How about another view on the issue? Are We Living In Nick Bostrom's Speculation? is a detailed rebuttal of Bostrom's Simulation Argument, revealing logical and mathematical mistakes in the original proof. Comments are welcome.
While the lawsuit was dismissed by the court, Google had to restore (voluntarily) the Searchking rankings. That means those damn search engine spammers can continue their evil doings.:( Google tried to adapt its system to abuse, but failed. Unfortunately, it seems that the more important Google becomes, the less freedom they will have to arbitrarily change (fine-tune) the system. Users lose as usual.:(
And I forgot, give some advice on dealing with different file formats. For some reason anime pirates just love using some obscure formats for anime videos. They used Smacker, Vivo, RealVideo. Now they use OGM. Crazy people. We anime fans definitely need some advice on dealing with all these file formats. I just downloaded Akira and had to convert that stupid OGM to AVI/MP3, because ogm DirectShow filter would not install correctly for some obscure reason.
If you call your page The Pirate Anime FAQ: A Guide To Unlicensed Anime and Manga Related Goods, it would make sense to include more detailed information on where to get the stuff (not just say eBay). How about explaining the benefits of different P2P systems, mentioning AnimeReactor, etc. And while you are at it, don't you think your FAQ is too one-sided? I would also add sections on "Why should I buy pirated stuff?", "How should I pirate stuff?", "What can I do for the anime piracy scene?", "How stupid you must be to oppose anime piracy for free, when you can earn some cash opposing movie piracy for MPAA?" etc.
But who is the copyright holder? With one person writing software you know that - he/she is the one an only copyright holder. With the company, there is no single person who is the copyright holder - the whole company is. Therefore for us, outsiders, there is no need to think twice, as long as we can reasonably expect the employee to be authorised (i.e., you can't claim that the office-cleaner in MS office gave you the distribution rights to Windows).
P.S. BTW, did you know that in some countries (not in the US) the company does not have copyright over something, the emloyee has.
Quite the opposite, I'd think the situation you describe is pretty "straightbackward". The nullsoft.com is the official site of Nullsoft, controlled by that company. Certainly, if something is posted there for download with the GPL attached, we can regard that as releasing software under the GPL. When the company is releasing something, it seems to be different from a person (who obviously can't claim that he didn't have the right to distribute his own software, when he did). But what if tomorrow Nullsoft claims that Winamp is commercial software and was released by some rogue employee who was already fired (or executed)? Will all Winamp users suddenly have to delete Winamp? What if VA or some other company that participated in Linux development changes their mind tomorrow? Will every copy of Linux become illegal? I doubt all that.
You as a company post ads about selling a car for 10 bananas, you have to sell it for 10 bananas (regardless of "banana" being a local slang for 1000$). HDTV appear in your online store at the price of 300$, you have to sell them at this price (to those who managed to order them). There is, of course, a condition of reasonability, but I think releasing this piece of software under GPL is reasonable. Releasing Windows is probably not, so don't be too excited when you see the source.
Too bad for AOL, but I don't see how they can legally get WASTE back into their proprietarity. After all GPL seems to not just be a virus, but an uncurable virus.:)
You all completely miss the point. Virtual object can have value, it is just not the same value as in real world objects (or rights, like lease). Real world objects are physical. You can touch them, I can take them from you, we can't both own one object at the same time, the objects have continuity, etc. Virtual objects are none of that.
Since these virtual objects are fundamentally different, it is a reasoning error to use your common sense (built and tested here in the real world) to make judgements about laws in virtuality.
What is the house in MMORPG? Is it a special sequence of numbers? Is it the idea of the house? Is it the picture on your display? Is it a record on the company's servers? Is it the fact that other players can't enter certain area? What exactly it is?
To me the idea about a record on the servers seems to be the most logical. But there are problems abound. What if I hack my client, get god-level access to the game world, and make your house my own? What was the crime? Modifying the software? Running this modified software? Getting the god-level access? Changing the records to make this house belong to me? I don't see a clear answer, since all these actions might be completely legitimate in some circumstances. The analogy with the real world breaks, because stealing a virtual property is very much different from stealing a real object. What if I edited the books of the golf club and erased your name and replaced it with mine? Would that be the called stealing your membership? I doubt that.
