Oh yeah - I don't have any sympathy for the Casinos they've always been stealing for as long as they've been around.
It doesn't matter whether you are headed for Vegas or Friday Night BINGO at the Catholic Church.
There are two - and only two - ways the house can make a profit.
1 The odds favor the house.
2 The house takes a percentage of the action.
If the size of your bundle you want to increase, I'll arrange that you go broke in quiet and peace, In a hideout provided by Nathan, where there are no neighbors to squawk, It's the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New Yawk. Where's the action? Where's the game? Gotta have the game or we'll die from shame. Oh the good old reliable Nathan, Nathan, Nathan, Nathan Detroit It's the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York. [Guys and Dolls, 1950]
The golden age of the private railroad car was, obviously, the bright noontide of the nabobs who took pleasure in such ornate and often beautiful conveniences and could afford to possess and maintain them. The privately owned Pullman was, from the mid-Eighteen Seventies until the stock market crash of 1929, an accepted and conventional symbol of wealth. Only a few survive today.
In the East they were cherished and maintained in gleaming splendor by entire generations and dynasties of Goulds, Harrimans, Vanderbilts, Fricks, and Wideners and rolled elegantly horn Palm Beach to the Adirondacks, to Bar Harbor and Louisville, as the season and occasion dictated. They clustered familiarly as late as the mid-Twenties in swarms of twenty or thirty at a time on the private car track of the now vanished Royal Poinciana Hotel at Palm Beach, and at Derby time the Louisville & Nashville's yards at Louisville saw their arrival at the end of every inbound varnish train for days at a time.
In the Old West they were the affluential hallmark of the presence of silver kings from the Comstock, copper monarchs from Butte, the old bearded Silver Senators of Nevada and Montana, cattle magnates and all the departed generation of Emperors of Get and Satraps of Power. Success on the prairies and in the tall timber rode the private palace cars in frock coats and passed out dollar cigars to the reporters on arriving in San Francisco, Virginia City, or Fort Worth. It drank vintage champagne in jeroboams and delighted in gold-plated plumbing fixtures and brass-bound observation platforms rolling through the high passes of the Sierra or through the sagebrush night.
There was almost no limit to the ingenuity of owners and decorators of private cars during their flowering. Rare inlaid woods were frequently imported for bulkheads, and solid mahogany trim and panels were commonplace. For her "Japauldin," Mrs. J. P. Donahue, perhaps the richest woman in the world, commanded quartered oak beams running the length of the drawing room ceiling, brocaded draperies at better than $100 a yard, solid gold lighting fixtures and plumbing appliances, and a wood-burning fireplace activated by an electric blower.
Paderewski was another musician who owned a private car and his "General Stanley" was known to railroad men all over the continent. Often in the yards of Cleveland or Fort Worth, switch tenders and brakemen would gather around it as the maestro practiced at night. "Just as good as a five-dollar seat at the concert," they said.VARNISH FOR THE NABOBS
Similar problem, I write murder mystery roleplaying games, and as a result frequently search for information on how various methods of murder could be detected or concealed.
Then the police probably won't need your search history.
They will only need copies of your notes, scenarios, published and unpublished works. Columbo: Murder By The Book (1971)
[first season classic, available as a Netflix stream]
The geek really shouldn't turn his thoughts towards crime. He is too certain of his own superiority. He makes things too complex. He is logical. But not reasonable.
So our 12 billion in bailout money goes to invest a company that maybe makes a few million dollars of profit on at a least half a billion dollars in revenue.
Goldman Sachs doesn't owe the government a dime:
In June 2009, Goldman Sachs repaid the U.S. Treasury's TARP investment, with 23% interest (in the form of $318 million in preferred dividend payments and $1.418 billion in warrant redemptions).Goldman Sachs
The 23% return in interest on a loan of $10 billion is not half-bad.
I'm betting most posters in this thread are going to skip over this phrase completely, and raise the "free speech no matter what" flag.
But on the other hand, if the impersonation is done with intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud, why can't we just prosecute people for fraud, criminal intimidation, or whatnot?
I think you have answered your own question.
The geek won't believe laws against impersonation, threats or fraud can be used to punish his behavior online unless and until it is made explicit.
Given it's on an xbox already, the art and level design is all done, etc, etc. Yes why not not take 9 million euros that's on the table, that'd be rational.
I'd like to have a dollar from every gamer geek who has complained about a console port to the PC.
The guy who thought this up is a dope.
