"For Windows game development, XNA Game Studio Express is completely free and built on top of the popular and powerful Visual C# Express. For Xbox 360 game development, you'll need to subscribe to the Creators Club and have a retail Xbox 360 with a hard drive." -- XBox Registered Developer Program
"As a Premium member in the XNA Creators Club, youll be able to submit any complete Xbox 360 game youve created in XNA Game Studio to the Creators Club community at http://creators.xna.com/ for peer review. Other Premium Creators will check to make sure your game is safe to play. If it is, youll set a price point between 200 and 800 Points that people will pay to download your game.
Once the game is reviewed and the price point set, youre done. The game is listed on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and youll get an electronic payment every quarter, for up to 70% of the games total revenue in your own currency. Depending on your games success, you may even have your game advertised on Xbox 360 and other Microsoft online properties. ...
If youre going to develop games for Xbox 360 and want to sell your game on Xbox LIVE Community Games, youll need a Premium membership. Its just $99 per year or $49 for four months." -- XNA Creators Club Online
In short, not exactly free. Nor entirely open. And it includes XNA lock-in, which seems to be more horizontally oriented. How about Apple and Microsoft work together towards a standard, open API and a standard, peer-review based store?
I think it's much worse than that. Who is most at risk from all these logs? If anything, botnets. So, what are botnets likely to do? Falsify and corrupt local logs (deleting them would be too obvious) and attack ISPs to falsify and corrupt their logs. It is in the best interest of botnets to make all logs worthless to frustrate tracking. And given that (a) most botnets are started through malware and (b) such malware will invariable run on a lot of systems that do logging, logging will be pretty worthless. Even if there was a requirement for a write-once log, it just means botnets will start falsify logs subtle to misdirect investigation.
It might not happen right away, but see how malware has advanced to the point of redirecting URLs in web browsers to falsified web sites supportative of their malware? I don't see how this would be different. Writing a law to try to effectively elevate a line of evidence when it is so susceptible to abuse by the very party that's likely a target seems unwise.
(1) Initially, owner has all rights; you have zero. (2) You seek to gain access to the work and purchase a set of rights. (3) The owner offers for distribution a copy of the work, conditioned on the acceptance of an agreement which governs the conveyance of limited, non-exclusive content rights. There is not yet a copyright question. (4) Because of the volume of this kind of transaction, there is no face-to-face negotiation. A standard form contract is employed. The parties to this contract are the Licensor (copyright owner) and Licensee (customer). There is still no copyright question. (5) The copyright owner wants to use a retail distribution channel. The retailer buys a pallet of books for an agreed wholesale price, applies a markup, and puts those books on the retail shelf. They are not party to the SLA, because they are not owners of copies of the work; they're owners of a physical good (a book). What's in that book is not directly touched. Still no copyright question. (6) The customer purchases said book from the retailer. The retailer has no authority to transfer content rights, as the retailer owns none. The customer, at time of purchase, is purchasing a purely physical good, and the purchase itself is a commercial transaction between the retailer and the customer. The copyright owner is not a party. (7). The customer goes home and opens the books, attempting to read the book. At this point, there is an interaction between the copyright owner and the customer. If the customer and copyright owner complete their transaction, the customer receives a set of limited, non-exclusive content rights to owner's work. At this point, copyright engages, the customer becomes an owner of a copy as defined in section 101 and is entitled to raise copyright causes of action, including violations of DFS, as well as to challenge the terms of their transaction under contract law.
The only claim I have made is just that: "Climate scientists have an economically-motivated bias to come up with findings that are more likely to spur funding for continued research in their field."
Thou dost protest too much! (This is rhetorically effective only for a certain audience)
Does srussia rape young, beautiful women in blind allies? Well, srussia has a evolutionary-motivated bias to breed with young, beautiful women, regardless of their consent, to produce healthy children with his genes.
Oh, and if you try to deny raping young, beautiful women, "thou does protest too much!" After all, I never said you actually did rape young, beautiful women.
PS - If srussia is a female, reverse gender roles. Obviously, though, this doesn't fall into conventional stereotypes. But, god knows nothing in this thread is about exploiting stereotypes to one's own ends...
I used the term "we" in that sentence a bit loosely.
While I appreciate your directing me to an FTP directory full of stuff more fit for someone who actually is working in the field, or can make meaningful use of, you missed the entire perspective from which a person like myself stands. Like much of the public at large, I don't give a shit what sensor 102.WG-72 says. I don't really feel the need to be an individual detective either. It's not a big enough part of the "big picture" and I don't have enough experience to really know if I'm looking at faulty data or not.... What people like myself want is a credible and non-hysterical overview of the problem at hand.
So, in short, you need a climate scientist to tell you the big picture? What climate scientists present isn't hysterical. It's just very unpleasent. It sounds like your complaint is about the media's sensational presentation of climate scientists and their conclusions, at best.
Wanting a factually correct summary of the problem and the possible solutions once the scientific community reaches a relatively common understanding can't be bad. Having an apparently sound method of getting to that summary is better. Pointing me (someone untrained in the use of it) at individual data points is next to useless.
Skeptism is healthy. The scientific method is a sound method to reach a summary about climate change. And the data is useless to you now, but you can become educated if you tried.
P.S. If you want I could go read a whole pile of journals, make my own theories up, and come back in here and start screaming about my own (uneducated) views about how the system works based on information I barely understand, to people I hardly know. Seems to be common practice for people to fail to acknowledge that they, in fact, know shit about what they speak and do not qualify as even remotely knowledgeable experts (this would be the public polarization I'm in reference to).
The problem with this is, if you read a whole pile of journals, you *would* become educated. If you were to ignore that education to present your views, you'd be heavily biased and bigoted. You'd also be a confidence artist. Con artists are very good at telling people exactly what they want to hear. If you qualified your lack of education and tried to distill what you learned, you'd be better than a con artist (but possibly a sensationalist that you seem to detest). The very issue, then, isn't that the experts on one side aren't educated. It is that their agenda is such that they're more interested in peddling ideas upon people more willing to listen to a softer tone than media sensationalism yet not interested enough in educating themselves. At that point, data has very little to do with the problem.
When you buy one of those plastic cards with cellular service minutes loaded onto it...
Cellular service is a service. A copy of a copyrighted work is a good, not a service, unlessly specifically contracted out otherwise. This is, btw, why you're required to sign cellular contracts. Beyond that, if you were to hack the card to get more minutes, you'd be charged with theft of services, not copright infringement. You can't make an analogy between the two as if they were equivalent or even very comparable because they're incredibly different concepts.
