I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny's house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's. "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. We need to put these people in the oven!"
I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.
As we walked through Fullerton's downtown, Weev told me about his day - he'd lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed - and summarized his philosophy of "global ruin." "We are headed for a Malthusian crisis," he said, with professorial confidence. "Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years." He paused. "The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world's six billion people in the most just way possible?" He seemed excited to have said this aloud.
Even if you are right, in that the only reason anyone makes a movie these days is to make money, it still isn't a good enough reason to continue propping up the industry by sacrificing our natural rights to access our culture.
Whilst it's possible to make a movie and not be motivated by money that's definitely not true of popular movies. Guess which sort of movie gets pirated? A quick look on Pirate Bay shows you it's the popular ones - i.e expensive popcorn ones with mass market appeal that were made to make money by some huge US corporation .
People do make movies for reasons other than money, but not the sort of movies that get pirated.
Yeah, it's like the great days of 1989 when the software in Eastern Europe revolted and demanded to be under an Open Source License. Or right now in the Middle East where bits are rebelling and demanding an end to them being proprietary and the right to be checked into a public CVS server.
A WB receipt was leaked online, showing that the hugely successful movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ended up with a $167 million loss on paper.
For example, a bunch of you sent in the example of how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, under "Hollywood accounting," ended up with a $167 million "loss," despite taking in $938 million in revenue. This isn't new or surprising, but it's getting attention because the income statement for the movie was leaked online, showing just how Warner Bros. pulled off the accounting trick:
The movie cost $150 million. So really it made $788 million income (i.e. $938-150). Profits are income less expenses. Techdirt shows you how they did it. As they put it
The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the "film corporation" a huge fee (which creates a large part of the "expense" that leads to the loss).
Now it seems to me like someone - whoever the fee is paid to - will need to pay tax on this income. There's nothing illegal about any of this. If you run a business I think you're obliged to take advantage of any loopholes you can. And they do.
Incidentally Harry Potter was going to make money no matter what. A better example of the effects of piracy would be Serenity. That had a budget of $39 million and gross revenues of $38 million. No one is going to make movies like Serenity if the profit margin is that slim.
Serenity has a target audience - geeky 20-30s males - that is more likely to download than Harry Potter's family audience. And Serenity was the first HD movies to be cracked
Now hardcore fans will insist they'll both download and buy. Of course buying something is lower priority if you've already got a copy for free. It's a lot cheaper to talk loudly about how you're going to do it than actually doing it. More convenient too. So have you wonder whether Serenity would have been profitable if it wasn't for the piracy.
Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.
Movies aren't like oxygen. If people don't pay to watch them the businesses that make movies will do something else instead. Talking about the costs of making a copy (zero) and neglecting the cost of making the original movie (hundreds of millions of dollars) completely misses the point that the reason people are willing to invest money in making movies is because they expect to get that money back and more from selling the right to see it. If everyone pirated it rather than paying to see it there would be no reason to invest money in making future movies. Thus movies would not get made.
So the people that pirate are reducing the chance of future movies from being made by reducing the profits on the ones that exist. They are a bit like customers that go to a restaurant and eat their fill but don't pay - in the long run they will force the restaurant out of business. That could easily be described as greedy by other non free loading patrons. Not to mention by the owner.
Maybe he smoked a joint before the interview and was laughing at LOLCAT and Y U NO pics his mates had emailed him on his iPhone and he just couldn't get back into his CEO persona fast enough. As a shareholder this seems fair enough to me.
The GPL says you only have to distribute source code to people you distribute binaries to. So for Google servers they don't distribute binaries outside Google at all - they are all internal. That means they keep the source internal too.
On Android phones they distribute the binaries to pretty much everyone. The maintain their own tree and provide patch files to the Linux kernel guys. The Linux kernel guys have rejected those patches - Android depends on waitlocks and the kernel guys have don't want them in mainstream Linux.
So the Android kernel is effectively a fork of the Linux one with little chance of a merger. The source is however open. Android userland is not GPL based and not open.
I applaud people who release code under a BSD license, since it basically says "go forth and write cool shit, you don't owe us anything".,
Naah, it's like Stalin said - you're not truly free unless you're chained to a millstone in the collective farm. This is why I prefer the "Freedom as in slavery" of the GPL. Orwell was right!
Hello? Did someone not realize that Google is basically all about stealing Linux and "forking" it? Do you think that google server that you're hitting is really running bleeding edge Linux 2.6.35RC62? No, they're probably running some 2 year old kernel with their own patches, because they want to insulate themselves from upstream idiocy. They're not going to give you those patches, and even if they did, they probably couldn't because of upstream churn.
When it comes to Android, Google has done what the license asks. Make all the modifications public. If you and your rag-tag bunch of kernel developers want _their_ HOT new shit, the suck it up and bring the code in. It looks like they've even produced patches and sent you reviews. Don't like what they got? well, they're already doing more than what's required, so stop complaining.
