On the plus side, content creators' rights are protected from rampant piracy.
That is a plus side...right? Guys? Hello? *crickets chirping*
I forgot, nobody gives a shit about the artists, so we have to invent cute little experiments where files with non-equivalent bitrates are compared, so we can scream "DRM REDUCES BATTERY LIFE!" in some vain attempt to bash DRM yet again. My bad.
Let's be real, the vast, vast majority of torrent traffic is freeloaders participating in illegal piracy. A torrent on PirateBay is getting a lot more traffic then torrents for some rinky-dink Ubuntu ISO or free concert MP3 from some unsigned local band.
Congratulations! You can't argue my points, so you resort to a caps lock laden title ordering moderators to censor me because my opinion disagrees with yours. Baa!
I love how I simply must be working for a studio if I dare suggest that people get paid for their work. Baa! Baa!
There's nothing about Apple's model that's not "consumer rights friendly." You're free to buy a competing player and service if you want.
Consumer friendly traits are not the antithesis of a monopoly, because a monopoly is not a bad thing. Abusing the monopoly is, and Apple hasn't done that. Selling a service for your product isn't illegal or wrong. It's when you leverage a monopoly position to shut out potential competitors by, for example, punishing retailers with huge fees if they sell competing music players. Apple hasn't done that.
Congratulations! You are the first poster of what will no doubt be many to mention "DRM." You see, in any article about movies, you are required by law to mention DRM. Even though people are just repeating themselves, you will get modded up anyway by fellow pirates who hate DRM and want the freedom to make sure people don't get paid for their work.
Instead of discussing HD-DVD's compression quality, or the films they chose, or Microsoft's backing, or its smaller size compared to Blu-ray, the discussion will instead become protracted DRM discussions for the ten millionth time.
In other words, nothing new will be said in this discussion. Just giving you the heads up!
My opinion would be no different. It's ridiculous and stupid of the French to force a company to make its product interoperate with other products just for the hell of it. A company has every right to sell a product, then sell a product or service that works with that product. What, is France going to force Microsoft to sell Office for Linux now? Or Halo 2 for the Gamecube? Does HBO now have to air "The Sopranos" on Fox? Does Sony have to sell XBox 360 games?
If Apple was actually abusing its monopoly the way Microsoft did in the 90s--e.g., punishing retailers who sold competing products like with Microsoft's coercive OEM deals--then this would have merit. But Apple hasn't done that (and doesn't need to, they're #1 fair and square). You're totally free to buy a competing product and service.
This is just the French hating Apple for being yet another American company taking over their precious little square of culture on the planet.
Or, buy a Mac. They have this crazy idea that computers should be quiet to begin with.
Of course, they also use advanced firmware like EFI and not 25-year-old technology like the PC BIOS, which Microsoft and PC makers want you to keep using for the next decade, so maybe PCs will always be noisy pieces of crap because nobody innovates in that industry.
Except that it'll take the actual pirates all of 30 minutes to defeat every single copy protection system the content owners can put in place.
Exactly, which is why DRM is becoming much more restrictive to protect the rights of content creators from getting shit on by idealistic freeloaders who think they deserve to download anything and everything. Copy protection is becoming much more sophisticated, which should help artists to actually get paid for their hard work. You and others have yet to explain why pirates have the right to be doing this in the first place.
Meanwhile, regular people who want to watch the latest movie they bought from best buy, only to find that the $10,000 entertainment system they bought a year ago is inadequate, will get screwed.
Cite a case where this happens, and you've got a point. Until then, nothing.
No, DRM really does prevent casual piracy, and studies have proven this. However, freeloaders have gotten much more proactive in breaking copy protection and distributing the content to as many other freeloaders as they can.
The money is better spent producing more content, or increasing the quality of what you do make.
There won't BE any money if nobody pays them.
Hell, maybe even kick a few dollars over to the musicians.
Ah, the "RIAA abuses artists" tact. Except that artists willingly sign their contracts.
Anything would be better than spending millions of dollars on technology that at best is mildly amusing to us "freeloaders" and at worst aggravating to paying customers.
It does prevent casual piracy, and it makes sure there are dollars to begin with to pay those content creators. Pirates don't want to pay anybody as they consume other people's work. It's the antithesis of both capitalism and the Open Source philosophy.
Reword your rhetoric to something reasonable or failing that, STFU.
Ah, the perfect response to something you disagree with--calling it "rhetoric" or telling them to "STFU."