The point of quoting First Sale Doctrine is because, again, First Sale Doctrine is about: "A copyright protects only the content inside a book, or the song in a sound recording. The package that contains the content the actual book, CD, or printed poster, for example is not copyrighted, and the person who buys the item can do whatever they want to that copy. (There is an exception in the law for unique works of visual art.)" Although the original First Sale Doctrine was spelled out over resale, clearly "do whatever they want to that copy" includes the right to *use* a copy. Even without First Sale Doctrine, it is patently absurd to think it's a "promo[tion] of the arts and sciences" for copyright holders to sell copies of a work without allowing the copy owner to ever use said copy.
A license agreement is a contract, and the Law of Contract allows assent by objective manifestation. There has never been a court case ruling that SLAs are not contracts, and there has never been a court case holding that SLAs are categorically unenforceable.
This is, again, mostly irrelevant. The sale of a box good is not a license agreement. The whole point of First Sale Doctrine was because, again, there have been attempts to enforce contracts after sale. First Sale Doctrine has specifically been invoked to nullify sections of SLA, after being agreed to, when they prevent resale. But, a SLA is not inherently necessary to using a program. Why? Because in every step, from CD to disk to ram to cache to cpu instruction translation, section 117 covers the making of an adaption of a lawful copy of a copyrighted work. And since you buy a legal copy of a work in a boxed sale, the SLA is, at best, material irrelevant. Even if one believes one has no right to modify the CD itself to make an adaption, one could readily use an emulator to skip the EULA. While agreeing to an EULA might be an "essential step" in the eyes of the copyright holder, the words "essential step" are not spoke in the intent of the copyright holder for such interpretation would effectively nullify First Sale Doctrine.
SLAs might be valid in themselves (barring any sections with First Sale Doctrine violations). That doesn't mean one has to agree to them if one has already obtained a lawful copy. Copyright holders do not have the power to redefine codified processes like "point of sale" at their whim. If they want to sell you a SLA instead of a copy of a work, they have to make that explicitly clear *at sale*.
If you are in possession of a lawful copy, section 117 permits the making of copies "essential" to its lawful use in a computer....
It does not come into effect until you are the authorized, lawful owner of an installed copy of the software, which of course returns you to section 101 definitions and the copyright holder's conveyance of rights to users. The owner has the sole right to do and to authorize the making and distribution of copies per section 106. They have authorized distribution conditional to acceptance of specific business terms.
Well, your interpretation is inherently flawed. By your logic, the program that displays the EULA would itself be copyright infringement because section 117 hasn't applied yet and you haven't agreed to whatever EULA is necessary to run the installer. The only way your logic holds is if one presumes that what one buys at a store is the right to run the installer, not the right to run the actual program the EULA is meant to cover. However, clearly people are buying the item mentioned on the box. Perhaps if boxes were sold as "Windows XP EULA Installer". But, First Sale Doctrine clearly applies to the point that one can't try to force a contract upon people after purchase.
Having said that, one has to figure out how to actually run said authorized program without agreeing to the EULA:
The text of section 117 reads as follows:
"Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the [lawful] owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the [lawful] utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner" (emphasis added)
Making modified copies for the purpose of bypassing binding terms placed on the initial conveyance of rights from the copyright owner to the putative copy owner (i.e. distribution) does not fall under section 117 because it is (a) used in an "other manner" and (b) performed by a person who has not complied with the terms of distribution and who is therefore not the copy owner as defined in section 101 (NB: they remain, however, the lawful owner of the box that contains the copy and its related components).
One doesn't just buy "the box". One buys the box and the contents, obviously including a copy of a computer program legally obtained. Note the wording carefully (relevent parts selected): "it is not an infringement for the [lawful] owner of a copy of a computer program to make [an] adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a[n] adaptation is created as an essential step in the [lawful] utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". Clearly the EULA isn't the program intended to be utilized. The adapted installer is used *only* for the purpose of utilizing the program, by allowing the install to continue. The only way that logic doesn't hold is if the adaption isn't necessary because one can agree to the EULA. But, clearly that is at odds with First Sale Doctrine which was specficially enshrined because of previous situations with attempted post-sale contracts in books; clearly buying a copy of a work includes the lawful right to use said work. Hence, "essentional step in the [lawful] utilization" must include the right to bypass an EULA.
It comes down to the simple point that if a software maker wants to enforce a contract on a person, they need to make them sign a contract. Tricks with installers and EULAs are, at best, sketchy. Perhaps a clearly marked "Windows XP Installer: This box does not include a copy of Windows XP but a contract to obtain such a copy under certain terms" would have more legal weight to the issue. But, once you start selling copies of a copyrighted work as a physical good instead o
I thought part of the point of UAC was to virtualize many of the filesystem parts of being an administrator so you could install programs without actually being administrator
No, it's the other way around. UAC removes lots of privileges of an administrator from the administrator until they explicitly approve them.
So, if a normal user tries to install some system software, they won't be allowed to. If an administrator tries to install it, they will be prompted 'are you sure this is OK?' first.
You're only partly right. As Inside Windows Vista User Account Control explains, UAC is joined with something called Virtual Store to allow normal users to have virtualized access to various parts of the registry and filesystem for programs not designed for Vista. But, it seems this is, at best, half-assed. As you note, once you try to do anything complex, real-admin access starts to be needed, and UAC kicks in to ask a normal user for a password. I'm not sure if "real" admins have any virtual store or if any sort of admin access kicks in the UAC password-less authorization.
So, while UAC and Virtual Store could have likely handled installs for a lot of programs, it seems to have been crafted more towards running already or admin installed programs as a normal user, leaving the admin to basically get an "are you sure" for programs that require admin access or an 'enhanced "run as"' (as Russinovich puts it) for regular users.
Of course, that all seems rather contradictory. If the point of UAC and Virtual store was to merely to make normal user's lives easier (to encourage their usage), then admins should have been left with their full authority. But, putting in UAC for the admin seems to imply that either (a) UAC was put in to make admining more annoying or (b) UAC was put in to help admins administrate. Of course, (a) makes the most sense if one considers that it's easier to go half-assed with supporting normal users and cripping the admin experience than it is to make UAC really useful for either admins or normal users.
So, your overall point seems to be half-right. I should have said something like, "UAC could be extended to install programs without actually being an administrator."
The OS runs the firewall, and you often need administrator or root level access to install a program.
I thought part of the point of UAC was to virtualize many of the filesystem parts of being an administrator so you could install programs without actually being administrator (that way programs don't pollute c:\windows, among other things). Beyond that, why aren't things like firewall modifications trapped under UAC? Certainly there should be something more fine-grained than "Install app needs to do function X, which isn't virtualized; allow install app to do function A to Z so it can do function X?"