I don't think we should bring the morals from the real world into the virtuality. That is not going to work and if it does to some extent, it would cause more harm than good. Let's wait until we have a better understanding of the virtuality and let's wait until there is a shared understanding of what is good and what is bad there. Then we can codify these ideas into laws. It doesn't work the opposite way.
We don't need any stinking laws for this case. There are laws against breaking into a computer system, they apply in this case. There is no difference, just because the system happens to run a MMORPG. And the financial losses are the company's problem, not anyone's else. If you are an airline that made a bug in the reservation system and I get a ticket that I shouldn't have, which causes the company to refund the price of the ticket to someone else (who missed the flight), the sole party responsible for the losses is the company.
So hacking is one thing - hacker can be held responsible, but the losses are a completely different story and should not matter (unless the anti-hacking law takes them into account).
Disclaimer: I've only read the abstract and the older article on Shadowbane.
I want to point out that there is a very important distinction between the real world and the virtual ones. The basic rules and assumptions differ. If you enter the virtual world, you abandon some of your rights. For example, in many online games you can be murdered or robbed by humans or AI agents. This means that you should not have any reasonable expectations of personal safety (or safety of your property) in the virtual world.
Hence, unless you play a simulation of Legalotopia, you accept the possibility of being killed/robbed/raped/whatever in the virtual world. There might be some law enforcement inside the game, like cops, guards, gods, GMs, etc., but you should not expect outside protection of your life, property or reputation. Players are not responsible in reality for what they do inside a virtual world.
Of course, if you hack a server, cheat, steal a password, break the agreement with the game company, etc., you can be held responsible for these action. But the punishment (if any) must not be related to the in-game results of your actions.
I don't necessarily like being categorical, but this is the only possible and rational way to resolve these problems. Anything else is (at this stage) simply nonsense.
Yes, you are right. Etology is a part of biology that studies animal behaviour and also human behaviour from that point of view. There is a great book On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz that deals with this issue. One experiment described there showed how acquarium fishes absolutely needed to vent their aggression on somebody. There were basically two options: on another fish that was behind a glass partition or on the partner fish (when the fish behind the partition was removed) that was in the same compartment. It can be argued that the situation is the same with humans - either we are agressive towards imaginary characters behind the glass (of the monitor) or we crash the skull of our friend.
This boy obviously had mental problems and I applaud the lawyer's attempt to help him, but game deverlopers are not the ones to blame. Instead blame (not too harshly) the parents who failed to notice the problem and provide necessary psychiatric care.
It's not clear whever you are trying to be ironic, or honestly admitting your mistake. Khruschev indeed gradually emptied the camps (which, BTW lead to increase in crime, because many criminals were freed too), reformed the NKVD secret police (which was renamed to KGB and became much more benign), stopped political murders (there are no high-profile cases known, although there have likely been isolated incidents), ended show trials (again, some isolated cases, usually in the form of (sometimes ugly) "black PR" campaigns (as we would call them now) and gave relative freedoms of speech, religion, etc.
For all these reasons (and many others), the period from second half of 1950s to the first part of 1960s is called ottepel (a thaw). There have been several cases when military suppressed demonstrations (nothing as bad as Tiananmen Square, though), Soviet army intervened into Hungary, there have been Berlin and Caribean crises, but overall it was pretty ok. Yes, there have been several thousands people killed in Hungary, which is bad, but that's practically the only such example (Czechoslovakia was a minor incident). US, on the other hand, has killed a lot of people in Vietnam, Korea and practically everywhere else in the world (usually in acts of completely unprovoked aggression).
I am not sure I know what so terrible happened in Ukraine after Stalin. And Chechnya is different, because it actually was a terrorist state (which the US refused to acknowledge for political reasons). And while Russian army obviosuly fucked up countless times there (since our politicians are a bunch of theives, the army was funded/supplied very badly if at all), it's not really comparable to My Lai. The worst things that happen are cases like officer killing a female Chechen sniper instead of following the proper procedure and passing her to law enforcement (and, of course, occasional looting, selling weapons to terrorists, etc.). Chechen terrorists, on the other hand, practice slavery, rape/robbery/murders, kidnapping (as a business, with thousands of people kidnapped every year), torture and other nasty things.
