Whether or not it gives anyone the right to have it without paying for it is not the issue.
I understand what you're saying about the loss numbers. My point was just that it doesn't matter if someone was going to buy something or not. Just because you weren't going to pay for something doesn't suddenly give you the right to have it for free. But I acknowledge what you are saying about monetary losses.
I tried Counter-Strike no more than three times. Each time, I started to get into the game, but the maddening immaturity of the players completely turned me off after five minutes. "EAT SHIT ASSDICK LOLOL!! PWNED" got old, and when I encountered a cheater, that was the last straw.
As a matter of fact, I haven't really been into online gaming since. Nothing intrigues me. Looking forward to single-player Doom 3 and Half-life 2, thank you very much.
What do you mean, "allows their software to be 'pirated'?" I honestly don't know what you mean. How are software companies allowing it to happen? I've been seeing some pretty insane copy protection schemes going on lately just to combat piracy. Of course, it still doesn't work.
People don't pirate VALUABLE SOFTWARE.
Are you with the submitter in hiding your head in the sand? Been on eMule lately? Shit, you can even find the official proprietary Gamecube development tools on it (I just searched on a whim). Pretty much anything under the sun is out there floating around, thanks to some guy who stuck it on there for everyone to trade asynchronously.
I consider Photoshop CS, Visual Studio 2003, Unreal Tournament 2003, Far Cry, and much more to be valuable software. That's just me.
But for a society to thrive and function, there must be a common ground defined, a shared ethical framework that is fair to everyone. Software piracy is an unfair system--it's an inbalance of the equation. Eventually that inbalance is going to catch up and have severe effects, forcing the system to change. One example is the gaming industry's mass exodus to console gaming where piracy is much more difficult. That area is already being cracked as well.
That's not even getting into the ethics issue, an overlooked issue, in my opinion. Software developers are geeks like us, and you're not helping someone's life any by taking away from his sales. Keep in mind that when you download, not only are you getting it, but you're serving as a node for other people to get it off of you. It's the nature of P2P, and without realizing it, you're part of a much bigger web affecting the system.
In the interest of fairness, yes, I have pirated too. In fact, in high school I was quite the pirate. Having graduated college, gotten a real job and produced products, and actually experienced real life, your eyes are opened to how things really work. It's a cliche, but it's true. I'm curious how the system will be forced to change, because such changes will majorly affect people's careers.
That attitude of yours. Taking something without paying for it is illegal...and inethical.
Am I the only one anymore who has fucking morals? I've posted a couple of other times about this. I just can't justify to myself taking something that I know some poor guys slaved over late hours into the night to get out the door for the publisher to stick on the shelves down at my local Wal-mart, people who are working to make money and make a living in this world. Then a bunch of kiddies and college dorm room "anti-capitalists" come along and rip them off, complete with a preset list of ideological justifications.
The statistics aren't "screwed up beyond all hell." Just because you weren't going to buy something still doesn't give you the right to suddenly have it without paying for it. Where does this backwards-ass sense of entitlement come from? Doesn't anybody care about the basic ideas of morals and fairness anymore? Even two year olds quickly grasp the simple concept of getting something by giving in return. And guess what, that's how it works in the real world when you get out of school (I say that because I know most of you are college guys).
If someone used pirated software illegally, he used it illegally. Don't spin it into "spreading your marketshare." Some real human beings who created that software didn't get paid for that marketshare. Or is it "free advertising"--the most laughable of all spins?
I know you guys love OSS, but just because you're used to one set of apps being free (not just beer, but speech) doesn't mean all apps are supposed to be free (as in loading). Note that this isn't an indictment of everyone on Slashdot. But I do know this applies to the majority viewpoint around here. I wish this site went back to more of the hard tech news of yesteryear and not these abstract ideological movements pre-designed to create page hits in the discussion threads.
...pirating software is wrong. Legally and ethically. Right? Right?!...
Hmm. I feel like I'm an empty voice in the wind here. I guess I never realized that part of it was forgotten. It's never even mentioned in these types of discussions...y'know...someone taking something without paying for it when they're supposed to. I mean, that's bad, right?