"Hey, let's make our product shittier and harder to use, I bet that will make us some money!"
Perhaps it has.
Ubisoft is looking much stronger financially and PC game and digital sales (DLC, PSN and XBLA) have been a part of that. Ubisoft® reports first-half 2010-11 results [Nov 15]
Refusing to take a brethalyzer test is a constitutional right under the 5th amendment
Courts are almost never willing to extend the privilege against self-incrimination to the collection of ordinary physical evidence - hair, fingerprints, blood samples and so on - paricularly when the procedure is non-invasive - and least of all when you look and smell as drunk as a skunk.
but, they are able to catch 'copyright thieves'. all the difference in between these, is that the latter hasnt gone mafia and started placing/bribing people in government. way to go, united states of hypocritica.
News Releases December 30, 2010 Washington, DC ICE's top 5 news stories for the week ending Dec. 30, 2010
Dec. 29, 2010 - ICE deputy director {in the] United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the inaugural Border Control, Airport and Seaport Security (BCASS) exposition.
Dec. 29, 2010 - ICE teams with CBP, USPIS to intercept counterfeit NHL Winter Classic sportswear...ICE Homeland Security...conducted a Pittsburgh-based operation that netted $100,000 in fake trademarked NHL and NFL items.
Dec. 29, 2010 - ICE arrests 3, seizes 28,000 rounds of ammunition in Tucson. Alejandro Ruiz-Escalante and Christian Gallegos-Arizmendi, both citizens of Mexico, were arrested on federal weapons smuggling charges after a traffic stop. Another individual was arrested at a Tucson residence in connection with the same weapons smuggling operation. All three individuals possessed thousands of rounds of ammunition, as well as several firearms.
Dec. 28, 2010 - Drug swallower arrested with 49 pellets of heroin in his stomach. ICE HSI agents took a 27-year-old U.S. citizen into custody after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers discovered he was carrying 49 pellets of heroin, with an approximate weight of 1.54 pounds, in his digestive tract.
Dec. 27, 2010 - Feds find cache of cocaine concealed inside phony candy Easter eggs. Esteban Galtes tried to smuggle more than 14 pounds of cocaine, much of it camouflaged as pastel-colored, egg-shaped candies, through Los Angeles International Airport. ICE HSI agents arrested him after CBP officers found the drugs in his suitcase.ICE's top 5 news stories for the week ending Dec. 30, 2010
In the American federal system, copyright is a federally defined and constitutionally protected property right.
Economic and property crimes with an interstate or international dimension are - broadly speaking - a federal responsibility.
It never ceases to amaze the geek that the government actually gives a damn about the $200 to $300 million dollar investment in a major theatrical film - and the billion dollar return it may generate in domestic and export sales.
There has to be a conspiracy.
Governments multi-task - a concept that also seems strangely foreign to the geek.
ICE Homeland Security Investigations [HSI] investigates immigration crime, human rights violations and human smuggling, smuggling of narcotics, weapons and other types of contraband, financial crimes, cybercrime and export enforcement issues. ICE special agents conduct investigations aimed at protecting critical infrastructure industries that are vulnerable to sabotage, attack or exploitation.
In addition to ICE criminal investigations, HSI oversees the agency's international affairs operations and intelligence functions. HSI consists of more than 10,000 employees, consisting of 6,700 special agents, who are assigned to more than 200 cities throughout the U.S. and 46 countries around the world.ICE Homeland Security Investigations
You check the button in the install process, Canoncial doesn't. With preinstalls it would be the OEM installing it for you, which makes the OEM a lawsuit target
Canonical licenses mp3 and H.264 for its OEM distributions:
Walmart.com had 212 flavors of the Win 7 laptop and 95 Win 7 desktops on sale this holiday season - and all sold with licensed mp3 audio and DVD video play out of the box.
The year of the Linux desktop could have been 2009 around the time of netbooks. However OEM's mucked it up by picking less than stellar variants of Linux and customers appeared only too happy to desert when Microsoft finally got their act together
The Linux netbook was a bottom feeder.
The Atom netbook running XP had far more credible hardware specs - a bigger screen, a better keyboard, a more muscular CPU, more RAM, a bigger hard drive and so on.
'Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it.'
Which is precisely the audit trail your boss is looking for.
The same guy who buys the high end color printer that can produce a plausible counterfeit bill.
The only real argument I have left with piracy is that it distorts the market.