The answer is, the USSR practically never did anything like that, with the possible exception of Cuban missile crisis*, that (fortunately) was quickly resolved. Although my country supported Cuba, we never trained Cuban terrorists who would then attack Florida, Georgia or Alabama with suicide bombings or something...
And please also note that we always flavoured our military assistance with liberal contributions to the economy of our friends. Soviet Union never (at least I can't remember anything) practiced exploitation of other countries, instead it usually was mutually beneficial co-operation. Now guess how many power plants the US helped build in Afganistan. Or how many factories they built in Iraq? And no, I don't mean factories for producing WMD.
* another exception was our support of Nazi Germany, but in that case USSR was not supporting potential terrorists, but was desperately trying to avoid the war at any cost.
P.S. In case that need to be said, I am not claiming that Soviet Union was always good, just that it's foreign policy was much more sensible and practically never openly evil.
Why would you need "money" in such future? Today you need people doing manual labour for you - the more, the better. That's why you want to get paid for your creative work. In the future you will be able to lead a wealthy life (and have the options of VR and eventually posthuman life) without paying for anything. That means you will not have any economic insentive to ask for payment for your work. And the jeans designer will probably be happy to share his work with the people.
Language is evolving. By voluntarily changing the meaning we just change the general consensus about what the term means. If there still a need for a term to describe the original idea (in case of the "rule of thumb" it is not needed, in case of "crimes against humanity" it might be needed again, but I hope it won't), a new term will appear.
This has a few side-effects, but overall it is much better than a rigid language, or, worse, a language controlled by "spelling nazis" (one more example of word devaluation).
This, of course, is very much different in the case of some organisation (government or corporation) changing these meanings, like introducing terms "intellectual property", "stealing" (for copying MP3s), "piracy", etc. This is evil, because this is manipulation of the language.
1) That was just an article header. They are intended to be catchy. the Word crime wasn't mentioned anywhere in the original article. 2) The idea is that copy protection/DRM in general is a crime against humanity, not any particular (existing) implementation. 3) A person may be imprisoned (if convicted) for 26 years just for recording a movie in the theater. Still not a life sentence? Well, you, nurightshu, represent the exact problem of rigidity and inflexibility that the author is writing about. You are akin to the programmed system of rules and one of the rules happen to be "DRM is a crime against humanity if and only if people are imprisoned for life for violting copyright". Well, real humans do have more flexibility. Go and watch this. It might give you a few hints...
It's not clear that Stalin could be convicted of his crimes, because he most probably was insane. His paranoia caused him to start the mass repressions in 1930s. Hitler, on the other hand (while he had his own share of mental problems), was more or less sane.
Therefore, killing millions of Jews was a crime agains humanity, while killing millions of Russians was an unfortunate accident. It also makes sense to remember how Stalin himself white-washed himself, by saying:
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." and "Kill one person and you are a murderer; kill a million people and you are a conqueror."
Actually, the United States also has a number of notorious achievements. Like sending soldiers into Asian villages and brutally murdering women and children en masse Nazi-style. At least Russians never did that (they did their own share of atrocities, but nothing as disgusting as that). US also routinely kills thousands of people every now and then even in the 21st century (3000 in Afganistan - every ten thousandth person, several times more in Iraq), most of them civilians.
And a much more important thing to understand is that a significant share of Soviet atrocities can be attributed first to civil war and second to Stalin's paranoia. After Stalin's death the repressions ended very soon. On the other hand, American behaviour during Cold War and today does not depend that much on President's personality (although that is important too), but more on the system that you managed to build. Clinton attacked Yugoslavia, Bush attacked Afganistan and Iraq. I am sure that even if some Nader is elected next year, he will probably have to attack someone as well.
But don't you think that the target was set a bit arbitrarily. First Russians won the race to the Moon (as most of the "races" before that) and then the US President said "we will land on the Moon". Too late, the Russians were first. It's the same as a marafon runner saying: "OK, now the winner will be the one who is first to run 1 extra kilometer". That doesn't work that way.:) Using your analogy with the girl, if Russians have broken into your house and raped the girl while she was pregnant with your child, does that mean that they won?:)
Or does the fact that Russian Buran was superiour to the Shuttle (among other things it was able to complete the whole flight automatically) mean that Russians won the race to build the reusable space craft? Using your logic, it does. BTW, it would also cheapen the US Moon landing after Chinese build the base there.