I guess I was just raised a certain way. I actually work for and buy shit when I want it. I had to buy my own car growing up. When I wanted WarCraft II, I worked for and bought the fucking thing. Nowadays kids just pirate. A lot of the young generation these days have their cars bought for them. I think that's not just coincidence when you look at what else is freeloaded in today's society.
Everyone suddenly thinks they're entitled to everything. In the many years I've been lurking here since the 90s, that selfish attitude has grown and grown. It's a bit startling to me. But, that's me.
Seems a little too far-fetched to me - a P2P network would be the last place where I would download software, just too much chance that you are downloading a trojan onto your computer.
You're kidding, right? The submitter is either purposely acting ignorant or really has had their head under a rock for the past five years. Software piracy is "far-fetched?" Why do you think all the games companies are so eager to move to consoles now?
Pirating software is so easy that entire websites have sprung up for the ed2k protocol alone. Warez groups compete with each other for the earliest pre-retail leaks. Even back in late 1999, a friend of mine had a retail version of Windows 2000 before it was out in stores. This was on 56k dialup.
Windows XP must be one of the most pirated pieces of software out there, to the point that both SP1 and SP2 refuse to install on known pirated product keys.
Let's not get stupid here. Software piracy alone is probably more rampant than mp3s and movies. If you're a shareware developer looking to make a living, forget it. Shareware is dead. Freeloaders just aren't willing to follow a valid system of try before you buy--they just want the whole thing for free. Morality and ethics are gone in a new era of hax0r kiddies who hang out in IRC all day and never even dream of heading to a software store to buy something.
People here love to hate the RIAA and MPAA, and few if any people here are musicians and filmmakers so it's easy to ignore the rights of those groups of content creators, but I'm curious to see how Slashdot's general position will change when software piracy begins to have a real effect on the people here who make a living developing software. Or is free OSS the only way to go now?
Doom 3 will be out on ed2k networks before it hits retail, I guarantee it. And that's "far-fetched?" Whatever. It's fact, it happens, and it's growing as more and more people have highspeed connections. At some point, people will be forced to face it head-on and decide--what are we going to do? Allow it to happen or actually come out and say that it's wrong? At this point come some college dorm room unemployeds who lecture me about "finding a new business model," whatever that means. I could have sworn making something and selling it was a business model. Guess I was wrong. That's the new era of computing. "GIMME THAT, IT'S MINE! GIMME THAT, IT'S MINE!"
If you disagree, reply. But don't mod me down. Just my opinion (which I feel is supported by the facts). It's stupid to turn a blind eye toward this ever-growing section of the Internet that is pirating everything.
What does "Kougar" tell you? "Kroupware?" "JuK?" "Konquerer?"
I could go on and on. Final Draft relates very well to screenplay final drafts. Winzip and the others were obvious. My point was how easy the titles were to remember and relate to their various functions. It's easier to remember what Final Draft is for than Kougar.
People make fun of Windows XP for a "Fisher Price" interface than use something called "KDE" with a "Konsole," "Kougar," "Kroupware," "Konquerer," etc. naming scheme.
What is this obsession with the K? It's completely pointless. It's not necessary.
Naming scheme? How about one where the developers actually come up with names that are functional and describe their product? Why is it so hard to just come up with a nice name? Final Draft is a screenplay-formatting application. Microsoft Word is a word-processing application. Winzip is a compression application. They're just nice, easy-to-remember names.
You're ignoring Kougar, Kroupware, JuK, KPaint, KIllustrator, Kontrol Center, Konsole, and so on.
After a while, it gets irritatingly dumb and counterproductive as well. Just give me a decent, functional name that's easy to remember. See "K" all the time is the last thing I want to see when trying to learn a new system.
I don't care how it's written in another country. Again, what's the point of translations if we're just supposed to accept misspellings because they happen to be correct spellings for another language?
Prefixing things with K doesn't differentiate a thing. Like you need a K to do that. Just give them functional names, developers. You know, like Winzip or Microsoft Office. Not "Kroupware."
