Can you talk a little about the website, and how important you perceive that as being to a new game?
* Is that a key component or just a "nice to have"? * In most industries, the idea of "closing" a sale on a website would be laughable, but could a website make a difference in video games? * Do you see your web community as important to you? * Do you purposely not invest in resources (art, programming and copy) until knowing if the game is taking off?
I joined WOW about a year after it came out, so I never saw it's website in it's infancy, but I was a little surprised when looking at your site at the retro feel in terms of graphics, and the content errors I found while trying to answer easy questions. I would have thought that if you were setting your sites on pulling WOW users, you'd have a more polished website, and I'd like to know more about the business drivers that sent you in the direction you went in.
Not for nothing, but I don't think you're Apple's primary audience, and I doubt if they're sitting around how to get into the low margin, low cost "build your own" box market. I'm not saying the way you think of computers isn't valid, it's just I don't think you're actaully a target user for Apple. Like BMW or Mercedes, they focus on a small market share, and high profit margins, and their target audience aren't poeple who go and soup up their 1974 Ford Mustang with the newest graphics card... ya know?
- Jason
http://www.gravityswitch.com/
Great point, another key thing the article states is these numbers do NOT include gift cards, which are available EVERYWHERE these days, which could easily account for more than the 20% drop. Heck, my mom's in her 60's and she wanted an iTunes Gift card for XMas!
Now it may be true that there are work-a-holics, and anti-social people in IT (both traits which can lead to bad marrages), but trying to carry on a job, an education, kids, and be a good spouse, something's gotta give. I think you're stretching it man.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a BUSINESS. Something like 50% of all businesses fail in their first year, and 80% fail by year 10. Here are some things to think about while starting a business:
* Do you really want to own a business? You give up a LOT of freedom when you own a business. You can never have a day where you're just "punching the clock". When we started our business it was 3 years before we could take more than 4 days off in a row. When an employee is sick, we have to come in. * Find smart people, and ask them for help, they'll usually say yes. When we first started in business we went up and asked smart people who were way out of our league for advice. They all helped us. One person I met actually helped us to hire some people, so we could see how it was done, for free! Another person goes out to lunch with us once or twice a year, and tells us LOTs of tips from their related business. * At the end of the day if you're not paying everyone's sallary (including yours), AND making a profit, it's not working. Know your numbers, and understand what your costs are. I have a friend who's started 4-5 businesses, none of which took off, and the #1 reason is he doesn't watch the numbers. Whenever I see him I ask him "Are you on track with your forecasts?" and "Did you make money this month?". He can never answer either one of those. He always says things like "I'm pretty sure...", or "I think that...", or simply "I don't know". * Have someone you're accountable to. It's easy to "skip" important things for a couple of months. I have set it up so that I send my bi-weekly financial checkin to one of my partners. In addition to the past, I look at the future. I report on things such as: Cash received per year broken down by month, how we're tracking month-by month based on our forecast and target, any upcoming new expenses (i.e. raises, new hires, tech purchases, building repairs, rent increase, etc.). Because someone else reads this I'm accountable to get it done, and I also have someone tell me if I'm looking at things with rose colored glasses. * Pay yourself a fair sallary as soon as you can. * Know how many years until you make your initial investment, plus your sallary back. Ideally that should be within 2-3 years. If you end up a year behind schedule, that's still only 4 years tops. * Don't forget your new shiny computers will break and be out of date very quickly. * If your projections tell you will loose (bleed) money for 6 months, assume it will really be 12. I've seen a LOT of companies have to close up shop, RIGHT as things turn around because they were optimistic about how quickly they can make their money back. Bite your numbers so they don't bite you. Have PLENTY of cash on hand. Don't invest more than you're willing to loose. * If you don't have management experience, REALLY think about what sort of culture you want. Read "First Break All the Rules" and "Ideas Are Free". Both great business books that apply to all types of businesses. * I know it's your money, and your butt on the line, but don't be a nerotic control freek. No one likes to work for a dictator, and your customers will know too. Besides if you have trustworthy employees, and are willing to let them make decisions, you can actually leave town for a few days once in a while. * Make time to work "on" the business not "in" the business. If you have to work from home one day to make this happen, do that. * Understand your ramp up time. For instance if you're eventually going to have 20 stations, but you're pretty sure you won't have over 7 people at a time in the first month, only buy 5 machines. Then buy a new one every 4 weeks. This will get you up to 20 stations in just about 2 years, at what time you'll need to be replacing old machines anyway. It also spreads out your cost, so that in 3-4 months, if you don't have the traffic you thought you'd have, you can postpone purchase of a couple of machines, and
terrorist |?ter?rist| noun a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims.
