I mute or turn off ads on TV pretty much all the time. Sometimes there's a funny ad that I like, but that's typically as far as it goes.
If you have a new product or service I've never heard of, then I may or may not want to hear from you. If you have a product or service I'm already not buying, then I have no need to be inundated with what are essentially lame 30-60 second TV shows that get re-run 5 times an hour.
My mom's dog is a bitch. My dog is a son of a a bitch.
Does saying so have any inherent barb against women? It's unquestionable whether some women *think* that's the case but I don't think it's *really* the case.
In common parlance "bitch" seems to be a specifically feminine "jerk" or "ass". The fact that we have a specific feminine insult doesn't have as much to do with sexism as it does with our language. Look at the close relatives of English and you'll see things like German's "die, der, das" in which nouns commonly have a masculine and feminine form as well as a default gender for every noun; "das Zimmer", "der Tisch", "die Kirsche".
Don't object to "bitch", object to being insulted. Or if you must object to "bitch" then also object to "woman", "man", "girl", and "boy" because they are also gender specific descriptions of a person.
I'm still not sure I understand the 95% straight vs. 5% gay thing. These are not cases of mutually exclusive goals nor are they necessarily opposed viewpoints.
I wouldn't suggest that the straight population shows any particular unity on this matter either. In some people's minds it might be "Us vs. Them" but for some of us it's just that little "...all men are created equal..." bit of our national heritage that gets to be the sticking point.
The founding fathers set forth their vision of a nation and of freedom without any exceptions. Maybe we should proceed as though we believed what they wrote.
Then why didn't they use any of the many, many available encryption methods that actually work rather than the very weak method they invented for this purpose?
Moreover bit by bit copies of DVDs are still playable. The encryption does *nothing* to prevent copying. The only thing the encryption *does* do is prevent players who haven't paid licensing fees for the *encryption*, not for the technology, from being made.
Thus, yes, they did encrypt them to keep you from being able to watch your movies however you see fit.
Protected from who? DVDs are encrypted to protect them from the end user, to keep you from watching a copy of a movie you bought legally.
You could have gotten the movie illegally, but you could also have gotten a guitar, a baseball bat or toilet paper illegally but we don't make laws on the legal uses of these items on that basis. You could use them to violate the law by vandalism, assault or copyright infringement but we don't yet have a law that says "You can't have a baseball bat because... ", "You can't have a guitar because...", or "You can't have toilet paper because...".
One of our cats crapped diarrhea into my mom's monitor. It smelled awful while the crap baked on the components but once cooled and sufficiently dried stopped smelling and continued to work.
Not insignificant is the apparent rise of the "griefing" style of gaming.
In Lineage II I've found a certain sort of freedom much different from EQ or SWG. You can do anything you like, there are consequences, but you can do it anyway. The leveling is straightforward and the combat at least at my low level has enough variability to keep me going back. Almost invariably however the "red names" or PKers are griefers. Instead of testing their mettle against similarly skilled or powerful opponents they would rather utterly decimate a lower leveled player oftentimes even visiting the newbie areas for the express purpose of making life hell for someone who can't fight back.
I played, briefly, on a PvP server in EQ and the situation was the same. I played The Realm and PvP was easily 90% of the griefing variety.
A friend of mine reported how he quit UO when someone got it in their head that it would be fun to steal everything they possibly could from him and destroy the rest. It was simply too much time and energy invested to have it all taken away by someone who could not be gotten back. There was no point in going back because recovering his stuff and status was not going to be any fun the second time around.
The fact that it takes time to build up a character or fortune is what gives you a sense of accomplishment. It also makes it that much more painful to lose it all. Thus far no design has been discovered to allow full PvP but to disallow the griefing so prevalent in gaming.
Part of what is killing (or has killed?) SWG is that the Developers have lost sight of so much of the original concept and mismanaged what they *have* produced. It was initially announced as a game that casual gamers and power gamers could play together.
The problem that resulted was that because their testing was so woefully inadequate players were able to very quickly "cap out" their characters in unanticipated ways. Their testing hadn't included bounds checking so when good resources showed up on the servers armor, weapons and medicine were suddenly far, *far* beyond what their testing environment had been set up to handle.
