three thousand miles of wilderness overcome by the flow, a lonely restitution of pavement, pomp and show, i seek a thousand answers, i find but one or two, i maintain no discomfiture, my path again renewed, against the grain, that's where i'll stay, swimming upstream, i maintain against the grain, theyre labelled as a lunatic, sequestered and content, theyre ignored and defeated by the government, ther's an oriented public whose magnetic force does pull, but away from the potential of the individual, against the grain..., the flow is getting stronger with smaller increments of time and eddies of new ideas are increasingly hard to find, you need all that the other has, it is your right to seize the day, but in all your acquisitions you will soone be swept away, against the grain..., there's a common consensus and a uncomfortable cheer, a reverberating chorus that anyone can hear, it sings "leve your cares behind you, just grab tenaciously", this lulling sense of purpose will destroy us rapidly, against the grain...
Yeah, most people are dogmatic and stupid, so you're right there. But rooting for a rationally chosen side not "myopic"
That's the thing. Most people rooting did not choose their side rationally. Or rather, not even 'most people rooting' but it seems like 'most of the people rooting the loudest and most often' Certainly there is nothing wrong with rooting for a side that is rationally chosen, but rooting because "MS SUCKS" or because "BUSH IS A NAZER/KERRER IS A FLIPPITERFLOPPITER" is certainly myopic.
btw
"I love western civilization in general,"
WTF is this supposed to mean?
"you know I love black people in general..."
see how stupid that sounds?
These two statements are not comparable, at least not in any effective way if you are trying to make the point the "I love western civilization in general" sounds stupid.
'Western Civilization' encompasses a lot of things, from McDonalds to WalMart to soccer moms, ghettos, rednecks, houses, water fountains, so on and so forth. To say that "I like western civilization in general" implies that he likes most things about western civilization, however there are some things that he does not like.
'black people' refers to people whose skin is of a darker shade than most caucasians. That is all. Any comment made about a trait that 'black people' have can normally be applied to 'just people.' saying "I love black people in general" sounds retarded because its basically the same as saying you like people in general, just with an added racial modifer that is not needed, and probably only added so you don't sound like a racist - which if you are saying something like that you probably are.
I love western civilization in general, but this is the one part of our culture which drives me nuts lately: the completely vicarious "us"-versus-them cheerleading... what I like to call the "sports fan" mentality
Ahh, I'm with you man. I have noticed this mentality in all varying types of people here in America - from geeks to rednecks, republicans, democrats, punks, preps, jocks, freshmen and seniors, so on and so forth. I really think that most of the people who are just 'rooting against' or 'rooting for' - the people who place a lot of emotion on things like sports teams winning or microsoft being hit by a virus, it seems like there is a trait that is common in all these people
Their opinions are told to them, or osmosed through their peers, and are not a product of reasoning. Granted, this is not the case one hundered percent of the time, but I think it is true in a majority of cases. In fact, it seems to be true of the majority of people that I meet.
I have noticed that in any group that has a significant userbase, you generally have two types of people - the people that know what they are talking about, and can back their opinions and explain their reasoning, and the group that takes what these people say and spout it off without thinking about it. It is a problem, I am sick of it.
Really, I'm just sick of people not putting any thought into anything at all. I mean, I know a ton of people who have a bunch of opinons - and who feel very strongly about these opinions - but can not explain to me the reason that they hold said opinions. It seems to me that if you can not explain the reasoning behind any opinion that you hold, that the opinion is just a product of what you have been told and should be discarded, with an "I don't know" replacing the opinion until you think about it for yourself and get some logic behind what you think.
But then, that's just me (or at least it seems like it is most of the time. Bah.)
Finally, there is nothing remotely "silly" about a web browser. You may only use it to make snide comments on Slashdot, but web browsers support hundreds of billions of dollars in business, which, I would argue, is far from silly. The security and availability of such a program is quite important, really.