Well, if pirating freeloaders keep ripping them off, they will have to get into another business. And that will effectively kill off all the content. Pirates don't give a shit about this; it has absolutely no prominence in their minds that they're making sure someone doesn't get paid for work they did. To them, artists are apparently slaves who must toil in expensive studios for free so that pirates just "might" decide to support them through the purchase of a t-shirt or concert ticket, though usually pirates assume someone else will do it.
Ah, the old "printed press" argument, a red herring to distract from the immorality of making sure System of a Down doesn't get paid today.
The "pirates" aren't a recent innovation since the creation of Napster, ok?
And now we're inventing something I never said so you can attack it, called a strawman argument.
Want to know what is a recent innovation compared to the past 500+ years? The Internet. That changes things. You can put a song in a shared folder and have a thousand people download it in a week. So no matter what weak argument you attempt to throw out to distract people, it won't change the fact you're purposely ignoring the new factor that is the Internet, which makes bit-for-bit copying easy and convenient for pirates, and connects them to millions of other people. That's what's different. That's why people are putting safeguards on their content in a net-connected world.
If the content owners find that they're unable to prosecute infringers (due to the measures of pirates to protect their freeloading brethren through anonymous pirating), or that prosecution isn't moving fast enough to get all the pirates, they'll secure their material so that they stop getting ripped off.
If piracy skyrockets, you better believe it will be added back in. If you don't want content owners reacting to the thievery of their material, you should tell the pirates to stop taking stuff without paying for it. It's that simple.
With all the freeloaders on the Internet and places like ThePirateBay selling friggin' t-shirts saying "Piracy is great!," it's never gonna happen. DRM is here to stay and necessary to at least make an attempt to protect the rights of content creators from getting stomped all over. It's always a careful balance between restricting user abilities while protecting content creators, but if you hate the existence of that gray line in the first place, blame the freeloaders.
Yeah seriously. Some people here will take every opportunity to bitch about MSFT and I'm not a fan of them either. However, let's be realistic here. Use the best tool for the job..Net was never meant for writing an OS. Why the hell would MSFT want to do that anyways?!
Read the fucking article. It's not about writing an OS in.NET. It's about all the userland that was previously written in.NET code--like the freakin' Explorer shell--which has now been replaced with native code. Microsoft developers previously claimed Longhorn would be based on a lot of.NET code, and now they've quietly replaced it all with native. There were services that ran in.NET that are now native as well.
If I see another "they're not going to write an OS in.NET" commenter who has clearly not bothered clicking the damn link and reading the article, I'm going to scream.
Here's an idea. Read the fucking article. It's not about writing an "OS from scratch." It's comparing the amount of managed code that was used since the PDC 2003 build to today's builds. Back then, the shell was managed code, two services were managed code, and since then, native code has replaced nearly all of it, and WinFX isn't even installed by default anymore.
Clearly, Microsoft has abandoned its former strategy of using.NET for all that stuff, as they previously advertised that they would (again, read the fucking article).
I'm pissed at them for a weird reason, too. I don't want Microsoft and its crappy console to gain any foothold. The only reason the XBox exists is to push the Windows platform into the living room--originally Microsoft offered their platform libraries to Sony and Nintendo and only made the X-Box when both companies refused to ship Windows on their consoles. Microsoft cares nothing at all about games or quality of games, which is why we get commercials espousing the wonders of sweat on a basketball player mesh. They only care about extending Windows and tying people to it in some way.
So with the Playstation 3 delayed--arguably the only sure bet to crushing and stomping out the XBox for good--this gives more time for the XBox 360 to actually gain a foothold, even despite their pathetically slow start (Nintendo sold more Gamecubes last Christmas than Microsoft sold XBox 360s).
I expected the Playstation 3 to dominate once more, with Nintendo coming on the side as the cheaper "add-on" gaming console that everyone buys to play Zelda and Mario Kart on the side.
Although the e-mails exchanged are unclear my guess is that the programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE. Not that you'd ever know that given that Blizzard communicates with their users seemingly almost exclusively with form letters.
Oh, STFU, Taco! What is it with you and World of Warcraft? Last time, you got all pissed that you had to change your name to follow the rules of no titles, which caused you to post a seven paragraph essay whining about how you, as CmdrTaco of Slashdot, should have been allowed to bend the rules everyone else has to follow. It's obvious you're STILL pissed over this and making flippant remarks about form letters, which is hypocritical considering Slashdot's piss-poor email feedback that often involves a sarcastic one-line dismissal of the user's problem.