Geez, talk about bias. Gnome users might say all that you said, but against KDE. Give me a break, the OK/Cancel combination is such a trivial issue that you get used to after five minutes (hey, ever used OS X?).
You basically illustrated the very prejudgmental bias the grandparent was asking about. Personally, I can't stand KDE's big giant foot--I like having a seperate Programs menu and a seperate Actions menu. KDE has an unholy beast of a start menu, completely with braindead pointless redundancies ("Control Center", "Settings", "System", etc.) as well as pointless "More Programs" subgroups. It's hell for a user.
I'm an English-speaking person, not a German-speaking person. I don't care if it's spelled "Konsole" in Germany. What's the point of translation if you're not going to use English words?
I know it's an annoying cliche now to bitch about the absolutely stupid K-prefix naming scheme, but to be honest the scheme itself is an annoying cliche so that's why it keeps coming up. It will keep coming up until the developers' cheesy sense of humor goes away. It's hard to take the names seriously, and it's hard for newbies to keep track of all these arcane K puns. It's bad enough they're having to deal with things called "grep" and "xine." Now we've got JuK, Konsole, Kroupware, Kougar, etc.
Haha..."Klassroom"...yeah, that's so cute. Disagree with all this if you want, but a lot of people don't like this dumb naming scheme.
It's not contradictory. We all know that when we started downloading, we found out that there were a lot of good music out there, and bought a lot of CD's. The RIAA didn't believe us, but when someone admitted that their sales went up, we had the proof.
We also know that they (nearly) stopped making good music. So, sales went down. Who could be surprised about that, except the RIAA?
At what point did they suddenly stop making good music? That's a subjective opinion and therefore irrelevant. You can't pinpoint a time at which they suddenly stopped putting out good music and as a result, sales went down.
I could just as easily point out that piracy became so rampant and widespread with the various post-Napster clients that sales suddenly started going down. My argument would be no different from yours.
So yes, piracy and buying more CD's were at least one of the causes when sales increased.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Piracy and buying more CD's were not the cause when it decreased. Lack of music worth buying or downloading was[1]. No contradictions here.
You just restated what I said--piracy somehow has a connection when sales go up, but no connection when they go down. I don't see how you could possibly be arguing such a contradictory point.
I traded email with several people who know the history of this algorithm and its patents fairly well.
Typical Slashdot journalism. Unnamed people you e-mailed today who "know the history of this algorithm." That's certainly a good reason to go ahead and make such a legal claim.
I understand your point. I was making a statement on the general consensus here on Slashdot.
You point out that the music industry blamed downloaders, and people here kept saying piracy had no correlation. Yet when Slashdot posted that sales when up in Australia last year, the article summary and all the posters fell over themselves saying "See, piracy is good!" fast enough.
I was just pointing out the contradiction. When sales are down, suddenly piracy has nothing to do with it. When sales are up, suddenly piracy has a lot to do with it. The truth is, nobody knows exactly how much piracy has hurt sales, but you'd be silly to pretend it's not a lot. It's only common sense. We should respect copyright holder rights. Copyright doesn't only extend to GPL violations, you know (and witness how up in arms people get when that happens). There really isn't any legal or ethical justification for pirating people's music. Yes, I've done it, as have probably 99% of the people posting here. But I'm not going to pretend I didn't break the law and also do something immoral toward the artist. I can imagine being in their shoes, having spent three months making an album only to have it ripped and stuck up on eMule for everyone to download in a lossless APE file complete with scanned cover art. Someday, piracy is going to affect things to the point where it's undeniable. Until then, I think it's silly to hold contradictory viewpoints about it, which is why I pointed it out.
"Piracy has nothing to do with sales losses! There is absolutely no correlation. Remember, 'correlation does not equal causation.' You're just making crap content, and that's why people aren't buying it. Let's ignore the question of why someone would download something if it sucked."
"Well, well! Sales are up! Just like I've been arguing all along, piracy affects sales. There is a direct connection between piracy and sales, and the more piracy, the better."
