I don't know how the Canadian legal system works, but wouldn't the burden of proof lie with the parents? Can they cite one study, just one fracking conclusive study that proves that it is these routers and acess points causing the children, oh the poor freaking children's ailments? Seriously. Show me one study where it has been positively shown that signals that fall in the range of the wifi consortium jurisdiction are causing people to get sick. Prove it. Prove it. Prove it. Evidence, or GTFO.
No, you see, that is the beauty of democracy - you don't need proof, nor even evidence. You just need to convince a majority of people.
We've just had part of a school reform fall through here, despite all credible evidence supporting it. A good campaign and some bullshit bingo will carry you a long way, and often longer than all this difficult "evidence" thing. Heck, most of the people allowed to vote couldn't read a good study, much less comprehend it, and don't even talk about discerning a credible study from a bullshit made-up one.
There's a guy over here in Germany who managed to get on national TV with his "electromagnetic sensitivity".
During a 30 minute program, one thing was blatantly absent, or maybe that's just because I've got a science education: An actual test. You know, a double-blind test or something. Put him in a room that's a faraday cage with nothing emitting signals inside whatsoever, but don't tell him. See if he gets sick. Bring 20 high-power Wifi routers, cellphone towers, whatever you have, to his mobile home in the woods, again without telling him, and see if he falls sick.
My guess? He'll be "sick" in the first case, and totally fine in the 2nd, because it's all in his head. Probably not even conscious, so I kind of pity him. A bit.
Same with these kids. Turn off all Wifi in the school for a week without telling anyone, well without telling the kids or the parents. Check if anything changes. If it doesn't, then it's not the Wifi, end of story.
But it is also true that Al Qaeda had the majority of their Middle East-based training/supply/weapons bases along with fighters & leadership inside Afghanistan
Agreed, invading Afghanistan was a less dumbshit than invading Iraq, and it actually did have something to do with the terrorists.
How about the Taliban that were in charge in Afghanistan
Fail. We came to them to fight a war. Left alone, they'd certainly harm thousands of their own people, but you must be crazy if you attribute the death of your soldiers to the evil people who dared to defend their country against a foreign invasion.
that cooperated with and allowed terrorists to set up bases there who then sent people to attack the US, hijack civilian aircraft with innocent passengers, and crash them into the WTC towers killing ~3,000 innocent people?
As many, many others have posted thousands of times: If you guys had had any actual intention of getting the real supporters and bases of those terrorists, you would have invaded Saudi Arabia.
Or is going after the actual culprits "too black & white" for you ?
Both those manufacturers and the larger part of the/. crew don't get it.
The iPad isn't successful because it is the only tablet device. In fact, it already isn't. Competing on CPU speed, graphics, hardware of any kind, is not competing.
Look, you're essentially saying that the BMW M5 is doomed because Crysler is coming out with a new model as is Ford, Honda and Toyota. But the world doesn't work like that. People who bought a BMW would probably not buy a Honda, even if it "beats" the BMW in all the hard values like fuel consumption, type of engine, crispiness of headlights, whatever.
The iPad is a seamless consumer experience, and that's what people like and want in it. You pick it up and you start browsing the web or reading your e-books. There is almost no explanation required, everything just works, and you are limited in what you can do. For people who are not computer geeks, that is actually a good thing, it makes the device easier to understand.
Put windows 7 on a notebook without keyboard isn't even in the same league. It's not even the Honda, it's a bike. Nothing against bikes, but how many people who were about to buy a BMW do you know that didn't, because some new bike just came to market?
Government granted monopolies are not the source of trouble if they are used correctly, as economic theory requires, i.e. with government oversight or what you'd call it: "regulation".
An unregulated monopoly is always a problem, because it will always strive to realize monopoly rent.
It doesn't matter whether it came to pass by the government granting a monopoly without oversight, or by market consolidation, or by being a natural monopoly.
Let all 8 companies all run their lines to each house. Yes, it's physically messy, but it would definitely solve the problem.
It doesn't happen. It is economical nonsense. What will happen is what already happens in countries with deregulated telecom industries: Whoever has his line in someones house rents it to whatever company is providing the service. In almost all cases that means that there is - at least locally - one big player who owns the lines and can, within limits, manipulate the prices of his competitors by changing the last mile charges.