Oh, and if you were to point out that Linux has the same problem, I entirely agree. Even though things like AppArmor and SeLinux do, to some extent, limit the availability of a program to do as it pleases, even if it were granted necessary root functions, it's too complex and non-fine-grained enough to be actually useful. Beyond that, AppArmor/SeLinux doesn't simulate functions it blocks, so you're still left with programs that are capable of aborting when it fails to achieve its ends.
Of course, there's no real solution to such a situation, anyways, short of rewriting such programs. Even if that weren't illegal, that's reasonably impossible. The real answer is to not be using programs you have to combat. Even when it comes to open source, that's a hard problem to resolve--fixing programs that aren't intentionally combative to function as you wish may be beyond your means. None of the above justifies the hand waving about any real attempt to resolve the lack of control in the current environment, though.
In the location of the old Local Settings folder is an NTFS junction, which merely redirects to the new AppData\Local location. Windows Explorer doesn't handle these junctions correctly and instead of redirecting you, will erroneously give you an "Access Denied" message.
Well, this part doesn't sound like user error. It sounds like a Windows Explorer error.
Also, programs have always been able to insert themselves as exceptions into the Windows Firewall. Many applications which require internet access and which are blocked by the firewall will ask you if they can create a firewall exception for themselves. So programs have always been allowed to insert exceptions into the firewall - it's not a requirement that the program has to ask you first.
And this doesn't sound like user error. At best, it sounds like shitty design, espectially in light of UAC. But, then, UAC isn't exactly bright either, design wise.
As for the rest of your post (at least, for those parts that are factually accurate), I mostly agree.
That seems suspiciously close to "the broken window fallacy" in space.
Broken window = break X; buy X to replace broken X and drive economic activity
Consumerism = X is "broke"; buy X' to replace "obsolete" X and drive economic activity
Externality compensation = X being cheap means people buy cheap, inefficient As, heavy use of X is bad; force manufacturers to build efficient As, and make X more expensive so that other A-like goods are made more efficient, and try to sweet talk consumers and manufactuers into believing it's consumerism
Externality compensation = X is prone to destroy other Xs; force manufacturers to build Y with most X functionality, but that doesn't destroy Xs or Ys, and try to sweet talk consumers and manufacturers into believing it's consumerism
It sounds like what they're thinking of doing is more like: (1) draw up 10 billion T-Cells, (2) use an enzyme to cleave off the CCR5 proteins, (3) filter out the enzyme+proteins, and (4) reinject the T-Cells. Ie, I don't think issue 3 would crop up (or, at least, it'd be much more limited in scope). The real issue, as I see it, is that those 10 billion T-Cells will eventually die. Not knowing enough about how proteins on the cell membrane are created/carried over during mitosis, it'd seem the biggest issue is that those 10 billion T-Cells are likely to either duplicate and regenerate the CCR5 protein or simply die out before the HIV is eliminated. Either situation would seem to only delay the spreading of HIV in the body.
On the other hand, if it happens that the CCR5 protein isn't regenerated, then perhaps HIV would be cured, but you'd be at risk of redevelopment a random assortment of childhood illnesses (which should just mean revaccination). Unfortunately, I don't know nearly enough about T-Cell reproduction and HIV to know exactly how it is HIV manages to permanently kill off T-Cell production.
A 1.5TiB drive would take ~3.4 hours to fill up at 1Gbps, best case scenario. In comparison, a 1.5TiB drive would take ~14.5 days to fill up at 10Mbps, again best case scenario. It's much harder to saturate a connection when you've ran out of room to put things. Even streaming content isn't enough to saturate a connection, as streaming content doesn't use nearly 1Gbps; although, if enough people decide to all watch a streaming show at a certain time there will be problems.
Connection rates will likely never growth at nearly the same scale of hard drive growth rates, but US telecoms sat on their thumbs as people began utilizing the internet to fill up the new massive amounts of hard drive space. Perhaps it was a lack of foresight on their part to not plan ahead to be constantly work to expand and upgrade their networks. Or, perhaps, they realized they were oligarchies in a time* when government was too pro-business to step in and demand that they not simply hand out profits but instead use them to help expand their networks (and hence the economy). In any case, it wasn't really an issue of telecoms not having the money or the technology.
*AFAIK, this was true during both Clinton ($200 Billion broadband fiasco, the failure of the 80MPG car, and failure in regulation of the two) and Bush years (letting Microsoft off, basically, and further failing at regulation of already existing projects). The fear these projects caused, btw, is mainly the reason why foreign countries and companies worked so hard on broadband and fuel-efficient cars. Funny, huh?
If someone has a gun to your head, telling you to use google, you have the choice either to use google or to get shot in the head; sounds voluntary to me. If you're going to be all black and white about whether something is voluntary or involuntary, you might as well go to the extreme, right?
A car without an engine can not be used as intended at all (though you could live in it i suppose!).
One can put one's own engine in it and drive it. It's presumptive that the intent of the car purchase was driving.
Starcraft without a CD key can not be played.
It could still be used as a coaster. And you could possibly still look at the movies and the music on the disc.
It's not like these computers sat on a shelf unused just because areo didn't run.
Um, what makes you presume that? It's quite possible that one needs Aero to run something and the machine is entirely useless to the purchaser without it.
I'm not saying the sticker wasn't unclear and the process was done correctly but the computers are still USABLE.
Just because you can find a use for a system or a car shell or a CD-keyless Starcraft CD doesn't negate the fraud commited or somehow undo the legitimacy of people deserving some option for recourse. I might not agree with the actual recourse suggested by the plantiff, but equally one can simple excuse fraud with the argument that the items sold are inherently useless in all functionality.
To that end, perhaps a better example would have been a pickup truck with a low-power engine capable of transport a maximal of two people and no extra load with advertisements showing the carrying of four people, a full load, and towing a boat. I truthfully don't know what's the best fair answer to such circumstances.
So, you're suggesting Microsoft engaged in a campaign to advertise a variety of systems as "Vista Capable" to the one group most capable of recognizing that Microsoft was lying to them? It had nothing to do with trying to trick people, informed or not, into buying hardware now instead of considering another platform (Mac OS X) back when Vista was taking so long to be released (and, btw, that's why it was "Vista Capable" not "Vista installed" or whatever)?
Btw, yes, the informed geeks and their lawyers were the ones who did the bulk of complaining. Why? Because most uninformed people are used to being screwed. When something bad happens to them, most just shrug it off as "I must have been mistaken". Their informed friends can belittle them for not knowing about "minimum system requirements" or "of course it doesn't run aero, that pretty thing you saw". The people that tend to complain with any credence are the ones who actually know enough about the subject to make valid complaints. Next up you'll note that accountants and tax laywers are the people who most complaint about questionable tax laws.