terror |?ter?r| noun 1 extreme fear : people fled in terror | [in sing. ] a terror of darkness.
Anyone who's seen the news in the past few years, and watched the look of terror on people's faces when US troops go into their houses must realize that we're using terror on civilians to fight terrorism. Why look so far outside of the US for non-muslum terrorists?
Did anyone read the story, or look at the picture? I could have faked that photo in 1980 (of course it would have taken a week to get them printed, and my computer was only black and green, but regardless).
Why does this merit so much discussion?
While in a theoretical world, this makes sense, in reality this isn't what's happened.
When you look at the distribution of wealth (or knowledge, or access, or whatever), you find that since the internet these gaps have grown bigger, and while the big players may be new, the truth is out of the billions of sites online, the top thousand sites get 99.99% of the traffic. How's the democracy? How's that "power to the people"?
While new technologies may come out that gives the "little guy" a voice for a while, this period goes away quickly as either entrenched companies jump into the fray (i.e. Microsoft/Apple/Dell) or new companies spring up (i.e. Google/Ebay/Amazon).
-Jason
Gravity Switch
It's good to see this so well articulated.
One way of looking at it is: Until Open Source grows up, it's not going to appeal to the masses.
Another way is: Open Source is software, by geeks, for geeks, and will never be anything else.
Think about the most successful Open Source projects. They're all projects that are more apt to be used by programmers than anyone else. I've done quite a bit of research into Open Source Shopping carts and CMS systems over the past couple of years, and the UI on all of them is so amazingly poor. The trick is this:
If a programmer who's contributing to an open source project has a choice of adding a cool geek feature, or tweaking the UI to make it easier for novice users, what are they going to choose? That means we end up with Open Source bloat (yes it does happen) and a UI that starts being poorly planned, and gets worse with every new feature.
The way the industry works now, I don't see this changing a lot.
The one other place that Open Source does well is when it's an EXACT copy of something commercial (i.e. Browsers), because the UI is already designed, all that has to happen is someone has to have a friend that can make pretty buttons. The UI itself doesn't have to change.
I wouldn't put it past old Steve J to have the games angle wrapped up also. All they'd need is a partnership with, say, Sony to allow every Mac Mini to have a dual operating system, OSX and PS3, that way every PS3 game would run on Mac, fast track to LOTs of developers, and since Sony doesn't make significant profit on the consols, it's really a win-win.
I have more thoughts on this at:
http://geekspeakwithjason.blogspot.com/
if anyone's interested...
This game is suprisingly GREAT. There's a really cool bidding phase, and a great planning phase. There are random things that happen (cards), but those same random events apply to EVERYONE, so you're able to build your strategy on what other players might do, and based on which random things will happen to EVERYONE.
It's possible to have a game where noone gets reinfocements (for instance). Likewise it's possible to play a game where everyone get's reinforcements EVERY round, or maybe just for the first 3 rounds, and then never again.
Everyone puts down little markers and then everyone flips over their markers at the same time to determine actions. The best of Diplomacy, even easier!
It's also a set 10 rounds, so you build your strategy accordingly.