The funny part is that all this argument still ignores the fact that it doesn't fucking matter if you college dorm room pirates think piracy helps or hurts anything--it's not legal and it's not ethical for you to take it upon yourselves to violate somebody's rights. Yes, believe it or not, content creators have rights to the property they make. I know, it's such a crazy idea and all.
...and people like me have to point out, yet again, that there have only ever been two versions, the normal releases and the extended releases of LOTR. And they've been upfront about that since the beginning.
It's not funny or clever anymore to make up really long names like "super special extended bronze edition." We've seen that joke a million times now.
Unfortunately, I doubt it'll be sold seperately, but the version of the Matrix in this box set is a brand-new transfer. Should be much cleaner. Also, the Wachowskis were never happy with the originaly DVD transfer, as it was too bright. The new transfer will be more accurate to the original theatrical release as well as more consistent with the color scheme of the sequels.
Personally, the dark green and blue of the two sequels gave me headaches, but hey, hopefully the first one won't look bad, and it'll be a much cleaner transfer and probably include a new audio mix.
...the "ground rules of the universe" people believe are being violated are complately inane, archaic things that 95% of the Spider-man 2 viewing audience didn't notice and wouldn't give a shit about.
It's fucking Spider-man 2. Enjoy the goddamn movie. Am I the only one who has an imagination that allows me to explain the things I see in a film?
Ok, seriously... DON'T pull that FUCKING elitist Firefox bullshit on me. I've had enough of it over the past few weeks
That's great, since I use Opera. Hell, at least use MyIE.
I've had other apps pull the focus-stealing thing it on me too. Like Photoshop and Acrobat.
I've had Linux apps do the same thing (Gaim comes to mind). By default, that's not supposed to happen in the Win32 API--those apps are specifically pulling their apps to the top-level. It's either ignorant programming, or just purposely annoying programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether or not it gives anyone the right to have it without paying for it is not the issue.
I understand what you're saying about the loss numbers. My point was just that it doesn't matter if someone was going to buy something or not. Just because you weren't going to pay for something doesn't suddenly give you the right to have it for free. But I acknowledge what you are saying about monetary losses.
I tried Counter-Strike no more than three times. Each time, I started to get into the game, but the maddening immaturity of the players completely turned me off after five minutes. "EAT SHIT ASSDICK LOLOL!! PWNED" got old, and when I encountered a cheater, that was the last straw.
As a matter of fact, I haven't really been into online gaming since. Nothing intrigues me. Looking forward to single-player Doom 3 and Half-life 2, thank you very much.
What do you mean, "allows their software to be 'pirated'?" I honestly don't know what you mean. How are software companies allowing it to happen? I've been seeing some pretty insane copy protection schemes going on lately just to combat piracy. Of course, it still doesn't work.
People don't pirate VALUABLE SOFTWARE.
Are you with the submitter in hiding your head in the sand? Been on eMule lately? Shit, you can even find the official proprietary Gamecube development tools on it (I just searched on a whim). Pretty much anything under the sun is out there floating around, thanks to some guy who stuck it on there for everyone to trade asynchronously.
I consider Photoshop CS, Visual Studio 2003, Unreal Tournament 2003, Far Cry, and much more to be valuable software. That's just me.
But for a society to thrive and function, there must be a common ground defined, a shared ethical framework that is fair to everyone. Software piracy is an unfair system--it's an inbalance of the equation. Eventually that inbalance is going to catch up and have severe effects, forcing the system to change. One example is the gaming industry's mass exodus to console gaming where piracy is much more difficult. That area is already being cracked as well.
That's not even getting into the ethics issue, an overlooked issue, in my opinion. Software developers are geeks like us, and you're not helping someone's life any by taking away from his sales. Keep in mind that when you download, not only are you getting it, but you're serving as a node for other people to get it off of you. It's the nature of P2P, and without realizing it, you're part of a much bigger web affecting the system.
In the interest of fairness, yes, I have pirated too. In fact, in high school I was quite the pirate. Having graduated college, gotten a real job and produced products, and actually experienced real life, your eyes are opened to how things really work. It's a cliche, but it's true. I'm curious how the system will be forced to change, because such changes will majorly affect people's careers.