Sounds great. So, I'll sell you a car without an engine. Just because you saw an advertisement of the car moving doesn't mean the engine isn't extra. I'll sell you Starcraft without a CD Key. Sure, you can't use the game, but there wasn't a sticker that said "is more valuable than a door stop". Or, I'll advertise to you a Big Mac, but when it comes to when you open the box, it'll be missing the beef patties. I mean, the menu didn't *say* there would be beef patties in the product. Just give a refund on the missing part, and let the consumer be stuck with the rest for their stupidity.
Yes, let's just ignore the obvious misconception that was being pushed with "vista capable". Or try to pretend that Microsoft-approved labels used as Microsoft intended aren't at all related to a responsibility on Microsoft's part not to defraud. Does that mean I think handing out hardware to fulfill the promise is the right answer? Not probably (having the option to return the whole machine for the original retail price, minimally, sounds better). But certainly a system where a company can defraud you with the minimal risk of having to, after a time, return money for a few defective parts encourages intentionally making expensive things with a few crucial, cheap, broken parts. At that level, fraud laws have been effectively bypassed, and that's definitely not the solution.
I think that your response to the IRA point just shows how different your beliefs are from most though. I don't think there's any significant number of people in the tax industry or in the government even that believe the arrangement I just described is abusive. If you go to any financial planner it would be suggested this is just smart tax planning. And almost everyone I guess would just shrug and say, "well that's the arcaneness of the tax system for you," and do it.
But that comes down to the mindset of a lot of Americans that taxes are evil. They've taken "no taxation without representation" to mean "I don't have to pay taxes if I disagree with the government" to "well, I still don't want to pay taxes even if I'm in power and everything is going how I want". Taxe avoid is, in many ways, exactly like piracy. People invariably try to account for their actions through vague justifications and are unwilling to accept that a system where noone plays taxes is a crippling one. Of course, "the tax man gets his money" and you don't hear of many (if any) companies closing because of piracy. But there's a certain amount of duty that people are missing in supporting the government they need or the entertainment they want.*
And once that is granted, it's hard to deny that the tax system is pretty damn complex, and it's not an easy problem delineating fair from abusive transactions.
I agree the tax system is complex, but that doesn't really justify abuse of the system any more than people who would act ignorant of 3rd degree homicide because the legal code is so complex to try to account for more than simply "if someone dies, someone else is executed in response". And while there are times when it's unclear that a transaction is abusive, many times it's pretty abundantly clear because entities that make millions in profit somehow avoid paying much of any taxes through clever redefinition of profits. If anything, the culture of tax cheating is itself so complex that the tax code is frequently updated to try to counter them. It's not that the tax code has become overly complex purely on the whim of trying to make it confusing. Besides, an overly complex tax code is likely to result in an entity paying more taxes, not less, as figuring out what you can deduct or exempt is the complex part.
*It's generally called the free-rider problem. In both cases, people see what they perceive as enormous waste, be it wasteful spending or inflated prices. Hopefully Obama's plan at more transparency will change this. I'm not entirely optimistic, though, as I think some people would rather see poor people starve than to allow for government to intervene in the free market, no matter how much of a case the government could make that their actions are an efficient correction to a market inefficiency. I'm not sure if that's more a point of delusion on some people's part, an unwillingness to bend on a point that makes their views clearly imperfect, or simply the callousness of those unwilling to feed their fellow man. Perhaps it's much more than those things, but as much as I appreciate the free market as an ideal and wish to apply it where applicable, to treat it as a religion when it's clearly proven to be incomplete and to not even deeply consider the proposals when government may very well should step in seems heartless and stupid.
Having said all that, I'd much profer it if laws were changed to make such interference legal rather than to rely on selective interpretation of laws. But, then, that involves winning the hearts and minds of a vast majority of people. Of course, when that is done, changing the law as necessary would be much more trivial and this whole discussion would be moot. It's just sad that enlightenment is so far out of reach of people who are more obsessed with believing that they can understand a small part of a complex system to extrapolate all things than to be open to a world so complex that while certainly
Further than that, the idea can be used for all sorts of applications, from automatic encrypted hibernation (since even if you're using encrypted swap, you need somewhere to store the key) to automatic backups (since a large part of why people don't backup is because there's too much risk leaking out something inoccuous at the time that later turns out to be important to keep yet shouldn't be available to anyone with physical access to one's tapes). IIRC, Windows's EFS uses the idea, although its use of a recovery agent undermines the implementation. It's a shame that public/private key encryption isn't used more often in such applications. Even if one fears quantum computing, there's elliptic curve based public/private key generation with no obvious sign of even theoretical weakness, AFAIK.
It is the intent of the law for most companies to pay taxes. The letter of the law allows for many companies to avoid paying much of those taxes. That is why such language in tax law is called loopholes. To recognize that loopholes exist is to recognize that companies seek to violate the intent of the law. Such certainly leaves room to blame companies for their actions, no matter how legal. And, of course, where possible, such loopholes certainly should be closed. Oh, and in response to the side comment you've made about the 401k and roth ira, if a person were to do the same or similar, they too would be just as worthy of blame. And the law should be changed to fix such a loophole.
Not everything wrong is illegal. Not everything illegal is wrong. A company or a person can be worthy of blame having commited no illegal act. And the fact that their actions weren't illegal may give rise to the indignation to make that act illegal. Such is not always justifiable, but I believe it is so in this case. Companies may be abstract constructs of law, but they're ran by people. And so, the company can be held to the standards of humans.
One, when I mentioned games in relationship to video game developers, I clearly specified games they bought (ie, not merely those games they worked on). Outside the function of their job, video game developers rarely have any rights to the games they make except through purchasing a copy. The exceptions, of course, are when the video game developer in question owns the company or has special provisions under contract (which, interestingly, is rather a point of the absurdity of copyright law).
Two, I agree that including rationales does indeed dilute the discussion; but, then you yourself engaged in that discussion as well (as did I, truthfully, although I did try to segue into my point about copyright).
Three, I don't think it necessarily appropriate to mention how widespread piracy is because that very quickly falls into the trap of discussing piracy instead of discussing copyright law. Beyond that, arguing purely for the ulitarian position of copyright creates the problem that not everyone seems to agree with what the actual purpose of copyright is. That is to say, many people seem to believe that copyright was created to reward authors. But, that is merely a means to an end. So long as people are stuck with the notion that the purpose of copyright is to reward authors, then *any* author whose work is pirated becomes a victim. Obviously that's absurd because copyright law isn't meant to be a way of being magical fair towards authors while ignore the unfairness of every other industry in existance. So, it would seem best to only mention the piracy rates as an asside and not focus on it or let it dominate the discussion. And that means not arguing over how big or small the legitimate users are today since that's not the underlying problem with the system.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say here, or what any of the rest of the post has to do with what I said.