Re:Apparently they never heard of the Cappuccino P
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
·
· Score: 1
Interestingly to make a *mostly* comparible Cappuccino, costs over $1,000. That's for a similar MHZ clock speed, but I don't know what the deal is with Video Ram, so it might cost more...
I've been very impressed with EVERYTHING that the Mac team at Microsoft has created. The Mac version of Office was developed with about 1/15th of the number of people as the Windows version, and I find it damn solid.
There are a couple of issues with Entourage that I've found, but they're pretty minor, esp. when you compare them to Apple's Mail.app.
As a business owner, the copies of Office that we buy for everyone on OSX are definitely worth-while. Sure, I wish they were free, but that's still *quite* a few years off, to have the features (not bloat) that Office has.
Well they make up for not testing effectiveness by this fun little line:
Please note that these decisions were not based on accuracy testing.
Duh! I imagine they test stereo systems without audio output and simply look at the box and the colors of the LCD?
Great point!
I would even extend the original post to say is there ANY other cross platform tool that's quick and easy to update that compares to Filemaker?
We also need to have control of printing, and it can't be a web interface. We did a study on going to a web interface, and those seconds end up. If we switched our system over to a web based interface we were looking at almost 5 hours per week of lost productivity just because we had to hit submit so many times, and wait for the screen to draw, not to mention lost data, more complicated list views, etc.
I tried their demo. After about 2 minutes of waiting I gave up. The whole reason that we use Filemaker in our Mac/PC shop is because it has a REALLY fast GUI (unlike web based solutions). Servoy is so slow we're much better off staying with Filemaker 6.
Filemaker 7 will be expensive for us to upgrade, since it will require a complete rewrite to take advantage of any of it's new features.
But how much does the company pay for it's admins and engineers to handle this, and research this? I imagine it's definitely less than if they didn't hire sharp people like you, but it's still a cost. It still takes time, training, coordination, server setups, etc.
We have a very small business (7 employees) and our cost for a lost day of work is about $3,000. We did have one virus a few years back (the one time I let someone check email on a PC... now we're back to the rule "check email on your mac, since it's virus safe.")... and it got into our file server, and pretty much shut us down for a day while everyone tried to get ANYTHING done.
I'm sure a 400 person company would lose a lot more money if a good percentage of their company spent the day not being able to work productively (not to mention all of the extra "water cooler" chatter that goes on when there's something breaking the routine of work.
Not for nothing, but it's a pretty competitive field out there, and if you're serious about this, just go out there and do it.
If you're a senior and just thinking about maybe starting to build a good portfolio, and your first step includes 3 months of research into the best system to maybe start building a portfolio... maybe think about a less competitive career. (i.e. want fries with that).
You're going to need a couple of DOZEN good solid games of your own in your portfolio, it doesn't matter too much what the first one is written in...
If you want to have fun and kick around with making some levels, then that's a totally different story...
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The server encountered an error and could not complete your request.
If the problem persists, please mail google@google.com and mention this error message and the query that caused it.
From a manufacturing point of view, that's not a bad percentage. If you invented a "widget" in the real world you'd probably get less. As a general rule everyone who touches a product get's 50% of it. The retailers, the distributors, etc.
Retailer (i.e. Quick-E Mart) 50%
Distributor 25%
Manufacturer 12.5%
Owner 12.5%
Once you start talking about commodity products (i.e. toilet paper, tools) things start getting tighter. Many manufacturers that I work with are happy to get a 4% profit margin, and they're the owners/creators/patent holders on their products.
The truth is people who use P2P to swap files illegally *are* criminals, and it's a very fine line morally what's right or wrong.
For instance if someone is hungry and steals bread, is it illegal? Hell yes.
If someone wants to steal music is it illegal? Hell yes.
Do you think there should be some limit on how and when people can take music without paying for it? Well that's a different situation. Let's say for instance that I want a new CD that just came out. Instead of buying it, I go online and grab it with whatever flavor of P2P software exists. Is that illegal? Yes. Is that immoral? We'll that's a trickier question.