That attitude of yours. Taking something without paying for it is illegal...and inethical.
Am I the only one anymore who has fucking morals? I've posted a couple of other times about this. I just can't justify to myself taking something that I know some poor guys slaved over late hours into the night to get out the door for the publisher to stick on the shelves down at my local Wal-mart, people who are working to make money and make a living in this world. Then a bunch of kiddies and college dorm room "anti-capitalists" come along and rip them off, complete with a preset list of ideological justifications.
The statistics aren't "screwed up beyond all hell." Just because you weren't going to buy something still doesn't give you the right to suddenly have it without paying for it. Where does this backwards-ass sense of entitlement come from? Doesn't anybody care about the basic ideas of morals and fairness anymore? Even two year olds quickly grasp the simple concept of getting something by giving in return. And guess what, that's how it works in the real world when you get out of school (I say that because I know most of you are college guys).
If someone used pirated software illegally, he used it illegally. Don't spin it into "spreading your marketshare." Some real human beings who created that software didn't get paid for that marketshare. Or is it "free advertising"--the most laughable of all spins?
I know you guys love OSS, but just because you're used to one set of apps being free (not just beer, but speech) doesn't mean all apps are supposed to be free (as in loading). Note that this isn't an indictment of everyone on Slashdot. But I do know this applies to the majority viewpoint around here. I wish this site went back to more of the hard tech news of yesteryear and not these abstract ideological movements pre-designed to create page hits in the discussion threads.
...pirating software is wrong. Legally and ethically. Right? Right?!...
Hmm. I feel like I'm an empty voice in the wind here. I guess I never realized that part of it was forgotten. It's never even mentioned in these types of discussions...y'know...someone taking something without paying for it when they're supposed to. I mean, that's bad, right?
I guess I was just raised a certain way. I actually work for and buy shit when I want it. I had to buy my own car growing up. When I wanted WarCraft II, I worked for and bought the fucking thing. Nowadays kids just pirate. A lot of the young generation these days have their cars bought for them. I think that's not just coincidence when you look at what else is freeloaded in today's society.
Everyone suddenly thinks they're entitled to everything. In the many years I've been lurking here since the 90s, that selfish attitude has grown and grown. It's a bit startling to me. But, that's me.
Seems a little too far-fetched to me - a P2P network would be the last place where I would download software, just too much chance that you are downloading a trojan onto your computer.
You're kidding, right? The submitter is either purposely acting ignorant or really has had their head under a rock for the past five years. Software piracy is "far-fetched?" Why do you think all the games companies are so eager to move to consoles now?
Pirating software is so easy that entire websites have sprung up for the ed2k protocol alone. Warez groups compete with each other for the earliest pre-retail leaks. Even back in late 1999, a friend of mine had a retail version of Windows 2000 before it was out in stores. This was on 56k dialup.
Windows XP must be one of the most pirated pieces of software out there, to the point that both SP1 and SP2 refuse to install on known pirated product keys.
Let's not get stupid here. Software piracy alone is probably more rampant than mp3s and movies. If you're a shareware developer looking to make a living, forget it. Shareware is dead. Freeloaders just aren't willing to follow a valid system of try before you buy--they just want the whole thing for free. Morality and ethics are gone in a new era of hax0r kiddies who hang out in IRC all day and never even dream of heading to a software store to buy something.
People here love to hate the RIAA and MPAA, and few if any people here are musicians and filmmakers so it's easy to ignore the rights of those groups of content creators, but I'm curious to see how Slashdot's general position will change when software piracy begins to have a real effect on the people here who make a living developing software. Or is free OSS the only way to go now?
Doom 3 will be out on ed2k networks before it hits retail, I guarantee it. And that's "far-fetched?" Whatever. It's fact, it happens, and it's growing as more and more people have highspeed connections. At some point, people will be forced to face it head-on and decide--what are we going to do? Allow it to happen or actually come out and say that it's wrong? At this point come some college dorm room unemployeds who lecture me about "finding a new business model," whatever that means. I could have sworn making something and selling it was a business model. Guess I was wrong. That's the new era of computing. "GIMME THAT, IT'S MINE! GIMME THAT, IT'S MINE!"