Now the powergamers had uber-weapons, armor, buffs and abilities and were burning through the existing content much too fast. What had been intended to keep the players busy for at least a year had been played out inside of 3-6 months. Then the Holocrons and the Jedi were introduced to maintain powergamer interest while the casual gamers were still trying to maintain a roleplay friendly and social environment.
The casual gamers began to catch up to the powergamers and gave in to the lure of the Holocrons and Jedi-dom and abandoned their roleplay and social play which had previously "kept them busy", enough so that they didn't notice how little content was in the game. Now that most of the players had adopted a power gaming attitude there simply wasn't enough content in the game. The fixes necessary to make a sustainable game took a back seat to the content needed to keep an entire community of powergamers busy.
Now they even had a hand in the acceleration of the community turning into powergamers who tore through content and they had to make the game more difficult somehow. They turned to rebalancing combat, which was necessary in its own right, but about that time management said "We need at least half of your manpower to be diverted into the Space Expansion".
Now there's an unfinished Combat Rebalance already partially implemented, broken professions, broken content and hundreds and thousands of disappointed players who have now done all of the available content, done all the professions they care to do and see nothing worthwhile being patched out until at least 4 months from now. The social play has been decimated by the Hologrind which turned everyone into an AFK zombie or a powergamer who consumed all the available content in far less time than the team anticipated.
New content to keep the powergamers busy? That's a neverending treadmill.
New content to keep the social gamers busy? That's a development nightmare. Social gamers are finicky and given the right environment tend to make their own content, given the wrong environment they blow you off altogether.
Stop the hologrind and unleash the AFK hordes upon a galaxy already short of spawns and content? That's a revenue bomb.
This is funny.
In California at least, Albertson's sells 3 brands of milk, Albertson's, Good Day and Berkeley Farms.
There was an antibiotic scare and everything from a particular dairy had to be pulled off the shelves and *poof*, none of the three brands were available. They are the *same* milk, produced at the *same* dairy by the *same* cows and yet at 3 different levels of pricing.
Good Day is invariably the cheapest with Albertson's in the middle and Berkeley Farms being the ritzy brand.
To complicate matters is the fact that Good Day is exclusively distributed by Albertson's making it a de facto store brand in pseudo-competition with an *actual* store brand.
And they're all still the same milk.
Re:Um...because using a computer is more complex?
on
Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 1
How exactly is being an end-user on a computer more complicated than being the end user of a car?
For 99% of what you want to do on a computer there's a simple interface consisting of labeled buttons, menus, etc. For all the thousands of things we expect a computer to be able to do, we also expect to have a labeled button that tells us what it will do. You are only expected to know when it is appropriate to use that button.
In cars we've trained everyone to one interface and insisted that all cars be relatively consistent to that interface. To the point that we don't label anything. How many hours of training does the average driver do before expecting to be an expert at it?
Computers seem complicated because we've spent so much time telling people how they are complicated whereas with cars we've spent at least an equal amount of time telling people how they are simple.
Actually...
There are some new licensing models on software being proposed, among them a per-person license in which every single employee who works with the software has to have a separately paid license.
I can't imagine companies being happy with the prospect of having to pay a separate license for each shift working on the same machine or having to buy a new license any time they have a temp in the office.
If they succeed in pushing this "innovative new business model" you can bet the employees are going to be the ones taking a dive. We'll be putting our software licenses on our resumes the same as we put certifications now.
Wouldn't you be banning the MAC address of a clueless user who got infected?
How likely is such a user to resort to reprogramming their MAC address as opposed to handing off to virus scanning software or someone more knowledgable about computers?
It's really difficult to deal with malicious users, but clueless users should be much easier to handle. Post signs, student newsletters, whatever telling people "If you can't connect then you may have been banned because of viral activity, call us to confirm your status and we'll move on from there."
People are so phobic about computer viruses these days it'll probably trigger a rash of panicky reinstalls but better individual machines than the whole network.
Maybe email servers should operate like a DNS server instead of as a spooling server, providing a route to the recipient rather than actually sending the mail itself. Let the spooling and sending happen upstream at the sender's location.
The sender takes the full bandwidth penalty of sending every copy of their email because even an "open relay" doesn't equate to infinite bandwidth the way it does now.
I could never put my finger on it, but having played Final Fantasy 7 on PC and on PSX, I much preferred the console experience.
I have a gamepad for my PC, I have no problem with the technical aspects of it and the "big" screen never impressed me so much. At about 10 years old I actually played Super Mario Bros. on the NES on a 25ft projection screen. *That* was impressive but the difference between my 17" monitor and the 27" TV not so much.