I think I see now why Slashdot is languishing. We always wonder what the editors do all day, and now we know CmdrTaco just plays World of Warcraft while his site generates ad revenue. Then he takes a break from the game to check the submission queue without even bothering to follow the front page (he probably doesn't even subscribe to the RSS feed), and once he's posted a few, goes back to his game while the site falls even further behind.
Please...shut up about World of Warcraft, 'k, Taco? In the first case you bitched, it was over you breaking the rules of no titles in names. In this case of your bitching, you're criticizing over automated keyboard macros that performed behaviors unattended, which is clearly against the rules. If you don't like Blizzard or their rules, don't play their fucking game.
The fringe I speak of is comprised of "a large cross-section of normal folks"? Who have a "certain set of faith beliefs [sic]"?
No, you're calling a large cross-section of normal folks a "fringe." Get the difference?
Congratulations, you just called the typical Christian church-goer a fringe lunatic
No, you did.
Maybe you should spend a little less time being a reactionary, overly-critical zealot so that you have some extra open time to think before you post stupid comments like that.
Maybe you should spend a little more time learning actual debate skills instead of calling people names like "reactionary, overly-critical zealot." You don't even know what my religious beliefs are (non-Christian). But I'm tired of the vehemently anti-Christian, anti-any-religion mindset on Slashdot that says anything that dares suggest a creator is somehow "lunatic fringe."
Ignoring your typical, condescending, vehemently anti-religious comment about a large cross-section of normal folks with a certain set of faith beliefs you happen to disagree with in an attempt to feel enlightened, this game is great in that you can interpret your input in the game as the natural hand of evolution, or you can interpret it as God shaping the development of the creatures. Whichever floats your boat.
It's not about money, it's about losing ground to other companies who are quite happy to play friendly with the EU. Paying big fines wouldn't sit well with shareholders either.
Slashdot Mirror
On the plus side, content creators' rights are protected from rampant piracy.
That is a plus side...right? Guys? Hello? *crickets chirping*
I forgot, nobody gives a shit about the artists, so we have to invent cute little experiments where files with non-equivalent bitrates are compared, so we can scream "DRM REDUCES BATTERY LIFE!" in some vain attempt to bash DRM yet again. My bad.
Let's be real, the vast, vast majority of torrent traffic is freeloaders participating in illegal piracy. A torrent on PirateBay is getting a lot more traffic then torrents for some rinky-dink Ubuntu ISO or free concert MP3 from some unsigned local band.
Congratulations! You can't argue my points, so you resort to a caps lock laden title ordering moderators to censor me because my opinion disagrees with yours. Baa!
I love how I simply must be working for a studio if I dare suggest that people get paid for their work. Baa! Baa!
There's nothing about Apple's model that's not "consumer rights friendly." You're free to buy a competing player and service if you want.
Consumer friendly traits are not the antithesis of a monopoly, because a monopoly is not a bad thing. Abusing the monopoly is, and Apple hasn't done that. Selling a service for your product isn't illegal or wrong. It's when you leverage a monopoly position to shut out potential competitors by, for example, punishing retailers with huge fees if they sell competing music players. Apple hasn't done that.
Congratulations! You are the first poster of what will no doubt be many to mention "DRM." You see, in any article about movies, you are required by law to mention DRM. Even though people are just repeating themselves, you will get modded up anyway by fellow pirates who hate DRM and want the freedom to make sure people don't get paid for their work.
Instead of discussing HD-DVD's compression quality, or the films they chose, or Microsoft's backing, or its smaller size compared to Blu-ray, the discussion will instead become protracted DRM discussions for the ten millionth time.
In other words, nothing new will be said in this discussion. Just giving you the heads up!
My opinion would be no different. It's ridiculous and stupid of the French to force a company to make its product interoperate with other products just for the hell of it. A company has every right to sell a product, then sell a product or service that works with that product. What, is France going to force Microsoft to sell Office for Linux now? Or Halo 2 for the Gamecube? Does HBO now have to air "The Sopranos" on Fox? Does Sony have to sell XBox 360 games?
If Apple was actually abusing its monopoly the way Microsoft did in the 90s--e.g., punishing retailers who sold competing products like with Microsoft's coercive OEM deals--then this would have merit. But Apple hasn't done that (and doesn't need to, they're #1 fair and square). You're totally free to buy a competing product and service.