Piracy distorts the market by shifting production and distribution into more mundane - and profitable - channels.
High School Musical XII gets the green light because Disney knows that its audience will buy the DVD and Blu-Ray disks, tickets for the arena stage show, the theme part attraction - and license the show for their High School drama club.
Production costs? $10-20 million.
Tron: Legacy, as fan service for the Geek. More like $300 million.
This is especially seen in the software market - where the incumbent publishers get undeserved market share through piracy - locking out alternatives. Repeat offenders giving piracy the wink-wink-nudg-nudge would be Microsoft, Adobe, and Autodesk. How else would they build their userbase if they made it impossible for HS and college students to pirate full editions?
Undeserved?
Their products remain - typically - best-of-breed, tools for the professional.
MS Office Academic Professional is an $80 download, direct from Microsoft. Look around and you will discover that Microsoft has even better deals for students, not just in the states, but globally.
if you go arm you will need new apps regardless and if people have learned anything over the past 15 years they should take this chance to break free of the lock-in rather than getting caught up in another round.
Lock-in never seems to trouble anyone but the geek.
... but you still have this crap running in the background.
And that matters when your $400 Toshiba Sattelite has a 2.2 GHz AMD dual-core CPU with 3 GB RAM and 64 bit Win 7?
You have a laptop with credible specs, a camera, a microphone, and a 16" display. You might as well install the app that can make good use of all these things.
Cancelled my MasterCard, then chopped it up. Enough people do that, MasterCard will start to wise up.
But if nothing comes of it, will the geek wise up?
Soon the government check won't be in the mail (AP) - 1 day ago
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Before too long, the government check will no longer be in the mail.
Officials have settled on the dates when millions of people will no longer be able to get their Social Security and other benefit checks by mail.
New recipients of benefits will have to accept paperless payments starting on May 1 of next year, three months later than first proposed.
Those already on Social Security will have until March 1, 2013 to make the switch to direct deposits or a debit card.
More than 58 million retirees, disabled people and surviving family members receive Social Security or Supplemental Security benefits. Already eight out of 10 people getting federal benefits receive those payments electronically.
The switch to electronic payments will eliminate the problem of lost or stolen checks and also the problems faced by people displaced from their homes who have to worry about getting their checks mailed to them.
For people who do not have accounts at a bank or credit union, the government has an option that allows them to use a Direct Express debit MasterCard issued by Comerica Bank, Treasury's financial agent. More than 1.5 million people have obtained these cards, which were first issued in 2008.Soon the government check won't be in the mail
The world will go on without not-for-profit average joes buying every movie that shows up. Corporate media is not important to the human race as a whole.
It seems to be mighty important to the pirate.
Because that is where he is spending his time - if not his money.
The corporation does not exist independent of its investors, employeees or its customers. Their pusuit of liberty and happiness.
The geek fan fick in 2011 will most likely be based on the 45 year old Star Trek: TOS It seems to take a Pixar to produce something as good - as original - as The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E.
In fact, if you intend doing anything online which might raise the ire of authorities, "securing" your WiFi is actually quite foolish. What you are effectively doing is removing a reasonable doubt that activity over the connection is your activity.
The geek's notions of "reasonable doubt" will most likely land him in the slammer.
Don't be so quick. Many innocent people plead guilty because they've been poorly advised by a public defender. A plea of guilty doesn't mean the person was guilty. It means that a deal was offered and the suspect had no faith in his defense at trial.
Where does it say he had a public defender?
He'd refused a more favorable plea deal last summer, insisting on fighting the government's case against him. But after two days of trial -- including Thursday's testimony from expert witnesses who showed the elaborate means Ardolf used to harass and smear neighbors who'd once called the police on him -- he stopped denying what he had done. "The reality of it became apparent to him that this was going to happen and he didn't want to perpetuate his own distress or the pain for the victims," Ardolf's lawyer, Seamus Mahoney, said Friday.Vengeful neighbor in Blaine pleads to Biden threat, hacking
Seamus Mahoney is a criminal defense attorney with a state-wide practice in Minnnesota.
Death threats against the vice president, breaking into his neighbor's wireless... But no, he didn't stop there. Child porn.
Read deeper.
Think before another knee-jerk mod-up:
It began in August 2008, when Ardolf's new neighbors called Blaine police to report a creepy encounter. Ardolf, they told police, had picked up their 4-year-old son and kissed him. After that, Matt and Bethany Kostolnik said, they intended to just keep their distance from him.