All things being equal, I prefer my games on a console and I don't know precisely why.
The paper ballot is printed, the voter reads it, confirms it is correct. Then they turn it in.
Nobody goes home with the paperwork from voting. You go home with one of this "I voted" stickers.
The machine counts up the votes. In the event of an error or challenge to the electronic vote the paper ballots are then the authority. Since they are, in theory, verified by the voters themselves their authority really can't be questioned.
If a voter can't verify their own vote for some reason then some allowance will have to be made, agreed, but scrapping the *entire* verifiable voting system because of a minority case doesn't make sense.
I try to stay out of Windows, but control+esc is just too easy to bother with having an extra key devoted to it.
And for gaming it's the absolute worst. Especially with some games that don't seem to properly switch control back to the OS when you minimize them. I alt-tab out of the game, pick up email or something and come back to find all of my mouse and/or keyboard activity was also messing with my game.
I'm watching the response from people here and now having read the article I find it kind of interesting.
The *most* critical systems are the ones most hard hit by this worm. The reason they are so hard hit is *because* they are critical. Admins are reluctant to break these systems by installing broken patches without due diligence of testing.
If the testing takes longer to complete than the worm takes to propagate, then we have a problem.
I think this is as good, if not a better, argument against Windows as I've ever seen. Their security is crap and the systems we've put in place to patch over their holes are biting us in the ass as badly as if we'd never tried to fix it at all.
I was very young at the time, but everything I've been taught was that PCs (as opposed to Apple/Mac) dominated early on because they were better business machines.
The business capabilities of the PCs were more easily translated into a home machine, games and all, than was the home computer into a business machine.
Perhaps it's not a raw comparison of speed or power and maybe I need to go read up on it. It's mostly academic anyway at this point.
You are arguing both sides now.
You're saying that Linux distributions must standardize and at the same time you're saying that they can't standardize. They're mutually exclusive arguments.
Also, do check out the LSB information. I believe it is exactly what you're talking about, even though you deny it exists.
Isn't that how PCs became the gaming platform to begin with? Apple was making everything user friendly, IBM and others were making everything faster and more capable.
When it came to making games having user friendly hardware and/or software didn't hold a candle to having more power.
While the situation may have evened out somewhat since then on the system side, the inertia is still too strong to anticipate much change.
If we can get good, fully featured and easy to use cross-platform libraries for everything that modern games need, we'll hopefully see a lot more releases but DirectX already has a good deal of momentum.
Hopefully, someday soon, recompiling the executable will be the difference between a Linux game and a Windows game.
Isn't it required in contract or licensing law that if a given clause is ruled illegal that the clause is rendered null and void?
Most of the licenses and legal stuff I've seen usually include another paragraph or so to the effect of "If part of this contract is deemed illegal, you can stop caring about that part but you're still bound by the rest."
If that wasn't the case, then hitmen would insist on written contracts because they couldn't be prosecuted for complying with the contract.
What makes you think the Linux even has a business model? Or that your imagined business model must carry over into every piece of software used on a Linux system?
If someone were willing to write the software to suit my needs and at a reasonable price point, I would buy it.
If someone insists that their product which is equivalent to a free product is in fact worth hundreds of dollars I am not going to give them my money. I am going to go with the free product.
This doesn't force Adobe or anyone else to give their product away for free. What it *does* do is forces them to compete on features and justify the high cost of their software.
If I could pay a reasonable sum for a superior product, I would. Your definition of "a reasonable sum" or "superior product" may not be the same as mine, nor does it have to be. Some people will only "buy" Open Source. Some people will only buy proprietary. Some people will weigh technical merit versus economic necessity and decide what suits them.
Or do you really think the Free Market economy is all bunk and we should have to pick from an approved list of proprietary vendors for everything technological?
If we work hard enough to pass some DMCA such nonsense in Iraq we can force them away from using any native-born technologies for fear of infringing some copyright or patent held in the U.S.
Then we have them forever sucking at the technological and bureaucratic teat of their "rightful rulers". We get paid when they infringe. We get paid when they license. We get paid until we see fit to call their "debt" to us paid.
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Relevance and timeliness is everything.
I mute or turn off ads on TV pretty much all the time. Sometimes there's a funny ad that I like, but that's typically as far as it goes.