That depends on what you were trying to say. It sounded like you were asking a generic question on whether there existed a population of people who dumped games they bought to play on their computer. If you were asking a more specific question, about whether anyone has done an actual survey to ascertain an exact measure of that population, then my post wasn't relevant, and I apologize. If, on the other hand, your question was more or less what I restated, then game developers are clearly a population of people with many with the expertise to dump games and a vested interest and aversion to piracy. So, it seems very probable that that population would be a great source for measurement.
The rest of my post, though, was mainly a counter to the generic question. That is, the idea that you and the original grandparent seem to possess that the questionable legitimate uses today of flashcarts somehow have any real consequence to the underlying funding for copyrighted works so that such entertainment can continue to be produced is generally a red herring because piracy itself is generally a red herring. Copyright law of today is far from perfect in fulfilling its underlying purpose. The discussion is about as absurd as people calmly discussing the best method of execution during the French Revolution.
There's nothing immoral with ROM dumping a game YOU own and playing it on your computer
Are you actually claiming any measurable number of people do this?
That all depends on whether you believe all game developers either never dump their own bought games or are hypocritical pirates. We could also pretend that things like the Wii Virtual Console aren't a big financial hit, when certainly piracy is a significantly cheaper (although a more complex) option.
Perhaps the answer is more along the times of, if it's trivial enough, even average Joe will do it. But, average Joe doesn't buy many games anyways. And as trivial as DS flashcarts are to use, it's not like you can buy them at the corner stop or that there's zero risk. The Wii Virtual Console succeeds because it's easy enough. The Nintendo DS succeeds inspite of piracy because honest people already pretty well put all their money their entertainment money into the same entertainment, regardless of their piracy of that entertainment.
Now, perhaps that removes the motivation to work harder, find a second job, etc to feed one's entertainment addiction. But, given copyright is a governmental monopoly intended to better the public at large, and it seems very clear that copyright holders can thrive even with extensive piracy (although probably not with 30%+ population piracy), I'm inclined to believe that work should be done to decriminalize/de-law-suitize many current practices of the populace at large since punishment would be arbitrary and non-constructive.
Slashdot Mirror
"For Windows game development, XNA Game Studio Express is completely free and built on top of the popular and powerful Visual C# Express. For Xbox 360 game development, you'll need to subscribe to the Creators Club and have a retail Xbox 360 with a hard drive." -- XBox Registered Developer Program
"As a Premium member in the XNA Creators Club, youll be able to submit any complete Xbox 360 game youve created in XNA Game Studio to the Creators Club community at http://creators.xna.com/ for peer review. Other Premium Creators will check to make sure your game is safe to play. If it is, youll set a price point between 200 and 800 Points that people will pay to download your game.
Once the game is reviewed and the price point set, youre done. The game is listed on Xbox LIVE Marketplace, and youll get an electronic payment every quarter, for up to 70% of the games total revenue in your own currency. Depending on your games success, you may even have your game advertised on Xbox 360 and other Microsoft online properties.
...
If youre going to develop games for Xbox 360 and want to sell your game on Xbox LIVE Community Games, youll need a Premium membership. Its just $99 per year or $49 for four months." -- XNA Creators Club Online
In short, not exactly free. Nor entirely open. And it includes XNA lock-in, which seems to be more horizontally oriented. How about Apple and Microsoft work together towards a standard, open API and a standard, peer-review based store?
I think it's much worse than that. Who is most at risk from all these logs? If anything, botnets. So, what are botnets likely to do? Falsify and corrupt local logs (deleting them would be too obvious) and attack ISPs to falsify and corrupt their logs. It is in the best interest of botnets to make all logs worthless to frustrate tracking. And given that (a) most botnets are started through malware and (b) such malware will invariable run on a lot of systems that do logging, logging will be pretty worthless. Even if there was a requirement for a write-once log, it just means botnets will start falsify logs subtle to misdirect investigation.
It might not happen right away, but see how malware has advanced to the point of redirecting URLs in web browsers to falsified web sites supportative of their malware? I don't see how this would be different. Writing a law to try to effectively elevate a line of evidence when it is so susceptible to abuse by the very party that's likely a target seems unwise.
(1) Initially, owner has all rights; you have zero.
(2) You seek to gain access to the work and purchase a set of rights.
(3) The owner offers for distribution a copy of the work, conditioned on the acceptance of an agreement which governs the conveyance of limited, non-exclusive content rights. There is not yet a copyright question.
(4) Because of the volume of this kind of transaction, there is no face-to-face negotiation. A standard form contract is employed. The parties to this contract are the Licensor (copyright owner) and Licensee (customer). There is still no copyright question.
(5) The copyright owner wants to use a retail distribution channel. The retailer buys a pallet of books for an agreed wholesale price, applies a markup, and puts those books on the retail shelf. They are not party to the SLA, because they are not owners of copies of the work; they're owners of a physical good (a book). What's in that book is not directly touched. Still no copyright question.
(6) The customer purchases said book from the retailer. The retailer has no authority to transfer content rights, as the retailer owns none. The customer, at time of purchase, is purchasing a purely physical good, and the purchase itself is a commercial transaction between the retailer and the customer. The copyright owner is not a party.
(7). The customer goes home and opens the books, attempting to read the book. At this point, there is an interaction between the copyright owner and the customer. If the customer and copyright owner complete their transaction, the customer receives a set of limited, non-exclusive content rights to owner's work. At this point, copyright engages, the customer becomes an owner of a copy as defined in section 101 and is entitled to raise copyright causes of action, including violations of DFS, as well as to challenge the terms of their transaction under contract law.
Does srussia rape young, beautiful women in blind allies? Well, srussia has a evolutionary-motivated bias to breed with young, beautiful women, regardless of their consent, to produce healthy children with his genes.
Oh, and if you try to deny raping young, beautiful women, "thou does protest too much!" After all, I never said you actually did rape young, beautiful women.
PS - If srussia is a female, reverse gender roles. Obviously, though, this doesn't fall into conventional stereotypes. But, god knows nothing in this thread is about exploiting stereotypes to one's own ends...
So, in short, you need a climate scientist to tell you the big picture? What climate scientists present isn't hysterical. It's just very unpleasent. It sounds like your complaint is about the media's sensational presentation of climate scientists and their conclusions, at best.
Skeptism is healthy. The scientific method is a sound method to reach a summary about climate change. And the data is useless to you now, but you can become educated if you tried.