Oh, thanks. I just became a day older, may I try again? Some software in some countries is sold for 3 dollars (legally distributed jewel boxes). While they might not be very profitable, presumably, these 3 dollars cover the packaging and distribution. That is the lower bound.
Then may I kindly remind you that in my original post I said "Bullshit. The marginal costs of one copy are negligible. Even more so with corporate licenses, where you don't need to provide packaging, etc." Apparently, you was so excited that you managed to read only the first sentence of the post, took it out of context, and replied to it alone, saying how expensive the packaging is. Duh!
Also could you please avoid including marketing costs in the P&D, ok? As well as the costs of agreements with the stores. We are talking about marginal costs of one copy (see your favourite economics book for the definition).
Finally, I hope you realise that MS has a significantly higher gross markup on its products. To understand why, you need to think about their retail price (which for the MS Office is 10 times higher than for RH CD), about their net profit margin (ridiculous), and their cash reserves (Billions and Billions, (c) Carl Sagan).
Don't be ridiculous, taking some fake numbers out of your ass. 25$ for packaging and distribution? What have you been smoking? How comes some software is sold for much less? Do they get their packaging and distribution free? And have you been checking the MS Office prices recently? 40$? Are you nuts?
You don't have to change a product. You can provide discounts to anyone. Practically any discounts and practically to anybody. You can give the product for free to people who have a birthday today. You can give the product for free (or at different prices) to academic users, to students, to citizens of a particular country/region (even a non-existing country), to people of a specific gender, etc. (I can give legal examples for every one of this possibilities) Why can't MS give a huge discount to a goverment in one particular city?
And again, you can't speak about inflated price in regards to the software. If it sold for more than the price of the media, it is legal.
In the US everyone can be suied for everything. That doesn't mean you should behave as if you already lost the potential lawsuits.
Grokster actually won in the court and it was proved that the company is not responsible for the users of its software as long as this software has legitimate uses.
Slashdot Mirror
How about another view on the issue? Are We Living In Nick Bostrom's Speculation? is a detailed rebuttal of Bostrom's Simulation Argument, revealing logical and mathematical mistakes in the original proof. Comments are welcome.
While the lawsuit was dismissed by the court, Google had to restore (voluntarily) the Searchking rankings. That means those damn search engine spammers can continue their evil doings. :( Google tried to adapt its system to abuse, but failed. Unfortunately, it seems that the more important Google becomes, the less freedom they will have to arbitrarily change (fine-tune) the system. Users lose as usual. :(
And I forgot, give some advice on dealing with different file formats. For some reason anime pirates just love using some obscure formats for anime videos. They used Smacker, Vivo, RealVideo. Now they use OGM. Crazy people. We anime fans definitely need some advice on dealing with all these file formats. I just downloaded Akira and had to convert that stupid OGM to AVI/MP3, because ogm DirectShow filter would not install correctly for some obscure reason.
If you call your page The Pirate Anime FAQ: A Guide To Unlicensed Anime and Manga Related Goods, it would make sense to include more detailed information on where to get the stuff (not just say eBay). How about explaining the benefits of different P2P systems, mentioning AnimeReactor, etc. And while you are at it, don't you think your FAQ is too one-sided? I would also add sections on "Why should I buy pirated stuff?", "How should I pirate stuff?", "What can I do for the anime piracy scene?", "How stupid you must be to oppose anime piracy for free, when you can earn some cash opposing movie piracy for MPAA?" etc.
Nope. Do you mean that these words make this page (this)copyright be Nullsoft? These words (or lack of them) doesn't mean shit.
But who is the copyright holder? With one person writing software you know that - he/she is the one an only copyright holder. With the company, there is no single person who is the copyright holder - the whole company is. Therefore for us, outsiders, there is no need to think twice, as long as we can reasonably expect the employee to be authorised (i.e., you can't claim that the office-cleaner in MS office gave you the distribution rights to Windows).