Unknown to them, he began moving to exact revenge.
He created e-mail accounts in Matt Kostolnik's name and used a password-cracking program to hack into the Kostolniks' wireless router. He then sent e-mails -- one containing sexually suggestive language, others containing images of child pornography -- to Matt Kostolnik's co-workers and boss. It was all meant to appear that the e-mails came from Kostolnik. Ardolf also used the bogus e-mail accounts to create a fake MySpace page, which contained a child porn image.
Later, he sent another fake e-mail to Kostolnik's law firm, purporting to be from a woman who claimed Kostolnik sexually assaulted her. The woman was real, the incident was not.
Windows has given us a way to differentiate between those who are and aren't IT literate.
In each new generation of technology, the wizard - the geek - gets shoved a little farther into the background.
The masses in their billions take to Windows. It happened to the automobile with the invention of the electric starter, and in radio with the invention of the superhet and network broadcasting.
In three words, the reason why no console manufacturer has embraced an AO game.
if you want this to happen, develop and market a PC game that introduces mature sexual content in a way that is not adolescently sophomoric or pornographic.
When you've shown that you have moved beyond Custer's Revenge, Duke Nukem and GTA: Hot Coffee, maybe then someone will listen.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yeah - I don't have any sympathy for the Casinos they've always been stealing for as long as they've been around.
It doesn't matter whether you are headed for Vegas or Friday Night BINGO at the Catholic Church.
There are two - and only two - ways the house can make a profit.
1 The odds favor the house.
2 The house takes a percentage of the action.
If the size of your bundle you want to increase,
I'll arrange that you go broke in quiet and peace,
In a hideout provided by Nathan, where there are no neighbors to squawk,
It's the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New Yawk.
Where's the action? Where's the game?
Gotta have the game or we'll die from shame.
Oh the good old reliable Nathan, Nathan, Nathan, Nathan Detroit
It's the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York. [Guys and Dolls, 1950]
The golden age of the private railroad car was, obviously, the bright noontide of the nabobs who took pleasure in such ornate and often beautiful conveniences and could afford to possess and maintain them. The privately owned Pullman was, from the mid-Eighteen Seventies until the stock market crash of 1929, an accepted and conventional symbol of wealth. Only a few survive today.
In the East they were cherished and maintained in gleaming splendor by entire generations and dynasties of Goulds, Harrimans, Vanderbilts, Fricks, and Wideners and rolled elegantly horn Palm Beach to the Adirondacks, to Bar Harbor and Louisville, as the season and occasion dictated. They clustered familiarly as late as the mid-Twenties in swarms of twenty or thirty at a time on the private car track of the now vanished Royal Poinciana Hotel at Palm Beach, and at Derby time the Louisville & Nashville's yards at Louisville saw their arrival at the end of every inbound varnish train for days at a time.
In the Old West they were the affluential hallmark of the presence of silver kings from the Comstock, copper monarchs from Butte, the old bearded Silver Senators of Nevada and Montana, cattle magnates and all the departed generation of Emperors of Get and Satraps of Power. Success on the prairies and in the tall timber rode the private palace cars in frock coats and passed out dollar cigars to the reporters on arriving in San Francisco, Virginia City, or Fort Worth. It drank vintage champagne in jeroboams and delighted in gold-plated plumbing fixtures and brass-bound observation platforms rolling through the high passes of the Sierra or through the sagebrush night.
There was almost no limit to the ingenuity of owners and decorators of private cars during their flowering. Rare inlaid woods were frequently imported for bulkheads, and solid mahogany trim and panels were commonplace. For her "Japauldin," Mrs. J. P. Donahue, perhaps the richest woman in the world, commanded quartered oak beams running the length of the drawing room ceiling, brocaded draperies at better than $100 a yard, solid gold lighting fixtures and plumbing appliances, and a wood-burning fireplace activated by an electric blower.
Paderewski was another musician who owned a private car and his "General Stanley" was known to railroad men all over the continent. Often in the yards of Cleveland or Fort Worth, switch tenders and brakemen would gather around it as the maestro practiced at night. "Just as good as a five-dollar seat at the concert," they said. VARNISH FOR THE NABOBS
Similar problem, I write murder mystery roleplaying games, and as a result frequently search for information on how various methods of murder could be detected or concealed.
Then the police probably won't need your search history.