Who am I stealing from? I'm stealing from the recording industry, and to some degree from the artists and songwriters.
I'm always a little suspect when someone is making a political stand to not have to pay for entertainment. Or someone who thinks that the people selling them someone are "crooks" and therefore "deserve to be stolen from". Often these are middle or upper-middle class white men who say "Because I deserve it, and I don't want to pay for it". It's never people saying "My kids deserve a good education" or "My family deserves to eat", or "I deserve to have a good job, where I'm treated with respect". It's music, or cable television.
What if I was walking down the street and saw a car with some CDs in it? Could I legally take the CDs out of that car? Does it matter if the car is an old Honda, or a BMW, or a delivery truck for Walmart? I might argue that if I take the music from the back of a Walmart truck, they can afford it, and they're just a heartless corporation, so that's OK. If I take it from a BMW, I might argue that this person can obviously afford it, and they can obviously afford a computer to re-download all the music a steal from them anyway, so I'm not even costing them anything (other than a few cents for new CDs to burn onto, and some time) by taking it.
If one house on the block has 3 TV sets and only 2 people living in the house, and one house doesn't have any, is it OK for the person with no TV sets to take one of the 3? Obviously the people in the house with 3 will be OK with only 2 TV sets.
I'll probably get modded down for this since most geeks are very pro-free music, but I honestly feel if you're going to have some strong political views about something, it's a sorry state of the world if the thing you care about the most is if you have to pay $200 per year for 25 new CDs, or if you can get them for free without shame or fear of being prosicuted.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you talk a little about the website, and how important you perceive that as being to a new game?
* Is that a key component or just a "nice to have"?
* In most industries, the idea of "closing" a sale on a website would be laughable, but could a website make a difference in video games?
* Do you see your web community as important to you?
* Do you purposely not invest in resources (art, programming and copy) until knowing if the game is taking off?
I joined WOW about a year after it came out, so I never saw it's website in it's infancy, but I was a little surprised when looking at your site at the retro feel in terms of graphics, and the content errors I found while trying to answer easy questions. I would have thought that if you were setting your sites on pulling WOW users, you'd have a more polished website, and I'd like to know more about the business drivers that sent you in the direction you went in.
Thanks,
Jason Mark
http://www.gravityswitch.com/
Not for nothing, but I don't think you're Apple's primary audience, and I doubt if they're sitting around how to get into the low margin, low cost "build your own" box market. I'm not saying the way you think of computers isn't valid, it's just I don't think you're actaully a target user for Apple. Like BMW or Mercedes, they focus on a small market share, and high profit margins, and their target audience aren't poeple who go and soup up their 1974 Ford Mustang with the newest graphics card... ya know? - Jason http://www.gravityswitch.com/
Great point, another key thing the article states is these numbers do NOT include gift cards, which are available EVERYWHERE these days, which could easily account for more than the 20% drop. Heck, my mom's in her 60's and she wanted an iTunes Gift card for XMas!
I'm a little skeptical of someone's numbers here. According to this article: http://www.macworld.co.uk/education/news/index.cfm ?newsid=16335
Apple is #1 in European education market.
According to this they're #2 in the US:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/25/macs
HP is a distant 3rd with Sony trailing... and Gateway is supposed to be #1 for college aged kids? Something just doesn't add up here.
In terms of total market share Apple is slightly below Gateway (which I guess includes eMachines, right?):
http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/10/20061019104 418.shtml
So maybe Gateway(eMachines) is the over whelming choice of the non-college bound college age kids?
He's right dude (please mod this parent up).
Now it may be true that there are work-a-holics, and anti-social people in IT (both traits which can lead to bad marrages), but trying to carry on a job, an education, kids, and be a good spouse, something's gotta give. I think you're stretching it man.