You see, they've got this product to ship. And they've also got this competitor called Apple. You may have heard of them. So, yea, they _could_ sit their rearchitecting their interfaces so that some kernel dev which they don't pay and don't give shit about can feel like he's important... and watch Apple eat their lunch.
Or they could say fuck you guys. We're the one that's actually building something here. We'll get around to it, maybe, after we win.
Platforms can be free for users or free for software authors.
Apple trades of freedom for users for freedom for software authors. Windows Mobile gave more freedom to users but less to authors. Windows Mobile 7, interestingly moves things more in the direction of Apple. Since I'm a dumb consumer and don't write any software but like to fiddle around I much preferred Windows Mobile with its rampant piracy, modding and hacking scene.
Of course in the long run platforms which offer more freedom to software authors and less freedom to users will tend to have more software written for them. And that will bring more users - most of whom don't care or even know about "software freedoms". You can see this with Windows and Linux - Windows allowed developers to keep their source code private and make money out of it - i.e. to own it and rent it. Linux encourages (though admittedly doesn't require at least for user mode code) developers to open their source code. That limits what they can charge for it since competitors could undercut them and drive the price to zero.
It's no coincidence that the least free platforms (for users) - iPhone (compared to Windows Mobile), games consoles (compared to desktop Windows) and Windows (compared to Linux) have more software and are thus more popular than their freer (for users) competition.
If you want a vision of the future imagine a trusted platform with no unsigned code stamping down on the face of hackers and pirates forever.
This idea - which I suspect a huge majority of slashdotters will agree with and will argue with people who criticize it is analogous to the Laffer curve for taxation. Oddly enough the vast majority of slashdotters will disagree with that idea and argue with people who advocate it. Fancy that.
Slashdot Mirror
Kill all permies
Amazon are doing great things for culture at the moment
( http://i.imgur.com/rgo9M.png in case they fix it before you read this )
Why do you cling to the tyranny of the individual? JOIN US!
Trolling acts as a sort of Internet Eugenics to keep the numbers of freaks and furries down.
As Weev put it
http://conuly.livejournal.com/1445545.html
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny's house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's. "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. We need to put these people in the oven!"
I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.
As we walked through Fullerton's downtown, Weev told me about his day - he'd lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed - and summarized his philosophy of "global ruin." "We are headed for a Malthusian crisis," he said, with professorial confidence. "Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years." He paused. "The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world's six billion people in the most just way possible?" He seemed excited to have said this aloud.
Seems reasonable to me.
Even if you are right, in that the only reason anyone makes a movie these days is to make money, it still isn't a good enough reason to continue propping up the industry by sacrificing our natural rights to access our culture.
Whilst it's possible to make a movie and not be motivated by money that's definitely not true of popular movies. Guess which sort of movie gets pirated? A quick look on Pirate Bay shows you it's the popular ones - i.e expensive popcorn ones with mass market appeal that were made to make money by some huge US corporation .
People do make movies for reasons other than money, but not the sort of movies that get pirated.
If you run a business you're obliged to maximize profits for shareholders
FTFY.
Wait, you know of Serenity fans who did NOT buy it?
I downloaded the torrent, watched it, didn't think much of it and didn't buy it. I can't believe I'm the only one.
Yeah, it's like the great days of 1989 when the software in Eastern Europe revolted and demanded to be under an Open Source License. Or right now in the Middle East where bits are rebelling and demanding an end to them being proprietary and the right to be checked into a public CVS server.
Boom Headshot!
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&nomo=1&tbm=isch&q=boom+headshot+gif
Also this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEWIw-a0GJw
Looks like someone has a case of The Mondays.
I hate it when people do unauthorized work without filing in a 27b/6.
Unfortunately, ms is a religion that's yet to produce a saint.
Dave Cutler?
They don't make a profit. They do make money.
E.g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples
A WB receipt was leaked online, showing that the hugely successful movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ended up with a $167 million loss on paper.
Following the link
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml
For example, a bunch of you sent in the example of how Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, under "Hollywood accounting," ended up with a $167 million "loss," despite taking in $938 million in revenue. This isn't new or surprising, but it's getting attention because the income statement for the movie was leaked online, showing just how Warner Bros. pulled off the accounting trick:
The movie cost $150 million. So really it made $788 million income (i.e. $938-150). Profits are income less expenses. Techdirt shows you how they did it. As they put it
The really, really, really simplified version is that Hollywood sets up a separate corporation for each movie with the intent that this corporation will take on losses. The studio then charges the "film corporation" a huge fee (which creates a large part of the "expense" that leads to the loss).
Now it seems to me like someone - whoever the fee is paid to - will need to pay tax on this income. There's nothing illegal about any of this. If you run a business I think you're obliged to take advantage of any loopholes you can. And they do.