They will only need copies of your notes, scenarios, published and unpublished works. Columbo: Murder By The Book (1971)
[first season classic, available as a Netflix stream]
The geek really shouldn't turn his thoughts towards crime. He is too certain of his own superiority. He makes things too complex. He is logical. But not reasonable.
20% of the computers currently in use were shipped with Windows 7.
Windows 7 RTM July 2009. Retail October 2, 2009. Windows 7
So our 12 billion in bailout money goes to invest a company that maybe makes a few million dollars of profit on at a least half a billion dollars in revenue.
Goldman Sachs doesn't owe the government a dime:
In June 2009, Goldman Sachs repaid the U.S. Treasury's TARP investment, with 23% interest (in the form of $318 million in preferred dividend payments and $1.418 billion in warrant redemptions). Goldman Sachs
The 23% return in interest on a loan of $10 billion is not half-bad.
In 2010 Goldman Sachs stage-managed $554.5 billion dollars worth of mergers and acquisitions. Goldman Sachs Returned to M&A Top Spot in 2010
I'm betting most posters in this thread are going to skip over this phrase completely, and raise the "free speech no matter what" flag.
But on the other hand, if the impersonation is done with intent to harm, intimidate, threaten, or defraud, why can't we just prosecute people for fraud, criminal intimidation, or whatnot?
I think you have answered your own question.
The geek won't believe laws against impersonation, threats or fraud can be used to punish his behavior online unless and until it is made explicit.
Given it's on an xbox already, the art and level design is all done, etc, etc. Yes why not not take 9 million euros that's on the table, that'd be rational.
I'd like to have a dollar from every gamer geek who has complained about a console port to the PC.
The guy who thought this up is a dope.
"Hey, let's make our product shittier and harder to use, I bet that will make us some money!"
Perhaps it has.
Ubisoft is looking much stronger financially and PC game and digital sales (DLC, PSN and XBLA) have been a part of that. Ubisoft® reports first-half 2010-11 results [Nov 15]
Refusing to take a brethalyzer test is a constitutional right under the 5th amendment
Courts are almost never willing to extend the privilege against self-incrimination to the collection of ordinary physical evidence - hair, fingerprints, blood samples and so on - paricularly when the procedure is non-invasive - and least of all when you look and smell as drunk as a skunk.
but, they are able to catch 'copyright thieves'.
all the difference in between these, is that the latter hasnt gone mafia and started placing/bribing people in government.
way to go, united states of hypocritica.
News Releases December 30, 2010 Washington, DC ICE's top 5 news stories for the week ending Dec. 30, 2010
Dec. 29, 2010 - ICE deputy director {in the] United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the inaugural Border Control, Airport and Seaport Security (BCASS) exposition.
Dec. 29, 2010 - ICE teams with CBP, USPIS to intercept counterfeit NHL Winter Classic sportswear...ICE Homeland Security...conducted a Pittsburgh-based operation that netted $100,000 in fake trademarked NHL and NFL items.
Dec. 29, 2010 - ICE arrests 3, seizes 28,000 rounds of ammunition in Tucson. Alejandro Ruiz-Escalante and Christian Gallegos-Arizmendi, both citizens of Mexico, were arrested on federal weapons smuggling charges after a traffic stop. Another individual was arrested at a Tucson residence in connection with the same weapons smuggling operation. All three individuals possessed thousands of rounds of ammunition, as well as several firearms.
Dec. 28, 2010 - Drug swallower arrested with 49 pellets of heroin in his stomach. ICE HSI agents took a 27-year-old U.S. citizen into custody after U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers discovered he was carrying 49 pellets of heroin, with an approximate weight of 1.54 pounds, in his digestive tract.
Dec. 27, 2010 - Feds find cache of cocaine concealed inside phony candy Easter eggs. Esteban Galtes tried to smuggle more than 14 pounds of cocaine, much of it camouflaged as pastel-colored, egg-shaped candies, through Los Angeles International Airport. ICE HSI agents arrested him after CBP officers found the drugs in his suitcase. ICE's top 5 news stories for the week ending Dec. 30, 2010
In the American federal system, copyright is a federally defined and constitutionally protected property right.
Economic and property crimes with an interstate or international dimension are - broadly speaking - a federal responsibility.
It never ceases to amaze the geek that the government actually gives a damn about the $200 to $300 million dollar investment in a major theatrical film - and the billion dollar return it may generate in domestic and export sales.
There has to be a conspiracy.
Governments multi-task - a concept that also seems strangely foreign to the geek.