Great topic. Very cool discussion, and idea.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is a BUSINESS. Something like 50% of all businesses fail in their first year, and 80% fail by year 10. Here are some things to think about while starting a business:
* Do you really want to own a business? You give up a LOT of freedom when you own a business. You can never have a day where you're just "punching the clock". When we started our business it was 3 years before we could take more than 4 days off in a row. When an employee is sick, we have to come in.
* Find smart people, and ask them for help, they'll usually say yes. When we first started in business we went up and asked smart people who were way out of our league for advice. They all helped us. One person I met actually helped us to hire some people, so we could see how it was done, for free! Another person goes out to lunch with us once or twice a year, and tells us LOTs of tips from their related business.
* At the end of the day if you're not paying everyone's sallary (including yours), AND making a profit, it's not working. Know your numbers, and understand what your costs are. I have a friend who's started 4-5 businesses, none of which took off, and the #1 reason is he doesn't watch the numbers. Whenever I see him I ask him "Are you on track with your forecasts?" and "Did you make money this month?". He can never answer either one of those. He always says things like "I'm pretty sure...", or "I think that...", or simply "I don't know".
* Have someone you're accountable to. It's easy to "skip" important things for a couple of months. I have set it up so that I send my bi-weekly financial checkin to one of my partners. In addition to the past, I look at the future. I report on things such as: Cash received per year broken down by month, how we're tracking month-by month based on our forecast and target, any upcoming new expenses (i.e. raises, new hires, tech purchases, building repairs, rent increase, etc.). Because someone else reads this I'm accountable to get it done, and I also have someone tell me if I'm looking at things with rose colored glasses.
* Pay yourself a fair sallary as soon as you can.
* Know how many years until you make your initial investment, plus your sallary back. Ideally that should be within 2-3 years. If you end up a year behind schedule, that's still only 4 years tops.
* Don't forget your new shiny computers will break and be out of date very quickly.
* If your projections tell you will loose (bleed) money for 6 months, assume it will really be 12. I've seen a LOT of companies have to close up shop, RIGHT as things turn around because they were optimistic about how quickly they can make their money back. Bite your numbers so they don't bite you. Have PLENTY of cash on hand. Don't invest more than you're willing to loose.
* If you don't have management experience, REALLY think about what sort of culture you want. Read "First Break All the Rules" and "Ideas Are Free". Both great business books that apply to all types of businesses.
* I know it's your money, and your butt on the line, but don't be a nerotic control freek. No one likes to work for a dictator, and your customers will know too. Besides if you have trustworthy employees, and are willing to let them make decisions, you can actually leave town for a few days once in a while.
* Make time to work "on" the business not "in" the business. If you have to work from home one day to make this happen, do that.
* Understand your ramp up time. For instance if you're eventually going to have 20 stations, but you're pretty sure you won't have over 7 people at a time in the first month, only buy 5 machines. Then buy a new one every 4 weeks. This will get you up to 20 stations in just about 2 years, at what time you'll need to be replacing old machines anyway. It also spreads out your cost, so that in 3-4 months, if you don't have the traffic you thought you'd have, you can postpone purchase of a couple of machines, and
terrorist |?ter?rist| noun a person who uses terrorism in the pursuit of political aims. terror |?ter?r| noun 1 extreme fear : people fled in terror | [in sing. ] a terror of darkness. Anyone who's seen the news in the past few years, and watched the look of terror on people's faces when US troops go into their houses must realize that we're using terror on civilians to fight terrorism. Why look so far outside of the US for non-muslum terrorists?
Did anyone read the story, or look at the picture? I could have faked that photo in 1980 (of course it would have taken a week to get them printed, and my computer was only black and green, but regardless). Why does this merit so much discussion?
Great point. I wonder what percent of the web traffic is "grassroots"? For instance how many people go to wikipedia vs. "ask Jeaves"?