Economics is a lot more complicated than "supply and demand meet at the optimal price, the market fixes everything else". Stop living in a simplified dream world!
So "choice" is your criterium that matters above all, yes?
You completely ignore that "choice" is not in itself a value. On the contrary, there are cases where choice is actually detrimental and many cases where more choices don't by itself improve anything.
If all your choices are meaningless, then choice is a negative contribution, because it takes effort to choose. For example, if all ISPs decide to dumb net neutrality, then you don't have a choice on that matter. Your choices are regarding brand, price, maybe bandwidth and service, but not regarding the topic you're talking about.
And, as someone else pointed out already, there are also the upstream and backbone providers that you can't choose, but who directly affect whether or not your link is neutral.
So, in fact, in almost all real-world circumstances, there will be no choice, at least not regarding net neutrality.
If you've done Economics 101, you know that this is a classic case of where regulations are the right thing to do, even according to free market theory.
Which one? The one that "regulation" automatically equals bad and "competition" automatically equals good? That the FCC can not possibly do something right, but various ISPs will automatically do the right thing?
Nobody is making those exaggerated claims about free markets as you claim;
But the claims that are being made can only be made if that is the thinking behind it. The argument of the GP explicitly was that the FCC will surely fuck it up and ISPs should be the ones who run the show and set the rules.
That only works in an idealized world where that approach really would result in choice.
Render your expression with the inverted bias:
Is just as false, I agree on that. Since very, very few people actually argue that point, however, there isn't a need to rip into it very often. But, if you read more of the stuff I post, you'll find that I don't have much love for the corrupt palm-greasing, lobbyist-ass-kissing machine we call "government" these days.
Nevertheless, my distrust of politicians doesn't make me blind to the fact that corporations are any better. In fact, more often than not it's the corporations who are responsible for the lobbying and corruption.
Regulation and Free Market are no opposites. Corporatism and Big Government are no opposites. If you really believe they are, you have been sold a bridge, and a rusty one at that.
So, idealists only exist on one side of the debate? Give me a break.
These skills of reading things that were not written is quite fascinating. Where do you learn it? Assumptions 101?
No, there are left-wing fanatics who still think Marx was right in everything and the answers to all problems are a socialist society. However, in this discussion we are talking about, I haven't seen those opinions voiced yet, so it would be pointless to argue against them just because, just in case, just because we feel like it.
If you don't like your internet service provider's policies, you can simply switch to another one.
Assuming, of course, you actually do have a choice, the market works, the providers do not collude on anything and the big players don't dictate de factor policies.
Or, in other words: In the ideal dreamworld of the free market fanatics, there's always this "competition" solution that solves every problem and gives the best answer to every question. In the real world, things are quite a bit more complicated.
The worst troubles in the West since WW2 were comparatively minor; the worst troubles in China during that timespan
How about you don't arbitrarily select a timespan that specifically excludes the worst event?
Pick the entire 20th century for a less arbitrary timespan. Then compare famines to two world wars and a pandemic, a world economic crisis, over 50 minor wars started by the US alone (and a dozen or so by other western powers) and a couple other things.
No, I'm not trying to whitewash the chinese. They've done horrible things and many mistakes. But so have we.
As inept and incompetent as the economists of the Federal Reserve are in the US, the ones running the Chinese economy are light years beyond them in terms of incompetence. You just can't assume that currency manipulation and central planning is going to get you anywhere in the long term. They flat out don't understand what it is that they're doing and it's going to cost us all dearly.
Which is why all the financial crashes, crisis and other problems of the past decades started in China, yes?
They may be incompetent. May. The problem with the people in comparable positions in the west is that they are not only incompetent, they are also corrupt, greedy and malicious.
Funny how the "evil communist country" gets important things done while the "modern" west endlessly bickers about it. I wouldn't yet want to live in China, with all the oppression that's also a part of the package, but I'd exchange our lobbyist-servile, stupid, fucked-up idiot politicians for some chinese dictator-wannabe with the balls to tell the big industry to go fuck themselves and do as the government says.