If you disagree, reply. But don't mod me down. Just my opinion (which I feel is supported by the facts). It's stupid to turn a blind eye toward this ever-growing section of the Internet that is pirating everything.
What does "Kougar" tell you? "Kroupware?" "JuK?" "Konquerer?"
I could go on and on. Final Draft relates very well to screenplay final drafts. Winzip and the others were obvious. My point was how easy the titles were to remember and relate to their various functions. It's easier to remember what Final Draft is for than Kougar.
Why do we have to suffer through idiotic "super duper 23rd special bronze edition" jokes in every single LOTR article?
Since 2001, it's always been standard release, then extended. Nothing more, nothing less, and they've been upfront since the beginning.
Oh, yeah, I forgot, hahahahaha, yeah, multiple versions of a DVD! MPAA sux0r!
People make fun of Windows XP for a "Fisher Price" interface than use something called "KDE" with a "Konsole," "Kougar," "Kroupware," "Konquerer," etc. naming scheme.
After all, if we're criticizing maturity here...
What is this obsession with the K? It's completely pointless. It's not necessary.
Naming scheme? How about one where the developers actually come up with names that are functional and describe their product? Why is it so hard to just come up with a nice name? Final Draft is a screenplay-formatting application. Microsoft Word is a word-processing application. Winzip is a compression application. They're just nice, easy-to-remember names.
You're ignoring Kougar, Kroupware, JuK, KPaint, KIllustrator, Kontrol Center, Konsole, and so on.
After a while, it gets irritatingly dumb and counterproductive as well. Just give me a decent, functional name that's easy to remember. See "K" all the time is the last thing I want to see when trying to learn a new system.
I don't care how it's written in another country. Again, what's the point of translations if we're just supposed to accept misspellings because they happen to be correct spellings for another language?
Prefixing things with K doesn't differentiate a thing. Like you need a K to do that. Just give them functional names, developers. You know, like Winzip or Microsoft Office. Not "Kroupware."
Gnome is the one who had that godawful big giant foot. Thank god they replaced it.
Of the two desktops, I consider Gnome the least bad.
Geez, talk about bias. Gnome users might say all that you said, but against KDE. Give me a break, the OK/Cancel combination is such a trivial issue that you get used to after five minutes (hey, ever used OS X?).
You basically illustrated the very prejudgmental bias the grandparent was asking about. Personally, I can't stand KDE's big giant foot--I like having a seperate Programs menu and a seperate Actions menu. KDE has an unholy beast of a start menu, completely with braindead pointless redundancies ("Control Center", "Settings", "System", etc.) as well as pointless "More Programs" subgroups. It's hell for a user.
I'm an English-speaking person, not a German-speaking person. I don't care if it's spelled "Konsole" in Germany. What's the point of translation if you're not going to use English words?
I know it's an annoying cliche now to bitch about the absolutely stupid K-prefix naming scheme, but to be honest the scheme itself is an annoying cliche so that's why it keeps coming up. It will keep coming up until the developers' cheesy sense of humor goes away. It's hard to take the names seriously, and it's hard for newbies to keep track of all these arcane K puns. It's bad enough they're having to deal with things called "grep" and "xine." Now we've got JuK, Konsole, Kroupware, Kougar, etc.
Haha..."Klassroom"...yeah, that's so cute. Disagree with all this if you want, but a lot of people don't like this dumb naming scheme.
It's not contradictory. We all know that when we started downloading, we found out that there were a lot of good music out there, and bought a lot of CD's. The RIAA didn't believe us, but when someone admitted that their sales went up, we had the proof.
We also know that they (nearly) stopped making good music. So, sales went down. Who could be surprised about that, except the RIAA?
At what point did they suddenly stop making good music? That's a subjective opinion and therefore irrelevant. You can't pinpoint a time at which they suddenly stopped putting out good music and as a result, sales went down.