While in a theoretical world, this makes sense, in reality this isn't what's happened. When you look at the distribution of wealth (or knowledge, or access, or whatever), you find that since the internet these gaps have grown bigger, and while the big players may be new, the truth is out of the billions of sites online, the top thousand sites get 99.99% of the traffic. How's the democracy? How's that "power to the people"? While new technologies may come out that gives the "little guy" a voice for a while, this period goes away quickly as either entrenched companies jump into the fray (i.e. Microsoft/Apple/Dell) or new companies spring up (i.e. Google/Ebay/Amazon). -Jason Gravity Switch
It's good to see this so well articulated. One way of looking at it is: Until Open Source grows up, it's not going to appeal to the masses. Another way is: Open Source is software, by geeks, for geeks, and will never be anything else. Think about the most successful Open Source projects. They're all projects that are more apt to be used by programmers than anyone else. I've done quite a bit of research into Open Source Shopping carts and CMS systems over the past couple of years, and the UI on all of them is so amazingly poor. The trick is this: If a programmer who's contributing to an open source project has a choice of adding a cool geek feature, or tweaking the UI to make it easier for novice users, what are they going to choose? That means we end up with Open Source bloat (yes it does happen) and a UI that starts being poorly planned, and gets worse with every new feature. The way the industry works now, I don't see this changing a lot. The one other place that Open Source does well is when it's an EXACT copy of something commercial (i.e. Browsers), because the UI is already designed, all that has to happen is someone has to have a friend that can make pretty buttons. The UI itself doesn't have to change.
I wouldn't put it past old Steve J to have the games angle wrapped up also. All they'd need is a partnership with, say, Sony to allow every Mac Mini to have a dual operating system, OSX and PS3, that way every PS3 game would run on Mac, fast track to LOTs of developers, and since Sony doesn't make significant profit on the consols, it's really a win-win. I have more thoughts on this at: http://geekspeakwithjason.blogspot.com/ if anyone's interested...
This game is suprisingly GREAT. There's a really cool bidding phase, and a great planning phase. There are random things that happen (cards), but those same random events apply to EVERYONE, so you're able to build your strategy on what other players might do, and based on which random things will happen to EVERYONE. It's possible to have a game where noone gets reinfocements (for instance). Likewise it's possible to play a game where everyone get's reinforcements EVERY round, or maybe just for the first 3 rounds, and then never again. Everyone puts down little markers and then everyone flips over their markers at the same time to determine actions. The best of Diplomacy, even easier! It's also a set 10 rounds, so you build your strategy accordingly.
Interestingly to make a *mostly* comparible Cappuccino, costs over $1,000. That's for a similar MHZ clock speed, but I don't know what the deal is with Video Ram, so it might cost more...
I've been very impressed with EVERYTHING that the Mac team at Microsoft has created. The Mac version of Office was developed with about 1/15th of the number of people as the Windows version, and I find it damn solid. There are a couple of issues with Entourage that I've found, but they're pretty minor, esp. when you compare them to Apple's Mail.app. As a business owner, the copies of Office that we buy for everyone on OSX are definitely worth-while. Sure, I wish they were free, but that's still *quite* a few years off, to have the features (not bloat) that Office has.
Well they make up for not testing effectiveness by this fun little line: Please note that these decisions were not based on accuracy testing. Duh! I imagine they test stereo systems without audio output and simply look at the box and the colors of the LCD?
Great point! I would even extend the original post to say is there ANY other cross platform tool that's quick and easy to update that compares to Filemaker? We also need to have control of printing, and it can't be a web interface. We did a study on going to a web interface, and those seconds end up. If we switched our system over to a web based interface we were looking at almost 5 hours per week of lost productivity just because we had to hit submit so many times, and wait for the screen to draw, not to mention lost data, more complicated list views, etc.
I tried their demo. After about 2 minutes of waiting I gave up. The whole reason that we use Filemaker in our Mac/PC shop is because it has a REALLY fast GUI (unlike web based solutions). Servoy is so slow we're much better off staying with Filemaker 6. Filemaker 7 will be expensive for us to upgrade, since it will require a complete rewrite to take advantage of any of it's new features.