ICE Homeland Security Investigations [HSI] investigates immigration crime, human rights violations and human smuggling, smuggling of narcotics, weapons and other types of contraband, financial crimes, cybercrime and export enforcement issues. ICE special agents conduct investigations aimed at protecting critical infrastructure industries that are vulnerable to sabotage, attack or exploitation.
In addition to ICE criminal investigations, HSI oversees the agency's international affairs operations and intelligence functions. HSI consists of more than 10,000 employees, consisting of 6,700 special agents, who are assigned to more than 200 cities throughout the U.S. and 46 countries around the world. ICE Homeland Security Investigations
If these are of our cultural significance, should we still be requiring people to spend money on them?
No one is "required" to spend any money on them.
That is why master prints are lost or allowed to deteriorate.
That is why films [and radio and television productions] disappear from broadcast and cable schedules.
Government support for the arts in the United States is fragile.
Corporate charitable support for the arts in the United States is fragile.
The one reason why classics like Forbidden Planet remain in circulation is because people are willing to pay for them.
You check the button in the install process, Canoncial doesn't. With preinstalls it would be the OEM installing it for you, which makes the OEM a lawsuit target
Canonical licenses mp3 and H.264 for its OEM distributions:
Licensed Companies, Licensees - PC Applications
AVC/H.264 Licensees
Walmart.com had 212 flavors of the Win 7 laptop and 95 Win 7 desktops on sale this holiday season - and all sold with licensed mp3 audio and DVD video play out of the box.
The year of the Linux desktop could have been 2009 around the time of netbooks. However OEM's mucked it up by picking less than stellar variants of Linux and customers appeared only too happy to desert when Microsoft finally got their act together
The Linux netbook was a bottom feeder.
The Atom netbook running XP had far more credible hardware specs - a bigger screen, a better keyboard, a more muscular CPU, more RAM, a bigger hard drive and so on.
It sold at a very competitive price.
'Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it.'
Which is precisely the audit trail your boss is looking for.
The same guy who buys the high end color printer that can produce a plausible counterfeit bill.
You are a corporation.
Steve Jobs is a person.
You do not have standing to take action on behalf of Steve Jobs as a person.
Standing is for a court to decide.
But I strongly suspect you'll discover that Apple has licensed Steve Job's image from Steve Jobs - and that will stand up in court.
There is, however, another argument that can be made:
That Apple has rights in the image of Steve Jobs because of his iconic association with Apple.
Who Can Inherit Fame?
[Merchandising rights to the images of Bela Lugosi and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy]
The only real argument I have left with piracy is that it distorts the market.
Piracy distorts the market by shifting production and distribution into more mundane - and profitable - channels.
High School Musical XII gets the green light because Disney knows that its audience will buy the DVD and Blu-Ray disks, tickets for the arena stage show, the theme part attraction - and license the show for their High School drama club.
Production costs? $10-20 million.
Tron: Legacy, as fan service for the Geek. More like $300 million.
This is especially seen in the software market - where the incumbent publishers get undeserved market share through piracy - locking out alternatives. Repeat offenders giving piracy the wink-wink-nudg-nudge would be Microsoft, Adobe, and Autodesk. How else would they build their userbase if they made it impossible for HS and college students to pirate full editions?
Undeserved?
Their products remain - typically - best-of-breed, tools for the professional.
MS Office Academic Professional is an $80 download, direct from Microsoft. Look around and you will discover that Microsoft has even better deals for students, not just in the states, but globally.
As for Autodesk: Find schools with students already downloading free Autodesk software. If the student's profile is public, see the designs they are creating.
The piracy argument is lame snd lazy.
The problem is apps...
Apps are not going to be a problem when you are porting from an OS with a 90% share of the market as whole.
Mobile vs. Desktop (Global)
Mobile vs. Desktop (North America)
if you go arm you will need new apps regardless and if people have learned anything over the past 15 years they should take this chance to break free of the lock-in rather than getting caught up in another round.
Lock-in never seems to trouble anyone but the geek.
Top 5 Operating Systems (Global)
Top 8 Mobile OSs In North America
... but you still have this crap running in the background.
And that matters when your $400 Toshiba Sattelite has a 2.2 GHz AMD dual-core CPU with 3 GB RAM and 64 bit Win 7?
You have a laptop with credible specs, a camera, a microphone, and a 16" display. You might as well install the app that can make good use of all these things.