The problem with this is, if you read a whole pile of journals, you *would* become educated. If you were to ignore that education to present your views, you'd be heavily biased and bigoted. You'd also be a confidence artist. Con artists are very good at telling people exactly what they want to hear. If you qualified your lack of education and tried to distill what you learned, you'd be better than a con artist (but possibly a sensationalist that you seem to detest). The very issue, then, isn't that the experts on one side aren't educated. It is that their agenda is such that they're more interested in peddling ideas upon people more willing to listen to a softer tone than media sensationalism yet not interested enough in educating themselves. At that point, data has very little to do with the problem.
Cellular service is a service. A copy of a copyrighted work is a good, not a service, unlessly specifically contracted out otherwise. This is, btw, why you're required to sign cellular contracts. Beyond that, if you were to hack the card to get more minutes, you'd be charged with theft of services, not copright infringement. You can't make an analogy between the two as if they were equivalent or even very comparable because they're incredibly different concepts.
The point of quoting First Sale Doctrine is because, again, First Sale Doctrine is about: "A copyright protects only the content inside a book, or the song in a sound recording. The package that contains the content the actual book, CD, or printed poster, for example is not copyrighted, and the person who buys the item can do whatever they want to that copy. (There is an exception in the law for unique works of visual art.)" Although the original First Sale Doctrine was spelled out over resale, clearly "do whatever they want to that copy" includes the right to *use* a copy. Even without First Sale Doctrine, it is patently absurd to think it's a "promo[tion] of the arts and sciences" for copyright holders to sell copies of a work without allowing the copy owner to ever use said copy.
This is, again, mostly irrelevant. The sale of a box good is not a license agreement. The whole point of First Sale Doctrine was because, again, there have been attempts to enforce contracts after sale. First Sale Doctrine has specifically been invoked to nullify sections of SLA, after being agreed to, when they prevent resale. But, a SLA is not inherently necessary to using a program. Why? Because in every step, from CD to disk to ram to cache to cpu instruction translation, section 117 covers the making of an adaption of a lawful copy of a copyrighted work. And since you buy a legal copy of a work in a boxed sale, the SLA is, at best, material irrelevant. Even if one believes one has no right to modify the CD itself to make an adaption, one could readily use an emulator to skip the EULA. While agreeing to an EULA might be an "essential step" in the eyes of the copyright holder, the words "essential step" are not spoke in the intent of the copyright holder for such interpretation would effectively nullify First Sale Doctrine.
SLAs might be valid in themselves (barring any sections with First Sale Doctrine violations). That doesn't mean one has to agree to them if one has already obtained a lawful copy. Copyright holders do not have the power to redefine codified processes like "point of sale" at their whim. If they want to sell you a SLA instead of a copy of a work, they have to make that explicitly clear *at sale*.
Well, your interpretation is inherently flawed. By your logic, the program that displays the EULA would itself be copyright infringement because section 117 hasn't applied yet and you haven't agreed to whatever EULA is necessary to run the installer. The only way your logic holds is if one presumes that what one buys at a store is the right to run the installer, not the right to run the actual program the EULA is meant to cover. However, clearly people are buying the item mentioned on the box. Perhaps if boxes were sold as "Windows XP EULA Installer". But, First Sale Doctrine clearly applies to the point that one can't try to force a contract upon people after purchase.
Having said that, one has to figure out how to actually run said authorized program without agreeing to the EULA:
One doesn't just buy "the box". One buys the box and the contents, obviously including a copy of a computer program legally obtained. Note the wording carefully (relevent parts selected): "it is not an infringement for the [lawful] owner of a copy of a computer program to make [an] adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a[n] adaptation is created as an essential step in the [lawful] utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". Clearly the EULA isn't the program intended to be utilized. The adapted installer is used *only* for the purpose of utilizing the program, by allowing the install to continue. The only way that logic doesn't hold is if the adaption isn't necessary because one can agree to the EULA. But, clearly that is at odds with First Sale Doctrine which was specficially enshrined because of previous situations with attempted post-sale contracts in books; clearly buying a copy of a work includes the lawful right to use said work. Hence, "essentional step in the [lawful] utilization" must include the right to bypass an EULA.
It comes down to the simple point that if a software maker wants to enforce a contract on a person, they need to make them sign a contract. Tricks with installers and EULAs are, at best, sketchy. Perhaps a clearly marked "Windows XP Installer: This box does not include a copy of Windows XP but a contract to obtain such a copy under certain terms" would have more legal weight to the issue. But, once you start selling copies of a copyrighted work as a physical good instead o
Ask Eve.
You're only partly right. As Inside Windows Vista User Account Control explains, UAC is joined with something called Virtual Store to allow normal users to have virtualized access to various parts of the registry and filesystem for programs not designed for Vista. But, it seems this is, at best, half-assed. As you note, once you try to do anything complex, real-admin access starts to be needed, and UAC kicks in to ask a normal user for a password. I'm not sure if "real" admins have any virtual store or if any sort of admin access kicks in the UAC password-less authorization.
So, while UAC and Virtual Store could have likely handled installs for a lot of programs, it seems to have been crafted more towards running already or admin installed programs as a normal user, leaving the admin to basically get an "are you sure" for programs that require admin access or an 'enhanced "run as"' (as Russinovich puts it) for regular users.
Of course, that all seems rather contradictory. If the point of UAC and Virtual store was to merely to make normal user's lives easier (to encourage their usage), then admins should have been left with their full authority. But, putting in UAC for the admin seems to imply that either (a) UAC was put in to make admining more annoying or (b) UAC was put in to help admins administrate. Of course, (a) makes the most sense if one considers that it's easier to go half-assed with supporting normal users and cripping the admin experience than it is to make UAC really useful for either admins or normal users.
So, your overall point seems to be half-right. I should have said something like, "UAC could be extended to install programs without actually being an administrator."
I thought part of the point of UAC was to virtualize many of the filesystem parts of being an administrator so you could install programs without actually being administrator (that way programs don't pollute c:\windows, among other things). Beyond that, why aren't things like firewall modifications trapped under UAC? Certainly there should be something more fine-grained than "Install app needs to do function X, which isn't virtualized; allow install app to do function A to Z so it can do function X?"
Oh, and if you were to point out that Linux has the same problem, I entirely agree. Even though things like AppArmor and SeLinux do, to some extent, limit the availability of a program to do as it pleases, even if it were granted necessary root functions, it's too complex and non-fine-grained enough to be actually useful. Beyond that, AppArmor/SeLinux doesn't simulate functions it blocks, so you're still left with programs that are capable of aborting when it fails to achieve its ends.