A browser is not a silly thing, no. But given the variety of browsers available it is a silly thing to have a war mentality about, I have yet to see a platform that literally does not let you have your choice of browser - even if it only comes with one by default.
Well, I don't really know, (maybe some Opera users could enlighten us here) but it seems to me that Opera is out to make a profit off of their browser - at least more so than the people at firefox are
I know that you see ads in Opera if you don't pay for it, however I am not sure if that is all you gain by paying for it (the removal of ads, that is) or not.
Also, I know Firefox has basically borrowed quite a few ideas from Opera, so they might be a little peeved about that.
Anyhow, you assume that beating IE is the goal of both Opera and Firefox (possibly you were just joking around, but there are enough people who actually think that to warrant a comment here) which is not true - it's more of icing on the cake. The cake is a solid fucking browser, which it seems like both Opera and Firefox have. Mozilla may be looking to make a profit off Firefox, but if they are they are less open about it then Opera, and are relying on the "damn that's so good imma give em some money" factor.
Now, for you Opera fans, I'm not trying to piss you off. And I realize that there are a whole slew of people who don't mind the ads, and that there are another slew who think they are beneficiaries for looking at the ads - that's just not me.
And if Opera wants to make a profit off their browser, of course they are going to want people to use it instead of Firefox.
per cap·i·ta Pronunciation (pr kp-t) adv. & adj. 1. Per unit of population; per person: In that year, Americans earned $15,304 per capita. Among the states, Connecticut has a high per capita income. 2. Equally to each individual.
Eh, true. Knowing me, I would probably rename it 99.99.99 then forget about it until something changed in firefox's code that caused a crash with that extension still being used, and by then I would have forgotten about renaming it in the first place. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
Sometimes though, it's better lazy than safe (ok ok not really) but I don't think that it's too much of a jump to assume that considering that it still works now, that it's still going to work for a while - at least until the next major code change (or until they change something dealing with the user-agent string and how its set, I don't know firefox's code at all) so perhaps 2.0.0 is a more reasonable choice of numbering.
Then again, I have a tendency to ramble on about shit that doesn't matter, and they don't call you paranoidgeek for no reason do they?
Still though, today - right now - if you ask most people why they use IE, they will respond with "It came with the computer" or "What's IE, oh you mean the internet".
I understand your point, but when is the last time you heard of someone getting busted for MAKING child porn?
If they are not going after the people making the porn, or at least after the people making the sites (and really, could that be that hard to do given the page itself stored on a hard drive?) then they are accomplishing nothing towards stopping child pornography - just throwing someeone else in jail.
Also, I would say that morally it only equals sponsoring, not producing. I know people who actively watch beast porn because they think it's funny. None of them would actually do anything sexual to an animal. Is the person viewing an exploititave act as morally reprehensible as the person commiting the explotitave act?
But anyhow, back on track.
I have never heard of ANYONE being busted for:
A:Running a child pornography site. B:Flooding USENET with kiddie porn (which happens regularly BTW) C:Misnaming child porn files to other, more popular file names to get them downloaded.
Now, I don't know whether or not cases like those have been made, I just haven't heard of any.
I hear pretty regularly about someone getting busted for just having some illegal porn cached.
You know, I never got the whole "ACs are cowards" thing. I mean, other than the fact that coward is part of the acronym.
You are not much less anonymous than an AC, unless your real name is TripMaster_Monkey. The biggest difference between ACs and non-ACs, at least on a site this large, is that you can read up on a poster's history.
It's just an internet forum. Who fucking cares? And anyone saying that you should disregard every post written by every AC is a fucktard. There's a ton of people with usernames that do nothing but troll as well, and a ton of good AC posts as well.
People may have different reasons for posting AC. Maybe someone just wants to make a flippant remark that they normally wouldn't post (this is the case a lot of the time it would seem) or maybe someone really is cowardly. Maybe someone doesn't want to make a slashdot account. Maybe someone just wants to post as AC for no reason.