Cancelled my MasterCard, then chopped it up. Enough people do that, MasterCard will start to wise up.
But if nothing comes of it, will the geek wise up?
Soon the government check won't be in the mail
(AP) - 1 day ago
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Before too long, the government check will no longer be in the mail.
Officials have settled on the dates when millions of people will no longer be able to get their Social Security and other benefit checks by mail.
New recipients of benefits will have to accept paperless payments starting on May 1 of next year, three months later than first proposed.
Those already on Social Security will have until March 1, 2013 to make the switch to direct deposits or a debit card.
More than 58 million retirees, disabled people and surviving family members receive Social Security or Supplemental Security benefits. Already eight out of 10 people getting federal benefits receive those payments electronically.
The switch to electronic payments will eliminate the problem of lost or stolen checks and also the problems faced by people displaced from their homes who have to worry about getting their checks mailed to them.
For people who do not have accounts at a bank or credit union, the government has an option that allows them to use a Direct Express debit MasterCard issued by Comerica Bank, Treasury's financial agent. More than 1.5 million people have obtained these cards, which were first issued in 2008. Soon the government check won't be in the mail
The world will go on without not-for-profit average joes buying every movie that shows up. Corporate media is not important to the human race as a whole.
It seems to be mighty important to the pirate.
Because that is where he is spending his time - if not his money.
The corporation does not exist independent of its investors, employeees or its customers. Their pusuit of liberty and happiness.
The geek fan fick in 2011 will most likely be based on the 45 year old Star Trek: TOS It seems to take a Pixar to produce something as good - as original - as The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E.
In fact, if you intend doing anything online which might raise the ire of authorities, "securing" your WiFi is actually quite foolish. What you are effectively doing is removing a reasonable doubt that activity over the connection is your activity.
The geek's notions of "reasonable doubt" will most likely land him in the slammer.
Don't be so quick. Many innocent people plead guilty because they've been poorly advised by a public defender. A plea of guilty doesn't mean the person was guilty. It means that a deal was offered and the suspect had no faith in his defense at trial.
Where does it say he had a public defender?
He'd refused a more favorable plea deal last summer, insisting on fighting the government's case against him. But after two days of trial -- including Thursday's testimony from expert witnesses who showed the elaborate means Ardolf used to harass and smear neighbors who'd once called the police on him -- he stopped denying what he had done.
"The reality of it became apparent to him that this was going to happen and he didn't want to perpetuate his own distress or the pain for the victims," Ardolf's lawyer, Seamus Mahoney, said Friday. Vengeful neighbor in Blaine pleads to Biden threat, hacking
Seamus Mahoney is a criminal defense attorney with a state-wide practice in Minnnesota.
Death threats against the vice president, breaking into his neighbor's wireless... But no, he didn't stop there. Child porn.
Read deeper.
Think before another knee-jerk mod-up:
It began in August 2008, when Ardolf's new neighbors called Blaine police to report a creepy encounter. Ardolf, they told police, had picked up their 4-year-old son and kissed him. After that, Matt and Bethany Kostolnik said, they intended to just keep their distance from him.
Unknown to them, he began moving to exact revenge.
He created e-mail accounts in Matt Kostolnik's name and used a password-cracking program to hack into the Kostolniks' wireless router. He then sent e-mails -- one containing sexually suggestive language, others containing images of child pornography -- to Matt Kostolnik's co-workers and boss. It was all meant to appear that the e-mails came from Kostolnik. Ardolf also used the bogus e-mail accounts to create a fake MySpace page, which contained a child porn image.
Later, he sent another fake e-mail to Kostolnik's law firm, purporting to be from a woman who claimed Kostolnik sexually assaulted her. The woman was real, the incident was not.
Vengeful neighbor in Blaine pleads to Biden threat, hacking [Dec 17]
Windows has given us a way to differentiate between those who are and aren't IT literate.
In each new generation of technology, the wizard - the geek - gets shoved a little farther into the background.
The masses in their billions take to Windows. It happened to the automobile with the invention of the electric starter, and in radio with the invention of the superhet and network broadcasting.
Fuck you, Microsoft. ;-)
In three words, the reason why no console manufacturer has embraced an AO game.
if you want this to happen, develop and market a PC game that introduces mature sexual content in a way that is not adolescently sophomoric or pornographic.
When you've shown that you have moved beyond Custer's Revenge, Duke Nukem and GTA: Hot Coffee, maybe then someone will listen.
But not before.