True, although the term was generally limited to large-scale infringement. The dude that copied a book for his own use was never a pirate. The guy that mass-produced thousands of unauthorized copies and sold them was definitely a pirate.
In the old days, a Robin Hood was judged as a thief and hanged as a thief even when he gave away the gold.
he's been shovel heaps of praise by parents, grandparents and educators for knowing how to create a slideshow of vacation pictures. He doesn't understand anything that's under the hood of the machine but because of the misdirection of his elders he thinks he does
not every driver wants to become a mechanic.
if the geek were honest he would probably admit that he spends most of his time rather far removed from the internals of the machine himself.
Business models tend to evolve for perfectly intelligible reasons.
The AM station of the Thirties and Forties had a strong local and regional identity and a national network affiliation. That is a fairly good reflection of the much less homogenized American society and culture of the time.
It shouldn't be surprising to discover that the 40 year run of the Midwest's National Barn Dance originated out of Chicago and WLS - then owned by Sears, Roebuck. "The World's Largest Store."
If you design a game for both PCs and Macs, then adding Linux as a third platform shouldn't be that hard, since hopefully you're already writing using a cross-platform toolkit
The second platform for the Windows developer is the XBox 360 - and the cross-platform toolkit is sitting there in front of him
The Mac port can be outsourced.
The OEM Linux PC is typically presented as an entry-level system with bottom feeder specs.
The games in the CNR repository make that plain enough.
It's the rare Linux developer who competes directly against the Sims or Bioshock on the PC.
He's far more likely to be producing content that wouldn't look out of place on Shockwave.com or the download arcade on the console.
You may remember how FM radio was delayed for years
FM radio was delayed for years because the enormous amounts of money being generated by RCA's investment in AM broadcasting was funding the development of the infinitely more disruptive technology of television.
Then there were the minor setbacks of World War Two and Korea.
FM doesn't come into its own until the Hi-Fi craze of the mid to late 50's. The LP. Magnetic Tape. Heathkit for the budget-minded hobbyist. H.H. Scott, Marantz and McIntosh for the audiophile.
Windows users don't have the same organization, at least, not around Windows.
That doesn't feel quite right.
You only have to look at CNET and Download.com to see that there are communities built around Windows. A $20 shareware product like SolSuite Solitaire rates an editorial review, a video, and 9 million downloads.
I think the problem is that the OS UI, and the Apps, are new and different. I think the adults evaluating this are stuck in old ways of thinking
The XO's UI and apps are nothing you will ever see outside the grade school classroom.
This is a problem for the third world education minister because it is a struggle to keep kids in school and he has very little time to teach them some marketable skills before they leave.
Just a commitment to M$'s incredibly narrow monopoly view of the world.
The education minister looks at MS Office and what he sees is the de facto standard for office applications. He looks at Sugar and what he sees is no connection with the world beyond the grade school classroom.
60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S.
Microsoft is spending $300 million on a research campus in Beijing's "Silicon Valley."
It has partnered with an African university for the design and launch of a new communications satellite for Africa.
Their intent was to provide access to information. The computer was included simply because to most of the target population, the only possible access to good information requires a computer and a wireless network. We have centuries of experience saying that the traditional books just weren't making it; kids in underdeveloped areas typically don't have access to those in any meaningful sense
Access to - good - information on the web demands basic literacy, a host of more advanced skills and a large store of empirical knowledge.
"The sore that does not heal."
Is that right way to frame the question if you are looking for medical advice?
Which reply should you trust?
But the Internet can be made available at a cost that's orders of magnitude lower than building a local library in the local language and populating it with good books against the opposition of local rulers.
If you can't get books into a library against local opposition how do you smuggle in computers and the Internet?
What makes you any different than the steam-driven imperialist of earlier era who quite consciously set out to make a wreckage of native cultures and traditions? To take up "The White Man's Burden." The eek is at heart i think Victorian.
If I could figure out the C64 [mostly] on my own in a world where there was no 'world wide web' at my fingertips
There were magazines like Creative Computing and Compute! which could be found in any drugstore. There was the BBS. There was public broadcasting, with programs like Canada's "Bits and Bytes."
The middle class kid never needed the web to get started in computing.
OLPC had a good mission when they wanted everything on the system to be fully open source, with simple point and click applications...then they got into talks with microsoft, and started to include some very complicated applications with their product, and their mission kind of went down the crapper
The OLPC's mission went into the crapper for the same reasons The New Math went into the crapper:
The geek as cultural imperialist is his own worst enemy.