The previous part of my post is not directed at you, specifically - I just think everyone railing against ACs are moronic at best.
"huddling under the AC blankie" - what the fuck kind of meaningless crap is that? Why don't you post your full name, street address, and some links to pics and stop "huddling under the pseudonym blankie?" Jesus.
You say what you want to who you want when you want, and you've got 'excellent' karma. I post what I want to whoever I want whenever I want, and I've never even looked at what my karma is because I DON'T FUCKING CARE.
I also don't care about you making "me too" posts, and I think that the people objecting to you making those posts are dumb. And, if you've got someone following you around making AC posts just to troll you, then they are dumb as well. Or at least just bored.
Anyhow, don't let much of anything that gets said to you on the internet get to you. You'll just end up pissed off.
Hey I don't doubt it. All I know is I went to his house one day and he goes "Check it out I had the class I'm teaching make me acid" and feeds me a few hits, and I got a decent trip off it. He could have been bullshitting, but he's not the type of person to do that.
No, I haven't. VHSs are regionally encoded too? Or do they not fit in the VCR? Tell me, what happens when you put a European VHS into an American VCR? Hopefully they don't start ranting about how the VCR doesn't spell aluminium right and the VHS has bad teeth. (OK that was lame, but in all seriousness I fucking HATE regional encoding. And if it's on VHSs i hate it even more)
Hey, if you want to get into a discussion about what needs to be accomplished to achieve any sort of positive social change without society doing the violent revolution run-around, drop me an email at apatheticagnostic at gmail dot com. (I read the discussion blurb in your sig, was going to email you before I realized you have no public email addy set, much as I do so here ya go.(also, these discussions tend to get a little too deep for slashdot forums in my opinion))
And why shouldn't you be able to do that? If your neighbors don't want to be watched, perhaps they should close their blinds.
Of course, the analogy here does not quite fit towards software - you could say that if a company does not want it's software pirated that they should aggressively pursue the piraters. But then, in the world of computers, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING a company can do to prevent it's software from being pirated. After all, that software is just a sequential series of 0s and 1s. Theoretically, if you generated random binary files for long enough you would make photoshop yourself.
So, it would seem to me that the best, if not the only logical thing for a company to do is to ensure that their product is good enough to attract the people with the money willing to pay for it. Like Oracle. Also, like Oracle if the company is confident of its product, it could allow people to download it for free. Because it knows people are going to pay for it, and it knows that some people may not be able to afford it now, but maybe those people could afford it later, or know people who could use it who can afford it now.
Yeah, the only difference is that now the people that would have been pirating Oracle don't have to - in fact, I'm sure there are people who thought they were pirating Oracle (downloading a torrent off some other site because they didn't know that Oracle offered it free anyhow.)
The point is this - Oracle offers a free product. You don't have to pay for it, unless you are using it for a business (and really even then the business doesn't have to pay for it either, they could just download it straight from Oracle's site as well) and Oracle STILL TURNS A PROFIT.
So, there must be people willing to pay for it.
Now, out of the people I know that pirated Photoshop (actually everyone I know who has a copy of Photoshop got it illegally, except the CS teacher at the highschool I attended), only a few of them use it very often. Out of those, none of them use it in any profitable way (although a couple have the talent to). Also, none of them could afford to pay for photoshop anyhow.
Now, with my photoshopping freinds - they might have bought photoshop if they had the money to throw around. They don't. They do not have the spare time to put into photoshop until they could somehow make the money they spent on photoshop back using their photoshop skills.
The company that makes photoshop does not lose any money when one of these people downloads it. They don't lose anything at all. If it wasn't available for download (pirated or not) my freinds would have only lost the ability to see what the prog is like and fuck around with a few pictures.
Now, it can be argued either way wether they should be allowed to do that or not, but I would say that they should - simply because now they know what an awesome prog it is, and they know of at least one good photo editing prog they could use if they needed to.
If anything, this brings Photoshop more sales further down the road, if only through word of mouth.