This is just the French hating Apple for being yet another American company taking over their precious little square of culture on the planet.
Wow! Thanks for the heads-up!
Or, buy a Mac. They have this crazy idea that computers should be quiet to begin with.
Of course, they also use advanced firmware like EFI and not 25-year-old technology like the PC BIOS, which Microsoft and PC makers want you to keep using for the next decade, so maybe PCs will always be noisy pieces of crap because nobody innovates in that industry.
Except that it'll take the actual pirates all of 30 minutes to defeat every single copy protection system the content owners can put in place.
Exactly, which is why DRM is becoming much more restrictive to protect the rights of content creators from getting shit on by idealistic freeloaders who think they deserve to download anything and everything. Copy protection is becoming much more sophisticated, which should help artists to actually get paid for their hard work. You and others have yet to explain why pirates have the right to be doing this in the first place.
Meanwhile, regular people who want to watch the latest movie they bought from best buy, only to find that the $10,000 entertainment system they bought a year ago is inadequate, will get screwed.
Cite a case where this happens, and you've got a point. Until then, nothing.
Your argument assumes that DRM works. It doesn't.
No, DRM really does prevent casual piracy, and studies have proven this. However, freeloaders have gotten much more proactive in breaking copy protection and distributing the content to as many other freeloaders as they can.
The money is better spent producing more content, or increasing the quality of what you do make.
There won't BE any money if nobody pays them.
Hell, maybe even kick a few dollars over to the musicians.
Ah, the "RIAA abuses artists" tact. Except that artists willingly sign their contracts.
Anything would be better than spending millions of dollars on technology that at best is mildly amusing to us "freeloaders" and at worst aggravating to paying customers.
It does prevent casual piracy, and it makes sure there are dollars to begin with to pay those content creators. Pirates don't want to pay anybody as they consume other people's work. It's the antithesis of both capitalism and the Open Source philosophy.
Reword your rhetoric to something reasonable or failing that, STFU.
Ah, the perfect response to something you disagree with--calling it "rhetoric" or telling them to "STFU."
Well, if pirating freeloaders keep ripping them off, they will have to get into another business. And that will effectively kill off all the content. Pirates don't give a shit about this; it has absolutely no prominence in their minds that they're making sure someone doesn't get paid for work they did. To them, artists are apparently slaves who must toil in expensive studios for free so that pirates just "might" decide to support them through the purchase of a t-shirt or concert ticket, though usually pirates assume someone else will do it.
Ah, the old "printed press" argument, a red herring to distract from the immorality of making sure System of a Down doesn't get paid today.
The "pirates" aren't a recent innovation since the creation of Napster, ok?
And now we're inventing something I never said so you can attack it, called a strawman argument.
Want to know what is a recent innovation compared to the past 500+ years? The Internet. That changes things. You can put a song in a shared folder and have a thousand people download it in a week. So no matter what weak argument you attempt to throw out to distract people, it won't change the fact you're purposely ignoring the new factor that is the Internet, which makes bit-for-bit copying easy and convenient for pirates, and connects them to millions of other people. That's what's different. That's why people are putting safeguards on their content in a net-connected world.
Ah, the anonymous one-man boycott so common on Slashdot...and oh-so-effective, too.
That's a job for the prosecutors.
If the content owners find that they're unable to prosecute infringers (due to the measures of pirates to protect their freeloading brethren through anonymous pirating), or that prosecution isn't moving fast enough to get all the pirates, they'll secure their material so that they stop getting ripped off.
If piracy skyrockets, you better believe it will be added back in. If you don't want content owners reacting to the thievery of their material, you should tell the pirates to stop taking stuff without paying for it. It's that simple.
With all the freeloaders on the Internet and places like ThePirateBay selling friggin' t-shirts saying "Piracy is great!," it's never gonna happen. DRM is here to stay and necessary to at least make an attempt to protect the rights of content creators from getting stomped all over. It's always a careful balance between restricting user abilities while protecting content creators, but if you hate the existence of that gray line in the first place, blame the freeloaders.
Yeah seriously. Some people here will take every opportunity to bitch about MSFT and I'm not a fan of them either. However, let's be realistic here. Use the best tool for the job. .Net was never meant for writing an OS. Why the hell would MSFT want to do that anyways?!