The Classmate or XO running Windows is fundamentally a bog-standard laptop. It doesn't require a commitment to a western theory of education or a philosophy of open source.
The use of the machines can evolve naturally, as an expression of local needs and values.
Where this all doesn't make any sense is when the terms get beyond the original 20 or so years. In fact, extending the term is counterproductive because an author of a really good book/song/painting/program only has a greater incentive to write more if they know they will lose the income from the first
Harper Lee has published nothing of significance since To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960.
That single book remains in print to this day. It won her the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The film remains a classic. The play a staple of the festival stage.
What more would you ask of her? What greater incentive could you offer?
The incentive to create is only to be found in money or recognition - but in the certainty that you will retain ownership and control of your creation.
But let us be honest here.
When the rights agencies pursue the geek it ain't for Steamboat Willie.
It is for the movie still in first run theatrical release or new in print on DVD or Blu-Ray.
If you want to argue that information should be free and pirate music/games/software/whatever for yourself, that's up to you to decide. And the same applies if you want to give away copies of whatever you've pirated to others for free. However very few things disgust me as much as people pirating someone else's work and then selling it for a profit to others.
When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who worked in the rail yards and made presents of things which "fell off a train." It gave him quite a boost -- better than any weed. I never cared much for the smell of it myself.
More people died of hunger that day than were killed in the attack. The US response to the attacks was totally illogical because people felt threatened
The first problem with this argument is that no single community has to bear the full weight of such tragedies.
The second problem is that the timing of the 9/11 attacks minimized casualties.
The population of the WTC around noon on a fine autumn day would have been around 100,000.
It then becomes possible - it then become necessary - to imagine terrorist attacks that kill on the scale of a nuclear blast.
The terrorist attack is not a random event. His weapons and targets do not remain static. He learns through experience. How then do you build a valid statistical model of the risk he presents?
What you're left with is always the lowest common denominator...all but the most apparently malleable minds.
maybe both sides of your case wanted someone intelligent in the box, but it's certainly the exception and not the rule
It strikes me that nothing more than your own intellectual arrogance may have kept you out of the box.
It's because it shows a difference between the attitude he showed in the courtroom and the attitude that will make him eventually eligible for parole.
The deal is off if evidence is found to support Reiser's conviction on first degree murder.
To be "eligible for parole" in California does not mean that parole will ever be granted. Fifteen years from now, the board doesn't have to grant Reiser the benefit of the doubt if what it sees is evidence of premeditation.
It could just be that the state thinks that it has read Reiser correctly and he can be tempted into making one last mistake.
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In the old days, a Robin Hood was judged as a thief and hanged as a thief even when he gave away the gold.
not every driver wants to become a mechanic.
if the geek were honest he would probably admit that he spends most of his time rather far removed from the internals of the machine himself.
Business models tend to evolve for perfectly intelligible reasons.
The AM station of the Thirties and Forties had a strong local and regional identity and a national network affiliation. That is a fairly good reflection of the much less homogenized American society and culture of the time.
It shouldn't be surprising to discover that the 40 year run of the Midwest's National Barn Dance originated out of Chicago and WLS - then owned by Sears, Roebuck. "The World's Largest Store."
The trespasser should be wary of a gun.
I remember a long-ago arson summer of burning barns near my grand dad's farm. When he made the rounds the 12 gauge made the rounds with him.
The second platform for the Windows developer is the XBox 360 - and the cross-platform toolkit is sitting there in front of him
The Mac port can be outsourced.
The OEM Linux PC is typically presented as an entry-level system with bottom feeder specs.
The games in the CNR repository make that plain enough.
It's the rare Linux developer who competes directly against the Sims or Bioshock on the PC.
He's far more likely to be producing content that wouldn't look out of place on Shockwave.com or the download arcade on the console.
XBox Live!
It would be presumptuous of course to think that his choice of a new alias was more than a coincidence.
It damns with faint praise to say that four years later UT2004 has become easy to install.
FM radio was delayed for years because the enormous amounts of money being generated by RCA's investment in AM broadcasting was funding the development of the infinitely more disruptive technology of television.
Then there were the minor setbacks of World War Two and Korea.
FM doesn't come into its own until the Hi-Fi craze of the mid to late 50's. The LP. Magnetic Tape. Heathkit for the budget-minded hobbyist. H.H. Scott, Marantz and McIntosh for the audiophile.
Your ISP isn't a common carrier. Your ISP has been looking for an excuse to shut down its USENRT servers for the last ten years.
CNR- with its roots in Linspire - has the right idea.