Oh and I would assume that if Adobe started offering free full versions of photoshop on their site (like Oracle does) that they would still turn a huge profit (like Oracle does.) The only difference between the two situations (pirating photoshop and the hypothetical offered free photoshop) is the legality of the actions of the people acquiring it for free. You may also see a moral difference, but that varies from person to person.
I've had some really clean feeling shroom trips, some not so much. And the amount of shrooms trips I've taken far outnumbers the amount of acid trips, which is mainly a factor of availability. I certainly like acid, but it runs $10 a hit here when it's around (which is rare), and when it is, it's usually crap acid. A shame really.
I did have a freind who taught chemistry at a high school for a while. He had his class make him almost-acid for a grade, then took it back to his place and completed it (I have no clue about the technical details of this, but I know it's true cause I ate some of it).
In respose to 1, I should have added that the lady got her degree from a school that basically just churns out degrees, that I know what computer science is, and that her job had nothing to do with actual computer science at all (and I doubt she had ever even heard of the "big o"). It wasn't the best example of what I was trying to show, but it's what came out in a ranty moment. Oh well.
<i>What I mean by this is yes there are some people who get paid to do "nothing". Obviously the value they provide is all psychology. Somebody somewhere is getting value out of them. That shouldn't be cause of resentment. To put it less politically, "worry about your own shit. Stop being a player hater"</i>
It's not a cause of resentment, it's more of a cause of bewilderment. Trust me, I worry about my own shit. Also, I really don't care what someone else does with their life.
<i>Business want to hire extremely valuable and effective people. That is impossible measure those qualities from a resume or an interview. It also does not work all the time to offer internships because of things such as ndas, non competes, training costs, facility costs, liability, etc. So employeers need a proxy for those metrics. The default choice of course is a college degree...</i>
Right, right, I was saying that a college degree is no longer a very effective proxy, judging by the people I know with degrees, and their set of knowledge. I think that employers, if they are looking for valuable employees, should be administering skills tests as job prerequisets.
<i> but remember what they are looking for is a highly effective person. There are other ways to show that. hint: use your initiative.</i>
Of course I realize that. That's why I am looking to switch locations. Because in my current on (Bridgeport, WV) there is nothing that I can get to that isn't fast food, telemarketing, or hire-based-on-degree.
<i>The key to life (imho) is to avoid the negativity and cynicism that you seem to have picked up. Of course this could all be an elborate troll but I feel as if I've done my good deed for today</i>.
No troll, I assure you. I (normally) don't spend my time trying to squeeze negative responses out of people. I will admit, I'm pretty cynical. Much of my cynicism stems from watching the people around me get treated like tools, constantly without ever noticing because they are too tied up with themselves and their self-image.
I, for one, think that the key to life is to find out what you enjoy, what you enjoy learning about, what you are passionate about - and to pursue that passionately.
Now, I can not deny that my current outlooks have been shaped by my experiances (who could?), and that my life has been what most people I've met would call "hard." I haven't considered it so, but perhaps that is mainly because of my mindset, I don't know.
<i>a) You can be useful anywhere b) finding like minded people is probably the worst thing you can do. Like minded people will be in the same situation you are. Disempowered and wondering why...</i>
As for a, I realize that, the biggest problem is that I'm not going to be happy if I'm being useful doing something I abhor around people I hate. And as for b, that depends on what your definition of like-minded people is, I meant mainly people who are open-minded and tolerant - not necessarily people in similar situations.