.NET. It's about all the userland that was previously written in .NET code--like the freakin' Explorer shell--which has now been replaced with native code. Microsoft developers previously claimed Longhorn would be based on a lot of .NET code, and now they've quietly replaced it all with native. There were services that ran in .NET that are now native as well.
.NET" commenter who has clearly not bothered clicking the damn link and reading the article, I'm going to scream.
Read the fucking article. It's not about writing an OS in
If I see another "they're not going to write an OS in
Here's an idea. Read the fucking article. It's not about writing an "OS from scratch." It's comparing the amount of managed code that was used since the PDC 2003 build to today's builds. Back then, the shell was managed code, two services were managed code, and since then, native code has replaced nearly all of it, and WinFX isn't even installed by default anymore.
.NET for all that stuff, as they previously advertised that they would (again, read the fucking article).
Clearly, Microsoft has abandoned its former strategy of using
I'm pissed at them for a weird reason, too. I don't want Microsoft and its crappy console to gain any foothold. The only reason the XBox exists is to push the Windows platform into the living room--originally Microsoft offered their platform libraries to Sony and Nintendo and only made the X-Box when both companies refused to ship Windows on their consoles. Microsoft cares nothing at all about games or quality of games, which is why we get commercials espousing the wonders of sweat on a basketball player mesh. They only care about extending Windows and tying people to it in some way.
So with the Playstation 3 delayed--arguably the only sure bet to crushing and stomping out the XBox for good--this gives more time for the XBox 360 to actually gain a foothold, even despite their pathetically slow start (Nintendo sold more Gamecubes last Christmas than Microsoft sold XBox 360s).
I expected the Playstation 3 to dominate once more, with Nintendo coming on the side as the cheaper "add-on" gaming console that everyone buys to play Zelda and Mario Kart on the side.
Although the e-mails exchanged are unclear my guess is that the programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE. Not that you'd ever know that given that Blizzard communicates with their users seemingly almost exclusively with form letters.
Oh, STFU, Taco! What is it with you and World of Warcraft? Last time, you got all pissed that you had to change your name to follow the rules of no titles, which caused you to post a seven paragraph essay whining about how you, as CmdrTaco of Slashdot, should have been allowed to bend the rules everyone else has to follow. It's obvious you're STILL pissed over this and making flippant remarks about form letters, which is hypocritical considering Slashdot's piss-poor email feedback that often involves a sarcastic one-line dismissal of the user's problem.
I think I see now why Slashdot is languishing. We always wonder what the editors do all day, and now we know CmdrTaco just plays World of Warcraft while his site generates ad revenue. Then he takes a break from the game to check the submission queue without even bothering to follow the front page (he probably doesn't even subscribe to the RSS feed), and once he's posted a few, goes back to his game while the site falls even further behind.
Please...shut up about World of Warcraft, 'k, Taco? In the first case you bitched, it was over you breaking the rules of no titles in names. In this case of your bitching, you're criticizing over automated keyboard macros that performed behaviors unattended, which is clearly against the rules. If you don't like Blizzard or their rules, don't play their fucking game.
The fringe I speak of is comprised of "a large cross-section of normal folks"? Who have a "certain set of faith beliefs [sic]"?
No, you're calling a large cross-section of normal folks a "fringe." Get the difference?
Congratulations, you just called the typical Christian church-goer a fringe lunatic
No, you did.
Maybe you should spend a little less time being a reactionary, overly-critical zealot so that you have some extra open time to think before you post stupid comments like that.
Maybe you should spend a little more time learning actual debate skills instead of calling people names like "reactionary, overly-critical zealot." You don't even know what my religious beliefs are (non-Christian). But I'm tired of the vehemently anti-Christian, anti-any-religion mindset on Slashdot that says anything that dares suggest a creator is somehow "lunatic fringe."
I'm not surprised by it. Non-violent games like The Sims mean a much wider target audience, as well as appealing more to females.
Ignoring your typical, condescending, vehemently anti-religious comment about a large cross-section of normal folks with a certain set of faith beliefs you happen to disagree with in an attempt to feel enlightened, this game is great in that you can interpret your input in the game as the natural hand of evolution, or you can interpret it as God shaping the development of the creatures. Whichever floats your boat.
I never said they were going away. I said they could become irrelevant. That's how fickle the tech industry is.
I'm not a "Linux zealot;" I don't even use it.
Anything else? Didn't think so. Next.
It's not about money, it's about losing ground to other companies who are quite happy to play friendly with the EU. Paying big fines wouldn't sit well with shareholders either.