P.S. BTW, did you know that in some countries (not in the US) the company does not have copyright over something, the emloyee has.
Quite the opposite, I'd think the situation you describe is pretty "straightbackward". The nullsoft.com is the official site of Nullsoft, controlled by that company. Certainly, if something is posted there for download with the GPL attached, we can regard that as releasing software under the GPL. When the company is releasing something, it seems to be different from a person (who obviously can't claim that he didn't have the right to distribute his own software, when he did). But what if tomorrow Nullsoft claims that Winamp is commercial software and was released by some rogue employee who was already fired (or executed)? Will all Winamp users suddenly have to delete Winamp? What if VA or some other company that participated in Linux development changes their mind tomorrow? Will every copy of Linux become illegal? I doubt all that.
:)
You as a company post ads about selling a car for 10 bananas, you have to sell it for 10 bananas (regardless of "banana" being a local slang for 1000$). HDTV appear in your online store at the price of 300$, you have to sell them at this price (to those who managed to order them). There is, of course, a condition of reasonability, but I think releasing this piece of software under GPL is reasonable. Releasing Windows is probably not, so don't be too excited when you see the source.
Too bad for AOL, but I don't see how they can legally get WASTE back into their proprietarity. After all GPL seems to not just be a virus, but an uncurable virus.
You all completely miss the point. Virtual object can have value, it is just not the same value as in real world objects (or rights, like lease). Real world objects are physical. You can touch them, I can take them from you, we can't both own one object at the same time, the objects have continuity, etc. Virtual objects are none of that.
Since these virtual objects are fundamentally different, it is a reasoning error to use your common sense (built and tested here in the real world) to make judgements about laws in virtuality.
What is the house in MMORPG? Is it a special sequence of numbers? Is it the idea of the house? Is it the picture on your display? Is it a record on the company's servers? Is it the fact that other players can't enter certain area? What exactly it is?
To me the idea about a record on the servers seems to be the most logical. But there are problems abound. What if I hack my client, get god-level access to the game world, and make your house my own? What was the crime? Modifying the software? Running this modified software? Getting the god-level access? Changing the records to make this house belong to me? I don't see a clear answer, since all these actions might be completely legitimate in some circumstances. The analogy with the real world breaks, because stealing a virtual property is very much different from stealing a real object. What if I edited the books of the golf club and erased your name and replaced it with mine? Would that be the called stealing your membership? I doubt that.
I don't think we should bring the morals from the real world into the virtuality. That is not going to work and if it does to some extent, it would cause more harm than good. Let's wait until we have a better understanding of the virtuality and let's wait until there is a shared understanding of what is good and what is bad there. Then we can codify these ideas into laws. It doesn't work the opposite way.
We don't need any stinking laws for this case. There are laws against breaking into a computer system, they apply in this case. There is no difference, just because the system happens to run a MMORPG. And the financial losses are the company's problem, not anyone's else. If you are an airline that made a bug in the reservation system and I get a ticket that I shouldn't have, which causes the company to refund the price of the ticket to someone else (who missed the flight), the sole party responsible for the losses is the company.
So hacking is one thing - hacker can be held responsible, but the losses are a completely different story and should not matter (unless the anti-hacking law takes them into account).
Disclaimer: I've only read the abstract and the older article on Shadowbane.
I want to point out that there is a very important distinction between the real world and the virtual ones. The basic rules and assumptions differ. If you enter the virtual world, you abandon some of your rights. For example, in many online games you can be murdered or robbed by humans or AI agents. This means that you should not have any reasonable expectations of personal safety (or safety of your property) in the virtual world.
Hence, unless you play a simulation of Legalotopia, you accept the possibility of being killed/robbed/raped/whatever in the virtual world. There might be some law enforcement inside the game, like cops, guards, gods, GMs, etc., but you should not expect outside protection of your life, property or reputation. Players are not responsible in reality for what they do inside a virtual world.
Of course, if you hack a server, cheat, steal a password, break the agreement with the game company, etc., you can be held responsible for these action. But the punishment (if any) must not be related to the in-game results of your actions.
I don't necessarily like being categorical, but this is the only possible and rational way to resolve these problems. Anything else is (at this stage) simply nonsense.