In my insignificant nineteen years of life, (yeah, I'm a young'n) I have been kicked out of my parent's house, lived on the streets of a city approximately 5 miles across, seen the underbelly of west virginia - the outcasts, homeless, hopeless, dumb and smart alike. I have been told that my IQ was approximately 145 after taking a few tests in an office following a night of heavy drinking and weed smoking (I have no clue if that test was accurate or not, It was administered by someone in employ of the state as a process of determining candidates' elig
Slashdot Mirror
three thousand miles of wilderness overcome by the flow, a lonely restitution of pavement, pomp and show, i seek a thousand answers, i find but one or two, i maintain no discomfiture, my path again
renewed, against the grain, that's where i'll stay, swimming upstream, i maintain against the grain, theyre labelled as a lunatic, sequestered
and content, theyre ignored and defeated by the government, ther's an oriented public whose magnetic force does pull, but away from the
potential of the individual, against the grain..., the flow is getting stronger with smaller increments of time and eddies of new ideas are
increasingly hard to find, you need all that the other has, it is your right to seize the day, but in all your acquisitions you will soone be
swept away, against the grain..., there's a common consensus and a uncomfortable cheer, a reverberating chorus that anyone can hear, it
sings "leve your cares behind you, just grab tenaciously", this lulling sense of purpose will destroy us rapidly, against the grain...
That's the thing. Most people rooting did not choose their side rationally. Or rather, not even 'most people rooting' but it seems like 'most of the people rooting the loudest and most often' Certainly there is nothing wrong with rooting for a side that is rationally chosen, but rooting because "MS SUCKS" or because "BUSH IS A NAZER/KERRER IS A FLIPPITERFLOPPITER" is certainly myopic.
These two statements are not comparable, at least not in any effective way if you are trying to make the point the "I love western civilization in general" sounds stupid.
'Western Civilization' encompasses a lot of things, from McDonalds to WalMart to soccer moms, ghettos, rednecks, houses, water fountains, so on and so forth. To say that "I like western civilization in general" implies that he likes most things about western civilization, however there are some things that he does not like.
'black people' refers to people whose skin is of a darker shade than most caucasians. That is all. Any comment made about a trait that 'black people' have can normally be applied to 'just people.' saying "I love black people in general" sounds retarded because its basically the same as saying you like people in general, just with an added racial modifer that is not needed, and probably only added so you don't sound like a racist - which if you are saying something like that you probably are.
Ahh, I'm with you man. I have noticed this mentality in all varying types of people here in America - from geeks to rednecks, republicans, democrats, punks, preps, jocks, freshmen and seniors, so on and so forth. I really think that most of the people who are just 'rooting against' or 'rooting for' - the people who place a lot of emotion on things like sports teams winning or microsoft being hit by a virus, it seems like there is a trait that is common in all these people
Their opinions are told to them, or osmosed through their peers, and are not a product of reasoning. Granted, this is not the case one hundered percent of the time, but I think it is true in a majority of cases. In fact, it seems to be true of the majority of people that I meet.
I have noticed that in any group that has a significant userbase, you generally have two types of people - the people that know what they are talking about, and can back their opinions and explain their reasoning, and the group that takes what these people say and spout it off without thinking about it. It is a problem, I am sick of it.
Really, I'm just sick of people not putting any thought into anything at all. I mean, I know a ton of people who have a bunch of opinons - and who feel very strongly about these opinions - but can not explain to me the reason that they hold said opinions. It seems to me that if you can not explain the reasoning behind any opinion that you hold, that the opinion is just a product of what you have been told and should be discarded, with an "I don't know" replacing the opinion until you think about it for yourself and get some logic behind what you think.
But then, that's just me (or at least it seems like it is most of the time. Bah.)
A browser is not a silly thing, no. But given the variety of browsers available it is a silly thing to have a war mentality about, I have yet to see a platform that literally does not let you have your choice of browser - even if it only comes with one by default.
Well, I don't really know, (maybe some Opera users could enlighten us here) but it seems to me that Opera is out to make a profit off of their browser - at least more so than the people at firefox are
I know that you see ads in Opera if you don't pay for it, however I am not sure if that is all you gain by paying for it (the removal of ads, that is) or not.
Also, I know Firefox has basically borrowed quite a few ideas from Opera, so they might be a little peeved about that.