But how much does the company pay for it's admins and engineers to handle this, and research this? I imagine it's definitely less than if they didn't hire sharp people like you, but it's still a cost. It still takes time, training, coordination, server setups, etc.
We have a very small business (7 employees) and our cost for a lost day of work is about $3,000. We did have one virus a few years back (the one time I let someone check email on a PC... now we're back to the rule "check email on your mac, since it's virus safe.")... and it got into our file server, and pretty much shut us down for a day while everyone tried to get ANYTHING done. I'm sure a 400 person company would lose a lot more money if a good percentage of their company spent the day not being able to work productively (not to mention all of the extra "water cooler" chatter that goes on when there's something breaking the routine of work.
Not for nothing, but it's a pretty competitive field out there, and if you're serious about this, just go out there and do it.
If you're a senior and just thinking about maybe starting to build a good portfolio, and your first step includes 3 months of research into the best system to maybe start building a portfolio... maybe think about a less competitive career. (i.e. want fries with that).
You're going to need a couple of DOZEN good solid games of your own in your portfolio, it doesn't matter too much what the first one is written in...
If you want to have fun and kick around with making some levels, then that's a totally different story...
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From a manufacturing point of view, that's not a bad percentage. If you invented a "widget" in the real world you'd probably get less. As a general rule everyone who touches a product get's 50% of it. The retailers, the distributors, etc. Retailer (i.e. Quick-E Mart) 50% Distributor 25% Manufacturer 12.5% Owner 12.5% Once you start talking about commodity products (i.e. toilet paper, tools) things start getting tighter. Many manufacturers that I work with are happy to get a 4% profit margin, and they're the owners/creators/patent holders on their products.
The truth is people who use P2P to swap files illegally *are* criminals, and it's a very fine line morally what's right or wrong. For instance if someone is hungry and steals bread, is it illegal? Hell yes. If someone wants to steal music is it illegal? Hell yes. Do you think there should be some limit on how and when people can take music without paying for it? Well that's a different situation. Let's say for instance that I want a new CD that just came out. Instead of buying it, I go online and grab it with whatever flavor of P2P software exists. Is that illegal? Yes. Is that immoral? We'll that's a trickier question. Who am I stealing from? I'm stealing from the recording industry, and to some degree from the artists and songwriters. I'm always a little suspect when someone is making a political stand to not have to pay for entertainment. Or someone who thinks that the people selling them someone are "crooks" and therefore "deserve to be stolen from". Often these are middle or upper-middle class white men who say "Because I deserve it, and I don't want to pay for it". It's never people saying "My kids deserve a good education" or "My family deserves to eat", or "I deserve to have a good job, where I'm treated with respect". It's music, or cable television. What if I was walking down the street and saw a car with some CDs in it? Could I legally take the CDs out of that car? Does it matter if the car is an old Honda, or a BMW, or a delivery truck for Walmart? I might argue that if I take the music from the back of a Walmart truck, they can afford it, and they're just a heartless corporation, so that's OK. If I take it from a BMW, I might argue that this person can obviously afford it, and they can obviously afford a computer to re-download all the music a steal from them anyway, so I'm not even costing them anything (other than a few cents for new CDs to burn onto, and some time) by taking it. If one house on the block has 3 TV sets and only 2 people living in the house, and one house doesn't have any, is it OK for the person with no TV sets to take one of the 3? Obviously the people in the house with 3 will be OK with only 2 TV sets. I'll probably get modded down for this since most geeks are very pro-free music, but I honestly feel if you're going to have some strong political views about something, it's a sorry state of the world if the thing you care about the most is if you have to pay $200 per year for 25 new CDs, or if you can get them for free without shame or fear of being prosicuted.
These are not the driods you're looking for.