Yes, you are right. Etology is a part of biology that studies animal behaviour and also human behaviour from that point of view. There is a great book On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz that deals with this issue. One experiment described there showed how acquarium fishes absolutely needed to vent their aggression on somebody. There were basically two options: on another fish that was behind a glass partition or on the partner fish (when the fish behind the partition was removed) that was in the same compartment. It can be argued that the situation is the same with humans - either we are agressive towards imaginary characters behind the glass (of the monitor) or we crash the skull of our friend.
This boy obviously had mental problems and I applaud the lawyer's attempt to help him, but game deverlopers are not the ones to blame. Instead blame (not too harshly) the parents who failed to notice the problem and provide necessary psychiatric care.
It's not clear whever you are trying to be ironic, or honestly admitting your mistake. Khruschev indeed gradually emptied the camps (which, BTW lead to increase in crime, because many criminals were freed too), reformed the NKVD secret police (which was renamed to KGB and became much more benign), stopped political murders (there are no high-profile cases known, although there have likely been isolated incidents), ended show trials (again, some isolated cases, usually in the form of (sometimes ugly) "black PR" campaigns (as we would call them now) and gave relative freedoms of speech, religion, etc.
For all these reasons (and many others), the period from second half of 1950s to the first part of 1960s is called ottepel (a thaw). There have been several cases when military suppressed demonstrations (nothing as bad as Tiananmen Square, though), Soviet army intervened into Hungary, there have been Berlin and Caribean crises, but overall it was pretty ok. Yes, there have been several thousands people killed in Hungary, which is bad, but that's practically the only such example (Czechoslovakia was a minor incident). US, on the other hand, has killed a lot of people in Vietnam, Korea and practically everywhere else in the world (usually in acts of completely unprovoked aggression).
I am not sure I know what so terrible happened in Ukraine after Stalin. And Chechnya is different, because it actually was a terrorist state (which the US refused to acknowledge for political reasons). And while Russian army obviosuly fucked up countless times there (since our politicians are a bunch of theives, the army was funded/supplied very badly if at all), it's not really comparable to My Lai. The worst things that happen are cases like officer killing a female Chechen sniper instead of following the proper procedure and passing her to law enforcement (and, of course, occasional looting, selling weapons to terrorists, etc.). Chechen terrorists, on the other hand, practice slavery, rape/robbery/murders, kidnapping (as a business, with thousands of people kidnapped every year), torture and other nasty things.
The answer is, the USSR practically never did anything like that, with the possible exception of Cuban missile crisis*, that (fortunately) was quickly resolved. Although my country supported Cuba, we never trained Cuban terrorists who would then attack Florida, Georgia or Alabama with suicide bombings or something...
And please also note that we always flavoured our military assistance with liberal contributions to the economy of our friends. Soviet Union never (at least I can't remember anything) practiced exploitation of other countries, instead it usually was mutually beneficial co-operation. Now guess how many power plants the US helped build in Afganistan. Or how many factories they built in Iraq? And no, I don't mean factories for producing WMD.
* another exception was our support of Nazi Germany, but in that case USSR was not supporting potential terrorists, but was desperately trying to avoid the war at any cost.
P.S. In case that need to be said, I am not claiming that Soviet Union was always good, just that it's foreign policy was much more sensible and practically never openly evil.
Why would you need "money" in such future? Today you need people doing manual labour for you - the more, the better. That's why you want to get paid for your creative work. In the future you will be able to lead a wealthy life (and have the options of VR and eventually posthuman life) without paying for anything. That means you will not have any economic insentive to ask for payment for your work. And the jeans designer will probably be happy to share his work with the people.
This has a few side-effects, but overall it is much better than a rigid language, or, worse, a language controlled by "spelling nazis" (one more example of word devaluation).
This, of course, is very much different in the case of some organisation (government or corporation) changing these meanings, like introducing terms "intellectual property", "stealing" (for copying MP3s), "piracy", etc. This is evil, because this is manipulation of the language.
1) That was just an article header. They are intended to be catchy. the Word crime wasn't mentioned anywhere in the original article.
2) The idea is that copy protection/DRM in general is a crime against humanity, not any particular (existing) implementation.