Anyhow, you assume that beating IE is the goal of both Opera and Firefox (possibly you were just joking around, but there are enough people who actually think that to warrant a comment here) which is not true - it's more of icing on the cake. The cake is a solid fucking browser, which it seems like both Opera and Firefox have. Mozilla may be looking to make a profit off Firefox, but if they are they are less open about it then Opera, and are relying on the "damn that's so good imma give em some money" factor.
Now, for you Opera fans, I'm not trying to piss you off. And I realize that there are a whole slew of people who don't mind the ads, and that there are another slew who think they are beneficiaries for looking at the ads - that's just not me.
And if Opera wants to make a profit off their browser, of course they are going to want people to use it instead of Firefox.
Bless the bits?
Anarchy is chaos in the modern. bastardized sense of the word.
Anarchy in the sense that it is supposed to mean is inherently peaceful and ordered.
per cap·i·ta Pronunciation (pr kp-t)
adv. & adj.
1. Per unit of population; per person: In that year, Americans earned $15,304 per capita. Among the states, Connecticut has a high per capita income.
2. Equally to each individual.
Eh, true. Knowing me, I would probably rename it 99.99.99 then forget about it until something changed in firefox's code that caused a crash with that extension still being used, and by then I would have forgotten about renaming it in the first place. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.
Sometimes though, it's better lazy than safe (ok ok not really) but I don't think that it's too much of a jump to assume that considering that it still works now, that it's still going to work for a while - at least until the next major code change (or until they change something dealing with the user-agent string and how its set, I don't know firefox's code at all) so perhaps 2.0.0 is a more reasonable choice of numbering.
Then again, I have a tendency to ramble on about shit that doesn't matter, and they don't call you paranoidgeek for no reason do they?
Still though, today - right now - if you ask most people why they use IE, they will respond with "It came with the computer" or "What's IE, oh you mean the internet".
Shouldn't you just make it 99.99.99 so you never have to update it again?
I understand your point, but when is the last time you heard of someone getting busted for MAKING child porn?
If they are not going after the people making the porn, or at least after the people making the sites (and really, could that be that hard to do given the page itself stored on a hard drive?) then they are accomplishing nothing towards stopping child pornography - just throwing someeone else in jail.
Also, I would say that morally it only equals sponsoring, not producing. I know people who actively watch beast porn because they think it's funny. None of them would actually do anything sexual to an animal. Is the person viewing an exploititave act as morally reprehensible as the person commiting the explotitave act?
But anyhow, back on track.
I have never heard of ANYONE being busted for:
A:Running a child pornography site.
B:Flooding USENET with kiddie porn (which happens regularly BTW)
C:Misnaming child porn files to other, more popular file names to get them downloaded.
Now, I don't know whether or not cases like those have been made, I just haven't heard of any.
I hear pretty regularly about someone getting busted for just having some illegal porn cached.
Sure, they can. But they won't. All the words worth reading are below the summaries 99.99% of the time anyhow.
You know, I never got the whole "ACs are cowards" thing. I mean, other than the fact that coward is part of the acronym.
You are not much less anonymous than an AC, unless your real name is TripMaster_Monkey. The biggest difference between ACs and non-ACs, at least on a site this large, is that you can read up on a poster's history.
It's just an internet forum. Who fucking cares? And anyone saying that you should disregard every post written by every AC is a fucktard. There's a ton of people with usernames that do nothing but troll as well, and a ton of good AC posts as well.
People may have different reasons for posting AC. Maybe someone just wants to make a flippant remark that they normally wouldn't post (this is the case a lot of the time it would seem) or maybe someone really is cowardly. Maybe someone doesn't want to make a slashdot account. Maybe someone just wants to post as AC for no reason.
The previous part of my post is not directed at you, specifically - I just think everyone railing against ACs are moronic at best.
"huddling under the AC blankie" - what the fuck kind of meaningless crap is that? Why don't you post your full name, street address, and some links to pics and stop "huddling under the pseudonym blankie?" Jesus.