Of course, there's no real solution to such a situation, anyways, short of rewriting such programs. Even if that weren't illegal, that's reasonably impossible. The real answer is to not be using programs you have to combat. Even when it comes to open source, that's a hard problem to resolve--fixing programs that aren't intentionally combative to function as you wish may be beyond your means. None of the above justifies the hand waving about any real attempt to resolve the lack of control in the current environment, though.
Well, this part doesn't sound like user error. It sounds like a Windows Explorer error.
And this doesn't sound like user error. At best, it sounds like shitty design, espectially in light of UAC. But, then, UAC isn't exactly bright either, design wise.
As for the rest of your post (at least, for those parts that are factually accurate), I mostly agree.
It sounds like what they're thinking of doing is more like: (1) draw up 10 billion T-Cells, (2) use an enzyme to cleave off the CCR5 proteins, (3) filter out the enzyme+proteins, and (4) reinject the T-Cells. Ie, I don't think issue 3 would crop up (or, at least, it'd be much more limited in scope). The real issue, as I see it, is that those 10 billion T-Cells will eventually die. Not knowing enough about how proteins on the cell membrane are created/carried over during mitosis, it'd seem the biggest issue is that those 10 billion T-Cells are likely to either duplicate and regenerate the CCR5 protein or simply die out before the HIV is eliminated. Either situation would seem to only delay the spreading of HIV in the body.
On the other hand, if it happens that the CCR5 protein isn't regenerated, then perhaps HIV would be cured, but you'd be at risk of redevelopment a random assortment of childhood illnesses (which should just mean revaccination). Unfortunately, I don't know nearly enough about T-Cell reproduction and HIV to know exactly how it is HIV manages to permanently kill off T-Cell production.
A 1.5TiB drive would take ~3.4 hours to fill up at 1Gbps, best case scenario. In comparison, a 1.5TiB drive would take ~14.5 days to fill up at 10Mbps, again best case scenario. It's much harder to saturate a connection when you've ran out of room to put things. Even streaming content isn't enough to saturate a connection, as streaming content doesn't use nearly 1Gbps; although, if enough people decide to all watch a streaming show at a certain time there will be problems.
Connection rates will likely never growth at nearly the same scale of hard drive growth rates, but US telecoms sat on their thumbs as people began utilizing the internet to fill up the new massive amounts of hard drive space. Perhaps it was a lack of foresight on their part to not plan ahead to be constantly work to expand and upgrade their networks. Or, perhaps, they realized they were oligarchies in a time* when government was too pro-business to step in and demand that they not simply hand out profits but instead use them to help expand their networks (and hence the economy). In any case, it wasn't really an issue of telecoms not having the money or the technology.
*AFAIK, this was true during both Clinton ($200 Billion broadband fiasco, the failure of the 80MPG car, and failure in regulation of the two) and Bush years (letting Microsoft off, basically, and further failing at regulation of already existing projects). The fear these projects caused, btw, is mainly the reason why foreign countries and companies worked so hard on broadband and fuel-efficient cars. Funny, huh?
If someone has a gun to your head, telling you to use google, you have the choice either to use google or to get shot in the head; sounds voluntary to me. If you're going to be all black and white about whether something is voluntary or involuntary, you might as well go to the extreme, right?
One can put one's own engine in it and drive it. It's presumptive that the intent of the car purchase was driving.
It could still be used as a coaster. And you could possibly still look at the movies and the music on the disc.
Um, what makes you presume that? It's quite possible that one needs Aero to run something and the machine is entirely useless to the purchaser without it.
Just because you can find a use for a system or a car shell or a CD-keyless Starcraft CD doesn't negate the fraud commited or somehow undo the legitimacy of people deserving some option for recourse. I might not agree with the actual recourse suggested by the plantiff, but equally one can simple excuse fraud with the argument that the items sold are inherently useless in all functionality.
To that end, perhaps a better example would have been a pickup truck with a low-power engine capable of transport a maximal of two people and no extra load with advertisements showing the carrying of four people, a full load, and towing a boat. I truthfully don't know what's the best fair answer to such circumstances.
So, you're suggesting Microsoft engaged in a campaign to advertise a variety of systems as "Vista Capable" to the one group most capable of recognizing that Microsoft was lying to them? It had nothing to do with trying to trick people, informed or not, into buying hardware now instead of considering another platform (Mac OS X) back when Vista was taking so long to be released (and, btw, that's why it was "Vista Capable" not "Vista installed" or whatever)?
Btw, yes, the informed geeks and their lawyers were the ones who did the bulk of complaining. Why? Because most uninformed people are used to being screwed. When something bad happens to them, most just shrug it off as "I must have been mistaken". Their informed friends can belittle them for not knowing about "minimum system requirements" or "of course it doesn't run aero, that pretty thing you saw". The people that tend to complain with any credence are the ones who actually know enough about the subject to make valid complaints. Next up you'll note that accountants and tax laywers are the people who most complaint about questionable tax laws.
Sounds great. So, I'll sell you a car without an engine. Just because you saw an advertisement of the car moving doesn't mean the engine isn't extra. I'll sell you Starcraft without a CD Key. Sure, you can't use the game, but there wasn't a sticker that said "is more valuable than a door stop". Or, I'll advertise to you a Big Mac, but when it comes to when you open the box, it'll be missing the beef patties. I mean, the menu didn't *say* there would be beef patties in the product. Just give a refund on the missing part, and let the consumer be stuck with the rest for their stupidity.
Yes, let's just ignore the obvious misconception that was being pushed with "vista capable". Or try to pretend that Microsoft-approved labels used as Microsoft intended aren't at all related to a responsibility on Microsoft's part not to defraud. Does that mean I think handing out hardware to fulfill the promise is the right answer? Not probably (having the option to return the whole machine for the original retail price, minimally, sounds better). But certainly a system where a company can defraud you with the minimal risk of having to, after a time, return money for a few defective parts encourages intentionally making expensive things with a few crucial, cheap, broken parts. At that level, fraud laws have been effectively bypassed, and that's definitely not the solution.