But I tend to use it as a reality check and on that level it can be depressing. "The Year of Linux" software looks like a shareware catalog from 1992.
CNR lists 23 commercial "games," only three of which are worth even passing notice: Postal 2, Flight Gear, and Bridge Construction Set.
That doesn't feel quite right.
You only have to look at CNET and Download.com to see that there are communities built around Windows. A $20 shareware product like SolSuite Solitaire rates an editorial review, a video, and 9 million downloads.
But enough are willing to pay to make PC gaming a billion dollar industry.
The developer for Linux begins with the handicap of a 0.68% market share -- in a world where Vista has 15%, OSX on the Mac and the iPhone 8%.
Operating System Market Share
When your potential market is already microscopic, you can't afford to lose a significant percentage of sales to the pirate.
The XO's UI and apps are nothing you will ever see outside the grade school classroom.
This is a problem for the third world education minister because it is a struggle to keep kids in school and he has very little time to teach them some marketable skills before they leave.
The education minister looks at MS Office and what he sees is the de facto standard for office applications. He looks at Sugar and what he sees is no connection with the world beyond the grade school classroom.
60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S.
Microsoft is spending $300 million on a research campus in Beijing's "Silicon Valley."
It has partnered with an African university for the design and launch of a new communications satellite for Africa.
The geek sees only Redmond.
The education minister is looking at DuBai.
Access to - good - information on the web demands basic literacy, a host of more advanced skills and a large store of empirical knowledge.
"The sore that does not heal."
Is that right way to frame the question if you are looking for medical advice?
Which reply should you trust?
But the Internet can be made available at a cost that's orders of magnitude lower than building a local library in the local language and populating it with good books against the opposition of local rulers.
If you can't get books into a library against local opposition how do you smuggle in computers and the Internet?
What makes you any different than the steam-driven imperialist of earlier era who quite consciously set out to make a wreckage of native cultures and traditions? To take up "The White Man's Burden." The eek is at heart i think Victorian.
There were magazines like Creative Computing and Compute! which could be found in any drugstore. There was the BBS. There was public broadcasting, with programs like Canada's "Bits and Bytes."
The middle class kid never needed the web to get started in computing.
The OLPC's mission went into the crapper for the same reasons The New Math went into the crapper:
Whatever Happened To New Math?
The geek as cultural imperialist is his own worst enemy.
The Classmate or XO running Windows is fundamentally a bog-standard laptop. It doesn't require a commitment to a western theory of education or a philosophy of open source.
The use of the machines can evolve naturally, as an expression of local needs and values.
Harper Lee has published nothing of significance since To Kill A Mockingbird in 1960.
That single book remains in print to this day. It won her the Pulitzer Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The film remains a classic. The play a staple of the festival stage.
What more would you ask of her? What greater incentive could you offer?
The incentive to create is only to be found in money or recognition - but in the certainty that you will retain ownership and control of your creation.
But let us be honest here.
When the rights agencies pursue the geek it ain't for Steamboat Willie.
It is for the movie still in first run theatrical release or new in print on DVD or Blu-Ray.
SharePoint alone has seen $1 Billion in sales. The one think the Geek can't forgive about Microsoft is its success.
When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who worked in the rail yards and made presents of things which "fell off a train." It gave him quite a boost -- better than any weed. I never cared much for the smell of it myself.
When a chronic illness or a single medical emergency strips away everything you own, what property rights do you have left?
The first problem with this argument is that no single community has to bear the full weight of such tragedies.
The second problem is that the timing of the 9/11 attacks minimized casualties.
The population of the WTC around noon on a fine autumn day would have been around 100,000.
It then becomes possible - it then become necessary - to imagine terrorist attacks that kill on the scale of a nuclear blast.
The terrorist attack is not a random event. His weapons and targets do not remain static. He learns through experience. How then do you build a valid statistical model of the risk he presents?
The rural telephone in 1890 doesn't have long distance service.
It doesn't have a dial.
Every connection is made manually by an operator or - much later - through a chain of operators.
maybe both sides of your case wanted someone intelligent in the box, but it's certainly the exception and not the rule
It strikes me that nothing more than your own intellectual arrogance may have kept you out of the box.
The deal is off if evidence is found to support Reiser's conviction on first degree murder.
To be "eligible for parole" in California does not mean that parole will ever be granted. Fifteen years from now, the board doesn't have to grant Reiser the benefit of the doubt if what it sees is evidence of premeditation.
It could just be that the state thinks that it has read Reiser correctly and he can be tempted into making one last mistake.