The only thing they're missing is that it should be a government by the people, for the people. Then again, we don't have that in the west anymore, either.
As I said back then: There is no such thing as "premium service" in things like networking, no matter what you call it. On an airplane you can offer additional things above and beyond the transport itself (say, a nice menu, or naked stewardesses, whatever). But on a network, if you provide "better" quality for some services, it really translates to degraded quality of the rest. You can't serve bytes a Martini as a special comfort.
That is exactly why net neutrality is so important, and it's important to get it done and over with finally and irrevocably before the lawyers, marketing people and lobbyists get their teeth into it. These are all people who are experts at spinning a simple matter, say, you can't make information move faster than the speed of light (plus switching), pump it up with nonsense terms, complicate the matter needlessly, twist and turn it around and then publish a convulted explanation of whatever their profit-hungry masters want.
Once upon a time, entire nations were founded on simple, straightforward principles. You do not need lawyer-weasling to find out what's right and wrong. On the contrary, far on the contrary, he who can't state his purpose in simple, straight up words is hiding his real purpose. Life may be complicated, but human desires and goals and dreams aren't. If your corporate mission statement is more than ten words, you can very probably replace it by one word: Greed. The rest is just lies and bullshit and attempts to find a nicely sounding description for the ugly truth.
Net neutrality is simple, like equal rights or emancipation. Those against have again and again failed to make a simple, straightforward, convincing argument. They are talking around the matter in the same language all crooks use to hide their true intentions.
Maybe it is time to find a different search engine. Or found one, since MS isn't exactly an alternative.
You do realize I was making a half-joking attempt at pointing out that the "wheee, the evil pirates! we are going bancrupt!!" pirate fraction is very tiny compared to the number of people who never seriously entertained the thought of buying it in the first place?
Really, Bill Gates knowns nothing about anything of importance. His books are ample testimony to that. Read them now and check where his predictions ended up.
If he were to write a book titles "Becoming rich through trickery, deceit and having the right parents", I'd buy it since that is the one area where he beats out everyone else and really knows what he's talking about. Everything else, his guesses are as good as any random tramp on the subway. Seriously.
On the topic, there is not an issue of "some studies have shown". It is generally accepted among all experts in the field of education, that people learn differently. For some, a video feed certainly works - maybe Gates is one of them and makes the usual human error of assuming that everyone else is like him. Other people need the physical presence, or the ability to ask questions. Yet others don't learn anything from the teaching, they learn from the notes they take during class. Often they don't know that, so they need an environment that entices or even forces them to take note - a video feed that they feel they can replay at leisure would mean they lose their means of learning, without noticing. There is a lot more to this, but this is/. so I'll keep it short.
People learn in different ways.
For some, a video feed, online e-learning class or whatever works.
For some, it won't, no matter how much you refine it, because it lacks elements they need for learning.
Stop assuming that what works for you works for everyone.
Stop listening to people who have no expert knowledge whatsoever in the field they're talking about, and are only quoted because some other fools who made the same mistakes think they're somehow important.
In group 2, why would any of them pay for a game when they can have it for free?
Because it's the right thing to do, because it's more convenient, because they buy it as a gift for someone else, because they want you to make another game, because they don't care about getting it as cheap as possible, there are other criteria besides price, because they want the nice, printed manual or the CD or whatever, because because because.
Just the way people have a hundred reason to download a torrent even though they have enough disposable income to buy it, other people have a hundred reasons not to, even if they could.
Why should they pay for it and worry about their next purchase when they could have both it for free AND the next purchase?
Mostly, because people are people and on average a lot more honest and moral than, say, corporations which do not have to burden themselves with such things as culture and emotions.
I thought the financial crises would've served to drive that point home. Banks are "afraid" of people defaulting on their houses, and yet it turns out that a) banks themselves are a lot worse in handling money and risk than home owners (on average) are and b) rich people default on houses a lot more often than poor people.
It is not about money. It's about honesty and values. Funny how capitalism ignores some of the most fundamental elements of humanity. Maybe we should have realized that it is a theoretical system to describe economic interactions in an idealized thought-world, not a religion.