Incidentally Harry Potter was going to make money no matter what. A better example of the effects of piracy would be Serenity. That had a budget of $39 million and gross revenues of $38 million. No one is going to make movies like Serenity if the profit margin is that slim.
Serenity has a target audience - geeky 20-30s males - that is more likely to download than Harry Potter's family audience. And Serenity was the first HD movies to be cracked
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/18/hd-dvd_crack/
Now hardcore fans will insist they'll both download and buy. Of course buying something is lower priority if you've already got a copy for free. It's a lot cheaper to talk loudly about how you're going to do it than actually doing it. More convenient too. So have you wonder whether Serenity would have been profitable if it wasn't for the piracy.
Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.
Movies aren't like oxygen. If people don't pay to watch them the businesses that make movies will do something else instead. Talking about the costs of making a copy (zero) and neglecting the cost of making the original movie (hundreds of millions of dollars) completely misses the point that the reason people are willing to invest money in making movies is because they expect to get that money back and more from selling the right to see it. If everyone pirated it rather than paying to see it there would be no reason to invest money in making future movies. Thus movies would not get made.
So the people that pirate are reducing the chance of future movies from being made by reducing the profits on the ones that exist. They are a bit like customers that go to a restaurant and eat their fill but don't pay - in the long run they will force the restaurant out of business. That could easily be described as greedy by other non free loading patrons. Not to mention by the owner.
Curiously most of the stuff they share is produced in the US.
He didn't say it was unfair he said it was "no fair". As in "intreviewar why u no fair me???/!!1".
Maybe he smoked a joint before the interview and was laughing at LOLCAT and Y U NO pics his mates had emailed him on his iPhone and he just couldn't get back into his CEO persona fast enough. As a shareholder this seems fair enough to me.
The GPL says you only have to distribute source code to people you distribute binaries to. So for Google servers they don't distribute binaries outside Google at all - they are all internal. That means they keep the source internal too.
On Android phones they distribute the binaries to pretty much everyone. The maintain their own tree and provide patch files to the Linux kernel guys. The Linux kernel guys have rejected those patches - Android depends on waitlocks and the kernel guys have don't want them in mainstream Linux.
So the Android kernel is effectively a fork of the Linux one with little chance of a merger. The source is however open. Android userland is not GPL based and not open.
Google obviously planned this rather carefully.
I applaud people who release code under a BSD license, since it basically says "go forth and write cool shit, you don't owe us anything".,
Naah, it's like Stalin said - you're not truly free unless you're chained to a millstone in the collective farm. This is why I prefer the "Freedom as in slavery" of the GPL. Orwell was right!
I kind of feel stabbed in the back with Android
Why?
http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/2010/02/they-took-our-codes.html
Perhaps I'm being obtuse here but this post seems like something of a non sequitur.
iPhone is more populer than Windows Mobile because Windows Mobile is for the most part unuasable junk.
To you maybe. To people who know how to flash custom Roms it's a superb platform.
http://www.jayceooi.com/2010/08/12/download-htc-hd2-cookie-energy-windows-mobile-6-5-x-custom-rom/
Lots of free - as opposed to Free - software too, if you know where to look.
3) a "division of the house" for those very close votes, or if someone really wants a record of who voted how.,
You could tattoo - or brand if you're in a hurry - a barcode on the kids and scan it with a cheap scanner.
Or you could get a surplus SkyNet Laserscan system to mark 'em.
Platforms can be free for users or free for software authors.
Apple trades of freedom for users for freedom for software authors. Windows Mobile gave more freedom to users but less to authors. Windows Mobile 7, interestingly moves things more in the direction of Apple. Since I'm a dumb consumer and don't write any software but like to fiddle around I much preferred Windows Mobile with its rampant piracy, modding and hacking scene.
Of course in the long run platforms which offer more freedom to software authors and less freedom to users will tend to have more software written for them. And that will bring more users - most of whom don't care or even know about "software freedoms". You can see this with Windows and Linux - Windows allowed developers to keep their source code private and make money out of it - i.e. to own it and rent it. Linux encourages (though admittedly doesn't require at least for user mode code) developers to open their source code. That limits what they can charge for it since competitors could undercut them and drive the price to zero.
It's no coincidence that the least free platforms (for users) - iPhone (compared to Windows Mobile), games consoles (compared to desktop Windows) and Windows (compared to Linux) have more software and are thus more popular than their freer (for users) competition.
If you want a vision of the future imagine a trusted platform with no unsigned code stamping down on the face of hackers and pirates forever.
Slashdot: Serious Fucking Business.
This idea - which I suspect a huge majority of slashdotters will agree with and will argue with people who criticize it is analogous to the Laffer curve for taxation. Oddly enough the vast majority of slashdotters will disagree with that idea and argue with people who advocate it. Fancy that.