You say what you want to who you want when you want, and you've got 'excellent' karma. I post what I want to whoever I want whenever I want, and I've never even looked at what my karma is because I DON'T FUCKING CARE.
I also don't care about you making "me too" posts, and I think that the people objecting to you making those posts are dumb. And, if you've got someone following you around making AC posts just to troll you, then they are dumb as well. Or at least just bored.
Anyhow, don't let much of anything that gets said to you on the internet get to you. You'll just end up pissed off.
Hey I don't doubt it. All I know is I went to his house one day and he goes "Check it out I had the class I'm teaching make me acid" and feeds me a few hits, and I got a decent trip off it. He could have been bullshitting, but he's not the type of person to do that.
If buy "at work" you meant "masturbating," then I believe you.
Could you perhaps explain, or point to a link explaining why you can only legally switch regions 5 times, and what exactly enforces the limit?
No, I haven't. VHSs are regionally encoded too? Or do they not fit in the VCR? Tell me, what happens when you put a European VHS into an American VCR? Hopefully they don't start ranting about how the VCR doesn't spell aluminium right and the VHS has bad teeth. (OK that was lame, but in all seriousness I fucking HATE regional encoding. And if it's on VHSs i hate it even more)
Hey, if you want to get into a discussion about what needs to be accomplished to achieve any sort of positive social change without society doing the violent revolution run-around, drop me an email at apatheticagnostic at gmail dot com. (I read the discussion blurb in your sig, was going to email you before I realized you have no public email addy set, much as I do so here ya go.(also, these discussions tend to get a little too deep for slashdot forums in my opinion))
And why shouldn't you be able to do that? If your neighbors don't want to be watched, perhaps they should close their blinds.
Of course, the analogy here does not quite fit towards software - you could say that if a company does not want it's software pirated that they should aggressively pursue the piraters. But then, in the world of computers, there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING a company can do to prevent it's software from being pirated. After all, that software is just a sequential series of 0s and 1s. Theoretically, if you generated random binary files for long enough you would make photoshop yourself.
So, it would seem to me that the best, if not the only logical thing for a company to do is to ensure that their product is good enough to attract the people with the money willing to pay for it. Like Oracle. Also, like Oracle if the company is confident of its product, it could allow people to download it for free. Because it knows people are going to pay for it, and it knows that some people may not be able to afford it now, but maybe those people could afford it later, or know people who could use it who can afford it now.
Yeah, the only difference is that now the people that would have been pirating Oracle don't have to - in fact, I'm sure there are people who thought they were pirating Oracle (downloading a torrent off some other site because they didn't know that Oracle offered it free anyhow.)
The point is this - Oracle offers a free product. You don't have to pay for it, unless you are using it for a business (and really even then the business doesn't have to pay for it either, they could just download it straight from Oracle's site as well) and Oracle STILL TURNS A PROFIT.
So, there must be people willing to pay for it.
Now, out of the people I know that pirated Photoshop (actually everyone I know who has a copy of Photoshop got it illegally, except the CS teacher at the highschool I attended), only a few of them use it very often. Out of those, none of them use it in any profitable way (although a couple have the talent to). Also, none of them could afford to pay for photoshop anyhow.
Now, with my photoshopping freinds - they might have bought photoshop if they had the money to throw around. They don't. They do not have the spare time to put into photoshop until they could somehow make the money they spent on photoshop back using their photoshop skills.
The company that makes photoshop does not lose any money when one of these people downloads it. They don't lose anything at all. If it wasn't available for download (pirated or not) my freinds would have only lost the ability to see what the prog is like and fuck around with a few pictures.
Now, it can be argued either way wether they should be allowed to do that or not, but I would say that they should - simply because now they know what an awesome prog it is, and they know of at least one good photo editing prog they could use if they needed to.
If anything, this brings Photoshop more sales further down the road, if only through word of mouth.
