only used Linux here and there back in the day, I selected Ubuntu because many of the easy to follow tutorials online were written with Ubuntu server in mind.
But what is fair market value? The $3.99 charged per episode by the iTunes store seems reasonable when compared against other forms of entertainment. I don't think making it DRM free should increase this price either.
The problem is, for every person like you who is prepared to pay fair market value, there are 10 people like me who pirate TV shows because a) it is free and b) there are no adverts included.
The letter is a PR stunt and reads as such. Who really puts something like this in a resignation letter?
"EA is an outstanding company with creative and talented employees, and it has been an honor to serve as the Company's CEO," Riccitiello said in a statement. "I am proud of what we have accomplished together, and after six years I feel it is the right time for me pass the baton and let new leadership take the Company into its next phase of innovation and growth. I remain very optimistic about EA's future — there is a world class team driving the Company's transition to the next generation of game consoles."
Why would you need a CoW file system and a Linux host machine when they could just install Windows and a good antivirus scanner?
You could buy either; both platforms support the MP3 files that both of these stores supply.
I used to use Napster and subsequently Audiogalaxy back over 28.8k dial-up and it took around 20 minutes to download an MP3 (always at 128Kbps bitrate). These days, I can get a 1080p Blu-Ray rip in that same 20 minutes. It was always a joy seeing a new track had been completed.
The thing I loved about Napster was that there was loads of cover songs and live performances on there and it was so easy to use.
Then when it all came tumbling down thanks to Metallica et al, seeing all the replacements pop up all over the place. Kazaa, Limewire etc all full of viruses and dodgy bitrate files.
These days, it's not worth the hassle to go pirate music anymore so I just pay for Spotify Premium. It is probably closest in functionality to Napster and has a great selection of mainstream and random tracks.