But that comes down to the mindset of a lot of Americans that taxes are evil. They've taken "no taxation without representation" to mean "I don't have to pay taxes if I disagree with the government" to "well, I still don't want to pay taxes even if I'm in power and everything is going how I want". Taxe avoid is, in many ways, exactly like piracy. People invariably try to account for their actions through vague justifications and are unwilling to accept that a system where noone plays taxes is a crippling one. Of course, "the tax man gets his money" and you don't hear of many (if any) companies closing because of piracy. But there's a certain amount of duty that people are missing in supporting the government they need or the entertainment they want.*
I agree the tax system is complex, but that doesn't really justify abuse of the system any more than people who would act ignorant of 3rd degree homicide because the legal code is so complex to try to account for more than simply "if someone dies, someone else is executed in response". And while there are times when it's unclear that a transaction is abusive, many times it's pretty abundantly clear because entities that make millions in profit somehow avoid paying much of any taxes through clever redefinition of profits. If anything, the culture of tax cheating is itself so complex that the tax code is frequently updated to try to counter them. It's not that the tax code has become overly complex purely on the whim of trying to make it confusing. Besides, an overly complex tax code is likely to result in an entity paying more taxes, not less, as figuring out what you can deduct or exempt is the complex part.
*It's generally called the free-rider problem. In both cases, people see what they perceive as enormous waste, be it wasteful spending or inflated prices. Hopefully Obama's plan at more transparency will change this. I'm not entirely optimistic, though, as I think some people would rather see poor people starve than to allow for government to intervene in the free market, no matter how much of a case the government could make that their actions are an efficient correction to a market inefficiency. I'm not sure if that's more a point of delusion on some people's part, an unwillingness to bend on a point that makes their views clearly imperfect, or simply the callousness of those unwilling to feed their fellow man. Perhaps it's much more than those things, but as much as I appreciate the free market as an ideal and wish to apply it where applicable, to treat it as a religion when it's clearly proven to be incomplete and to not even deeply consider the proposals when government may very well should step in seems heartless and stupid.
Having said all that, I'd much profer it if laws were changed to make such interference legal rather than to rely on selective interpretation of laws. But, then, that involves winning the hearts and minds of a vast majority of people. Of course, when that is done, changing the law as necessary would be much more trivial and this whole discussion would be moot. It's just sad that enlightenment is so far out of reach of people who are more obsessed with believing that they can understand a small part of a complex system to extrapolate all things than to be open to a world so complex that while certainly
More or less unacceptable than having to open regedit to make a major configuration tweak?
Further than that, the idea can be used for all sorts of applications, from automatic encrypted hibernation (since even if you're using encrypted swap, you need somewhere to store the key) to automatic backups (since a large part of why people don't backup is because there's too much risk leaking out something inoccuous at the time that later turns out to be important to keep yet shouldn't be available to anyone with physical access to one's tapes). IIRC, Windows's EFS uses the idea, although its use of a recovery agent undermines the implementation. It's a shame that public/private key encryption isn't used more often in such applications. Even if one fears quantum computing, there's elliptic curve based public/private key generation with no obvious sign of even theoretical weakness, AFAIK.
It is the intent of the law for most companies to pay taxes. The letter of the law allows for many companies to avoid paying much of those taxes. That is why such language in tax law is called loopholes. To recognize that loopholes exist is to recognize that companies seek to violate the intent of the law. Such certainly leaves room to blame companies for their actions, no matter how legal. And, of course, where possible, such loopholes certainly should be closed. Oh, and in response to the side comment you've made about the 401k and roth ira, if a person were to do the same or similar, they too would be just as worthy of blame. And the law should be changed to fix such a loophole.
Not everything wrong is illegal. Not everything illegal is wrong. A company or a person can be worthy of blame having commited no illegal act. And the fact that their actions weren't illegal may give rise to the indignation to make that act illegal. Such is not always justifiable, but I believe it is so in this case. Companies may be abstract constructs of law, but they're ran by people. And so, the company can be held to the standards of humans.
Just three small points.
One, when I mentioned games in relationship to video game developers, I clearly specified games they bought (ie, not merely those games they worked on). Outside the function of their job, video game developers rarely have any rights to the games they make except through purchasing a copy. The exceptions, of course, are when the video game developer in question owns the company or has special provisions under contract (which, interestingly, is rather a point of the absurdity of copyright law).
Two, I agree that including rationales does indeed dilute the discussion; but, then you yourself engaged in that discussion as well (as did I, truthfully, although I did try to segue into my point about copyright).
Three, I don't think it necessarily appropriate to mention how widespread piracy is because that very quickly falls into the trap of discussing piracy instead of discussing copyright law. Beyond that, arguing purely for the ulitarian position of copyright creates the problem that not everyone seems to agree with what the actual purpose of copyright is. That is to say, many people seem to believe that copyright was created to reward authors. But, that is merely a means to an end. So long as people are stuck with the notion that the purpose of copyright is to reward authors, then *any* author whose work is pirated becomes a victim. Obviously that's absurd because copyright law isn't meant to be a way of being magical fair towards authors while ignore the unfairness of every other industry in existance. So, it would seem best to only mention the piracy rates as an asside and not focus on it or let it dominate the discussion. And that means not arguing over how big or small the legitimate users are today since that's not the underlying problem with the system.
That depends on what you were trying to say. It sounded like you were asking a generic question on whether there existed a population of people who dumped games they bought to play on their computer. If you were asking a more specific question, about whether anyone has done an actual survey to ascertain an exact measure of that population, then my post wasn't relevant, and I apologize. If, on the other hand, your question was more or less what I restated, then game developers are clearly a population of people with many with the expertise to dump games and a vested interest and aversion to piracy. So, it seems very probable that that population would be a great source for measurement.
The rest of my post, though, was mainly a counter to the generic question. That is, the idea that you and the original grandparent seem to possess that the questionable legitimate uses today of flashcarts somehow have any real consequence to the underlying funding for copyrighted works so that such entertainment can continue to be produced is generally a red herring because piracy itself is generally a red herring. Copyright law of today is far from perfect in fulfilling its underlying purpose. The discussion is about as absurd as people calmly discussing the best method of execution during the French Revolution.
That all depends on whether you believe all game developers either never dump their own bought games or are hypocritical pirates. We could also pretend that things like the Wii Virtual Console aren't a big financial hit, when certainly piracy is a significantly cheaper (although a more complex) option.
Perhaps the answer is more along the times of, if it's trivial enough, even average Joe will do it. But, average Joe doesn't buy many games anyways. And as trivial as DS flashcarts are to use, it's not like you can buy them at the corner stop or that there's zero risk. The Wii Virtual Console succeeds because it's easy enough. The Nintendo DS succeeds inspite of piracy because honest people already pretty well put all their money their entertainment money into the same entertainment, regardless of their piracy of that entertainment.
Now, perhaps that removes the motivation to work harder, find a second job, etc to feed one's entertainment addiction. But, given copyright is a governmental monopoly intended to better the public at large, and it seems very clear that copyright holders can thrive even with extensive piracy (although probably not with 30%+ population piracy), I'm inclined to believe that work should be done to decriminalize/de-law-suitize many current practices of the populace at large since punishment would be arbitrary and non-constructive.