If you have a new product or service I've never heard of, then I may or may not want to hear from you. If you have a product or service I'm already not buying, then I have no need to be inundated with what are essentially lame 30-60 second TV shows that get re-run 5 times an hour.
My mom's dog is a bitch. My dog is a son of a a bitch.
Does saying so have any inherent barb against women? It's unquestionable whether some women *think* that's the case but I don't think it's *really* the case.
In common parlance "bitch" seems to be a specifically feminine "jerk" or "ass". The fact that we have a specific feminine insult doesn't have as much to do with sexism as it does with our language. Look at the close relatives of English and you'll see things like German's "die, der, das" in which nouns commonly have a masculine and feminine form as well as a default gender for every noun; "das Zimmer", "der Tisch", "die Kirsche".
Don't object to "bitch", object to being insulted. Or if you must object to "bitch" then also object to "woman", "man", "girl", and "boy" because they are also gender specific descriptions of a person.
I'm still not sure I understand the 95% straight vs. 5% gay thing. These are not cases of mutually exclusive goals nor are they necessarily opposed viewpoints.
I wouldn't suggest that the straight population shows any particular unity on this matter either. In some people's minds it might be "Us vs. Them" but for some of us it's just that little "...all men are created equal..." bit of our national heritage that gets to be the sticking point.
The founding fathers set forth their vision of a nation and of freedom without any exceptions. Maybe we should proceed as though we believed what they wrote.
Close... the answer is "they don't give a fuck about pirates because they're making their money selling decryption, not movies."
Then why didn't they use any of the many, many available encryption methods that actually work rather than the very weak method they invented for this purpose?
Moreover bit by bit copies of DVDs are still playable. The encryption does *nothing* to prevent copying. The only thing the encryption *does* do is prevent players who haven't paid licensing fees for the *encryption*, not for the technology, from being made.
Thus, yes, they did encrypt them to keep you from being able to watch your movies however you see fit.
Protected from who? DVDs are encrypted to protect them from the end user, to keep you from watching a copy of a movie you bought legally.
You could have gotten the movie illegally, but you could also have gotten a guitar, a baseball bat or toilet paper illegally but we don't make laws on the legal uses of these items on that basis. You could use them to violate the law by vandalism, assault or copyright infringement but we don't yet have a law that says "You can't have a baseball bat because... ", "You can't have a guitar because...", or "You can't have toilet paper because...".
One of our cats crapped diarrhea into my mom's monitor. It smelled awful while the crap baked on the components but once cooled and sufficiently dried stopped smelling and continued to work.
Like hell was I opening it up to clean that out.
Not insignificant is the apparent rise of the "griefing" style of gaming.
In Lineage II I've found a certain sort of freedom much different from EQ or SWG. You can do anything you like, there are consequences, but you can do it anyway. The leveling is straightforward and the combat at least at my low level has enough variability to keep me going back. Almost invariably however the "red names" or PKers are griefers. Instead of testing their mettle against similarly skilled or powerful opponents they would rather utterly decimate a lower leveled player oftentimes even visiting the newbie areas for the express purpose of making life hell for someone who can't fight back.
I played, briefly, on a PvP server in EQ and the situation was the same. I played The Realm and PvP was easily 90% of the griefing variety.
A friend of mine reported how he quit UO when someone got it in their head that it would be fun to steal everything they possibly could from him and destroy the rest. It was simply too much time and energy invested to have it all taken away by someone who could not be gotten back. There was no point in going back because recovering his stuff and status was not going to be any fun the second time around.
The fact that it takes time to build up a character or fortune is what gives you a sense of accomplishment. It also makes it that much more painful to lose it all. Thus far no design has been discovered to allow full PvP but to disallow the griefing so prevalent in gaming.
Part of what is killing (or has killed?) SWG is that the Developers have lost sight of so much of the original concept and mismanaged what they *have* produced. It was initially announced as a game that casual gamers and power gamers could play together.
The problem that resulted was that because their testing was so woefully inadequate players were able to very quickly "cap out" their characters in unanticipated ways. Their testing hadn't included bounds checking so when good resources showed up on the servers armor, weapons and medicine were suddenly far, *far* beyond what their testing environment had been set up to handle.