Oh and I would assume that if Adobe started offering free full versions of photoshop on their site (like Oracle does) that they would still turn a huge profit (like Oracle does.) The only difference between the two situations (pirating photoshop and the hypothetical offered free photoshop) is the legality of the actions of the people acquiring it for free. You may also see a moral difference, but that varies from person to person.
I've had some really clean feeling shroom trips, some not so much. And the amount of shrooms trips I've taken far outnumbers the amount of acid trips, which is mainly a factor of availability. I certainly like acid, but it runs $10 a hit here when it's around (which is rare), and when it is, it's usually crap acid. A shame really.
I did have a freind who taught chemistry at a high school for a while. He had his class make him almost-acid for a grade, then took it back to his place and completed it (I have no clue about the technical details of this, but I know it's true cause I ate some of it).
In respose to 1, I should have added that the lady got her degree from a school that basically just churns out degrees, that I know what computer science is, and that her job had nothing to do with actual computer science at all (and I doubt she had ever even heard of the "big o"). It wasn't the best example of what I was trying to show, but it's what came out in a ranty moment. Oh well.
<i>What I mean by this is yes there are some people who get paid to do "nothing". Obviously the value they provide is all psychology. Somebody somewhere is getting value out of them. That shouldn't be cause of resentment. To put it less politically, "worry about your own shit. Stop being a player hater"</i>
It's not a cause of resentment, it's more of a cause of bewilderment. Trust me, I worry about my own shit. Also, I really don't care what someone else does with their life.
<i>Business want to hire extremely valuable and effective people. That is impossible measure those qualities from a resume or an interview. It also does not work all the time to offer internships because of things such as ndas, non competes, training costs, facility costs, liability, etc. So employeers need a proxy for those metrics. The default choice of course is a college degree...</i>
Right, right, I was saying that a college degree is no longer a very effective proxy, judging by the people I know with degrees, and their set of knowledge. I think that employers, if they are looking for valuable employees, should be administering skills tests as job prerequisets.
<i> but remember what they are looking for is a highly effective person. There are other ways to show that. hint: use your initiative.</i>
Of course I realize that. That's why I am looking to switch locations. Because in my current on (Bridgeport, WV) there is nothing that I can get to that isn't fast food, telemarketing, or hire-based-on-degree.
<i>The key to life (imho) is to avoid the negativity and cynicism that you seem to have picked up. Of course this could all be an elborate troll but I feel as if I've done my good deed for today</i>.
No troll, I assure you. I (normally) don't spend my time trying to squeeze negative responses out of people. I will admit, I'm pretty cynical. Much of my cynicism stems from watching the people around me get treated like tools, constantly without ever noticing because they are too tied up with themselves and their self-image.
I, for one, think that the key to life is to find out what you enjoy, what you enjoy learning about, what you are passionate about - and to pursue that passionately.
Now, I can not deny that my current outlooks have been shaped by my experiances (who could?), and that my life has been what most people I've met would call "hard." I haven't considered it so, but perhaps that is mainly because of my mindset, I don't know.
<i>a) You can be useful anywhere
b) finding like minded people is probably the worst thing you can do. Like minded people will be in the same situation you are. Disempowered and wondering why...</i>
As for a, I realize that, the biggest problem is that I'm not going to be happy if I'm being useful doing something I abhor around people I hate. And as for b, that depends on what your definition of like-minded people is, I meant mainly people who are open-minded and tolerant - not necessarily people in similar situations.
In my insignificant nineteen years of life, (yeah, I'm a young'n) I have been kicked out of my parent's house, lived on the streets of a city approximately 5 miles across, seen the underbelly of west virginia - the outcasts, homeless, hopeless, dumb and smart alike. I have been told that my IQ was approximately 145 after taking a few tests in an office following a night of heavy drinking and weed smoking (I have no clue if that test was accurate or not, It was administered by someone in employ of the state as a process of determining candidates' elig
God, I would feel sketchy hotswapping a cpu board.