I could just as easily point out that piracy became so rampant and widespread with the various post-Napster clients that sales suddenly started going down. My argument would be no different from yours.
So yes, piracy and buying more CD's were at least one of the causes when sales increased.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Piracy and buying more CD's were not the cause when it decreased. Lack of music worth buying or downloading was[1]. No contradictions here.
You just restated what I said--piracy somehow has a connection when sales go up, but no connection when they go down. I don't see how you could possibly be arguing such a contradictory point.
I traded email with several people who know the history of this algorithm and its patents fairly well.
Typical Slashdot journalism. Unnamed people you e-mailed today who "know the history of this algorithm." That's certainly a good reason to go ahead and make such a legal claim.
I understand your point. I was making a statement on the general consensus here on Slashdot.
You point out that the music industry blamed downloaders, and people here kept saying piracy had no correlation. Yet when Slashdot posted that sales when up in Australia last year, the article summary and all the posters fell over themselves saying "See, piracy is good!" fast enough.
I was just pointing out the contradiction. When sales are down, suddenly piracy has nothing to do with it. When sales are up, suddenly piracy has a lot to do with it. The truth is, nobody knows exactly how much piracy has hurt sales, but you'd be silly to pretend it's not a lot. It's only common sense. We should respect copyright holder rights. Copyright doesn't only extend to GPL violations, you know (and witness how up in arms people get when that happens). There really isn't any legal or ethical justification for pirating people's music. Yes, I've done it, as have probably 99% of the people posting here. But I'm not going to pretend I didn't break the law and also do something immoral toward the artist. I can imagine being in their shoes, having spent three months making an album only to have it ripped and stuck up on eMule for everyone to download in a lossless APE file complete with scanned cover art. Someday, piracy is going to affect things to the point where it's undeniable. Until then, I think it's silly to hold contradictory viewpoints about it, which is why I pointed it out.
"Piracy has nothing to do with sales losses! There is absolutely no correlation. Remember, 'correlation does not equal causation.' You're just making crap content, and that's why people aren't buying it. Let's ignore the question of why someone would download something if it sucked."
"Well, well! Sales are up! Just like I've been arguing all along, piracy affects sales. There is a direct connection between piracy and sales, and the more piracy, the better."
The funny part is that all this argument still ignores the fact that it doesn't fucking matter if you college dorm room pirates think piracy helps or hurts anything--it's not legal and it's not ethical for you to take it upon yourselves to violate somebody's rights. Yes, believe it or not, content creators have rights to the property they make. I know, it's such a crazy idea and all.
...and people like me have to point out, yet again, that there have only ever been two versions, the normal releases and the extended releases of LOTR. And they've been upfront about that since the beginning.
It's not funny or clever anymore to make up really long names like "super special extended bronze edition." We've seen that joke a million times now.
Unfortunately, I doubt it'll be sold seperately, but the version of the Matrix in this box set is a brand-new transfer. Should be much cleaner. Also, the Wachowskis were never happy with the originaly DVD transfer, as it was too bright. The new transfer will be more accurate to the original theatrical release as well as more consistent with the color scheme of the sequels.
Personally, the dark green and blue of the two sequels gave me headaches, but hey, hopefully the first one won't look bad, and it'll be a much cleaner transfer and probably include a new audio mix.
...the "ground rules of the universe" people believe are being violated are complately inane, archaic things that 95% of the Spider-man 2 viewing audience didn't notice and wouldn't give a shit about.
It's fucking Spider-man 2. Enjoy the goddamn movie. Am I the only one who has an imagination that allows me to explain the things I see in a film?
http://funroll-loops.org/
Ok, seriously... DON'T pull that FUCKING elitist Firefox bullshit on me. I've had enough of it over the past few weeks
That's great, since I use Opera. Hell, at least use MyIE.
I've had other apps pull the focus-stealing thing it on me too. Like Photoshop and Acrobat.
I've had Linux apps do the same thing (Gaim comes to mind). By default, that's not supposed to happen in the Win32 API--those apps are specifically pulling their apps to the top-level. It's either ignorant programming, or just purposely annoying programming.