Now the powergamers had uber-weapons, armor, buffs and abilities and were burning through the existing content much too fast. What had been intended to keep the players busy for at least a year had been played out inside of 3-6 months. Then the Holocrons and the Jedi were introduced to maintain powergamer interest while the casual gamers were still trying to maintain a roleplay friendly and social environment.
The casual gamers began to catch up to the powergamers and gave in to the lure of the Holocrons and Jedi-dom and abandoned their roleplay and social play which had previously "kept them busy", enough so that they didn't notice how little content was in the game. Now that most of the players had adopted a power gaming attitude there simply wasn't enough content in the game. The fixes necessary to make a sustainable game took a back seat to the content needed to keep an entire community of powergamers busy.
Now they even had a hand in the acceleration of the community turning into powergamers who tore through content and they had to make the game more difficult somehow. They turned to rebalancing combat, which was necessary in its own right, but about that time management said "We need at least half of your manpower to be diverted into the Space Expansion".
Now there's an unfinished Combat Rebalance already partially implemented, broken professions, broken content and hundreds and thousands of disappointed players who have now done all of the available content, done all the professions they care to do and see nothing worthwhile being patched out until at least 4 months from now. The social play has been decimated by the Hologrind which turned everyone into an AFK zombie or a powergamer who consumed all the available content in far less time than the team anticipated.
New content to keep the powergamers busy? That's a neverending treadmill.
New content to keep the social gamers busy? That's a development nightmare. Social gamers are finicky and given the right environment tend to make their own content, given the wrong environment they blow you off altogether.
Stop the hologrind and unleash the AFK hordes upon a galaxy already short of spawns and content? That's a revenue bomb.
This is funny. In California at least, Albertson's sells 3 brands of milk, Albertson's, Good Day and Berkeley Farms. There was an antibiotic scare and everything from a particular dairy had to be pulled off the shelves and *poof*, none of the three brands were available. They are the *same* milk, produced at the *same* dairy by the *same* cows and yet at 3 different levels of pricing. Good Day is invariably the cheapest with Albertson's in the middle and Berkeley Farms being the ritzy brand. To complicate matters is the fact that Good Day is exclusively distributed by Albertson's making it a de facto store brand in pseudo-competition with an *actual* store brand. And they're all still the same milk.
How exactly is being an end-user on a computer more complicated than being the end user of a car? For 99% of what you want to do on a computer there's a simple interface consisting of labeled buttons, menus, etc. For all the thousands of things we expect a computer to be able to do, we also expect to have a labeled button that tells us what it will do. You are only expected to know when it is appropriate to use that button. In cars we've trained everyone to one interface and insisted that all cars be relatively consistent to that interface. To the point that we don't label anything. How many hours of training does the average driver do before expecting to be an expert at it? Computers seem complicated because we've spent so much time telling people how they are complicated whereas with cars we've spent at least an equal amount of time telling people how they are simple.
Actually... There are some new licensing models on software being proposed, among them a per-person license in which every single employee who works with the software has to have a separately paid license. I can't imagine companies being happy with the prospect of having to pay a separate license for each shift working on the same machine or having to buy a new license any time they have a temp in the office. If they succeed in pushing this "innovative new business model" you can bet the employees are going to be the ones taking a dive. We'll be putting our software licenses on our resumes the same as we put certifications now.
Wouldn't you be banning the MAC address of a clueless user who got infected?
How likely is such a user to resort to reprogramming their MAC address as opposed to handing off to virus scanning software or someone more knowledgable about computers?
It's really difficult to deal with malicious users, but clueless users should be much easier to handle. Post signs, student newsletters, whatever telling people "If you can't connect then you may have been banned because of viral activity, call us to confirm your status and we'll move on from there."
People are so phobic about computer viruses these days it'll probably trigger a rash of panicky reinstalls but better individual machines than the whole network.
Maybe email servers should operate like a DNS server instead of as a spooling server, providing a route to the recipient rather than actually sending the mail itself. Let the spooling and sending happen upstream at the sender's location.
The sender takes the full bandwidth penalty of sending every copy of their email because even an "open relay" doesn't equate to infinite bandwidth the way it does now.
I could never put my finger on it, but having played Final Fantasy 7 on PC and on PSX, I much preferred the console experience. I have a gamepad for my PC, I have no problem with the technical aspects of it and the "big" screen never impressed me so much. At about 10 years old I actually played Super Mario Bros. on the NES on a 25ft projection screen. *That* was impressive but the difference between my 17" monitor and the 27" TV not so much. All things being equal, I prefer my games on a console and I don't know precisely why.