3) A person may be imprisoned (if convicted) for 26 years just for recording a movie in the theater. Still not a life sentence? Well, you, nurightshu, represent the exact problem of rigidity and inflexibility that the author is writing about. You are akin to the programmed system of rules and one of the rules happen to be "DRM is a crime against humanity if and only if people are imprisoned for life for violting copyright". Well, real humans do have more flexibility. Go and watch this. It might give you a few hints...
It's not clear that Stalin could be convicted of his crimes, because he most probably was insane. His paranoia caused him to start the mass repressions in 1930s. Hitler, on the other hand (while he had his own share of mental problems), was more or less sane.
Therefore, killing millions of Jews was a crime agains humanity, while killing millions of Russians was an unfortunate accident. It also makes sense to remember how Stalin himself white-washed himself, by saying:
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic."
and
"Kill one person and you are a murderer; kill a million people and you are a conqueror."
And there was Russian play in 1980s that was shown on TV, which was great. Then there are many other plays and even a radio play on Echo of Moscow.
Actually, the United States also has a number of notorious achievements. Like sending soldiers into Asian villages and brutally murdering women and children en masse Nazi-style. At least Russians never did that (they did their own share of atrocities, but nothing as disgusting as that). US also routinely kills thousands of people every now and then even in the 21st century (3000 in Afganistan - every ten thousandth person, several times more in Iraq), most of them civilians.
And a much more important thing to understand is that a significant share of Soviet atrocities can be attributed first to civil war and second to Stalin's paranoia. After Stalin's death the repressions ended very soon. On the other hand, American behaviour during Cold War and today does not depend that much on President's personality (although that is important too), but more on the system that you managed to build. Clinton attacked Yugoslavia, Bush attacked Afganistan and Iraq. I am sure that even if some Nader is elected next year, he will probably have to attack someone as well.
But don't you think that the target was set a bit arbitrarily. First Russians won the race to the Moon (as most of the "races" before that) and then the US President said "we will land on the Moon". Too late, the Russians were first. It's the same as a marafon runner saying: "OK, now the winner will be the one who is first to run 1 extra kilometer". That doesn't work that way. :) Using your analogy with the girl, if Russians have broken into your house and raped the girl while she was pregnant with your child, does that mean that they won? :)
Or does the fact that Russian Buran was superiour to the Shuttle (among other things it was able to complete the whole flight automatically) mean that Russians won the race to build the reusable space craft? Using your logic, it does. BTW, it would also cheapen the US Moon landing after Chinese build the base there.
Then may I kindly remind you that in my original post I said "Bullshit. The marginal costs of one copy are negligible. Even more so with corporate licenses, where you don't need to provide packaging, etc." Apparently, you was so excited that you managed to read only the first sentence of the post, took it out of context, and replied to it alone, saying how expensive the packaging is. Duh!
Also could you please avoid including marketing costs in the P&D, ok? As well as the costs of agreements with the stores. We are talking about marginal costs of one copy (see your favourite economics book for the definition).
Finally, I hope you realise that MS has a significantly higher gross markup on its products. To understand why, you need to think about their retail price (which for the MS Office is 10 times higher than for RH CD), about their net profit margin (ridiculous), and their cash reserves (Billions and Billions, (c) Carl Sagan).
I dunno... In GTA you can't see people or cars farther than 10 meters anyway.
Don't be ridiculous, taking some fake numbers out of your ass. 25$ for packaging and distribution? What have you been smoking? How comes some software is sold for much less? Do they get their packaging and distribution free? And have you been checking the MS Office prices recently? 40$? Are you nuts?
You don't have to change a product. You can provide discounts to anyone. Practically any discounts and practically to anybody. You can give the product for free to people who have a birthday today. You can give the product for free (or at different prices) to academic users, to students, to citizens of a particular country/region (even a non-existing country), to people of a specific gender, etc. (I can give legal examples for every one of this possibilities) Why can't MS give a huge discount to a goverment in one particular city?
And again, you can't speak about inflated price in regards to the software. If it sold for more than the price of the media, it is legal.
In the US everyone can be suied for everything. That doesn't mean you should behave as if you already lost the potential lawsuits.
Grokster actually won in the court and it was proved that the company is not responsible for the users of its software as long as this software has legitimate uses.