This has been hashed over so many times guys.
The paper ballot is printed, the voter reads it, confirms it is correct. Then they turn it in.
Nobody goes home with the paperwork from voting. You go home with one of this "I voted" stickers.
The machine counts up the votes. In the event of an error or challenge to the electronic vote the paper ballots are then the authority. Since they are, in theory, verified by the voters themselves their authority really can't be questioned.
If a voter can't verify their own vote for some reason then some allowance will have to be made, agreed, but scrapping the *entire* verifiable voting system because of a minority case doesn't make sense.
I try to stay out of Windows, but control+esc is just too easy to bother with having an extra key devoted to it. And for gaming it's the absolute worst. Especially with some games that don't seem to properly switch control back to the OS when you minimize them. I alt-tab out of the game, pick up email or something and come back to find all of my mouse and/or keyboard activity was also messing with my game.
I'm pretty sure that when I clicked and held the button down that I ran out of ammo in Half-Life. The patent is software, not OS, not hardware.
I'm watching the response from people here and now having read the article I find it kind of interesting.
The *most* critical systems are the ones most hard hit by this worm. The reason they are so hard hit is *because* they are critical. Admins are reluctant to break these systems by installing broken patches without due diligence of testing.
If the testing takes longer to complete than the worm takes to propagate, then we have a problem.
I think this is as good, if not a better, argument against Windows as I've ever seen. Their security is crap and the systems we've put in place to patch over their holes are biting us in the ass as badly as if we'd never tried to fix it at all.
I was very young at the time, but everything I've been taught was that PCs (as opposed to Apple/Mac) dominated early on because they were better business machines.
The business capabilities of the PCs were more easily translated into a home machine, games and all, than was the home computer into a business machine.
Perhaps it's not a raw comparison of speed or power and maybe I need to go read up on it. It's mostly academic anyway at this point.
You are arguing both sides now. You're saying that Linux distributions must standardize and at the same time you're saying that they can't standardize. They're mutually exclusive arguments. Also, do check out the LSB information. I believe it is exactly what you're talking about, even though you deny it exists.
Isn't that how PCs became the gaming platform to begin with? Apple was making everything user friendly, IBM and others were making everything faster and more capable. When it came to making games having user friendly hardware and/or software didn't hold a candle to having more power. While the situation may have evened out somewhat since then on the system side, the inertia is still too strong to anticipate much change. If we can get good, fully featured and easy to use cross-platform libraries for everything that modern games need, we'll hopefully see a lot more releases but DirectX already has a good deal of momentum. Hopefully, someday soon, recompiling the executable will be the difference between a Linux game and a Windows game.
Isn't it required in contract or licensing law that if a given clause is ruled illegal that the clause is rendered null and void?
Most of the licenses and legal stuff I've seen usually include another paragraph or so to the effect of "If part of this contract is deemed illegal, you can stop caring about that part but you're still bound by the rest."
If that wasn't the case, then hitmen would insist on written contracts because they couldn't be prosecuted for complying with the contract.
What makes you think the Linux even has a business model? Or that your imagined business model must carry over into every piece of software used on a Linux system? If someone were willing to write the software to suit my needs and at a reasonable price point, I would buy it. If someone insists that their product which is equivalent to a free product is in fact worth hundreds of dollars I am not going to give them my money. I am going to go with the free product. This doesn't force Adobe or anyone else to give their product away for free. What it *does* do is forces them to compete on features and justify the high cost of their software. If I could pay a reasonable sum for a superior product, I would. Your definition of "a reasonable sum" or "superior product" may not be the same as mine, nor does it have to be. Some people will only "buy" Open Source. Some people will only buy proprietary. Some people will weigh technical merit versus economic necessity and decide what suits them. Or do you really think the Free Market economy is all bunk and we should have to pick from an approved list of proprietary vendors for everything technological?
If we work hard enough to pass some DMCA such nonsense in Iraq we can force them away from using any native-born technologies for fear of infringing some copyright or patent held in the U.S. Then we have them forever sucking at the technological and bureaucratic teat of their "rightful rulers". We get paid when they infringe. We get paid when they license. We get paid until we see fit to call their "debt" to us paid.