Now, how many copies would they have sold if there was 100% unbreakable DRM? Obviously that data is impossible to gather... But I'd bet that most people who pirate games weren't going to buy them anyways.
Bingo.
Here's how you could get an approximation of those numbers:
Have piratebay.org and the other torrent sites check the referrers in their logfiles. See how many of them came from amazon or some other online sales site. Those are the people who apparently thought about buying it, then went looking for a download. A part of those may go back and buy it if it can't find a download. Everyone else very likely never had the thought of buying it cross their minds.
The third group are those who have money, would have bought it but preferred to warez it instead. Those two groups together are 90% of the games market. If the game had strong DRM, so that you could not pirate it, people in the third group would be enticed to buy the game.
Unlikely. They have other reasons not to do it. For example, I know a lot of people who were burnt once too often and have sworn themselves to never, ever, buy a game again if it doesn't have a demo so they can check that it fucking works at all. I know people who bought several games that had mid-game bugs that made it impossible to continue playing (famously, NWN2 had such a bug). After several of these experiences, you would have to be dumb to buy another game, it would show you are unable to learn from your experiences. So you can stop playing games, or you can go and pirate them.
Amongst the people that I know, not one would go and buy it instead if some game he wants to download is not available on the usual sites. Not one.
The demographics your are thinking about certainly exists. The cheapskates who have no real reason to be cheap (i.e. money is available), but choose to anyways, for no deeper reason at all. I doubt that is more than 1%.
But you know what the next step to prevent piracy will be?
Fully online games. You can already see this with the Ubisoft's DRM, the recent Starcraft 2 and the movement to multiplayer, co-op (left4dead), and mmo games.
Yes, it is a current trend.
Also, it's the reason I've not bought Starcraft 2 and likely won't. This is a game I'll play either on my own or with my girlfriend, so leaving out LAN play was a deal-breaker for me - and many other people I know.
If you cripple your game in a pointless effort to thwart piracy, you lose actual customers who are not willing to pay full price for a crippled game.
Really, is it the pirates who are destroying PC gaming? The pirates who have always been here? Now, suddenly, after 30 years they are the ones killing gaming? That doesn't make sense. Has there been a massive change in piracy over the past few years? No, there hasn't. What has changed is the approach of publishers, who have become to greedy to accept what they can't change, and who have started to actively cripple their games as anti-piracy measures.
I don't pay for crippled games. If you do, I feel sorry for you. They won't stop there. It is never enough. As long as there is a single pirate left, there will be functionality that they can cripple to drive him off. Until one day, they can proudly announce that their title has a 0% piracy rate - oh, also 0 sales, because nobody, not even the pirates, cares anymore about this broken, crippled piece of shit.
The "piracy rate" is a totally bogus number. It doesn't mean anything. Most importantly, what it definitely not means is "lost sales". You can't do mathematics with an illusionary number. It's like me saying the Bogeyman number is 12.5 - it doesn't mean anything. You can't say "oh wow, that means for today (8h), I earned (8*12.5 = 100) a hundred dollars!" Uh, no. Same thing, taking a "piracy rate" number and multiplying it by another made-up number (say, "potential conversion rate") and then multiplying it by an arbitrarily set number-with-unit (sales price) to arrive at a totally made-up number and then call that "loss due to piracy" is just dishonest.
I'll be interested in the results of this guy, but my guess is any additional sales have nothing to do with piracy and everything with advertisement.
Do yourself a favour and step away from this movie-and-music-industry created phantom that piracy == lost sales. There is something called "structural unemployment", to use a non-car metaphor. What it means is that you can never, ever, have 0% unemployment. There are always people without a job, even if there are a hundred open positions for every person looking for one. You have people on the move, people who just quit and haven't yet signed up for a new one, some people are just impossible to employ, and so on. You always have some unemployment that you can not get rid of no matter what you do (aside from playing statistics tricks). Same thing with piracy, just on a different scale. No matter what DRM you use, no matter how low the price, no matter what else, there will always be people who don't pay for your game.
I've said this before. Think about your players as being in three groups: 1.) the ones that will certainly buy your game 2.) the ones that may or may not buy your game 3.) the ones that will certainly not buy your game
where 3.) includes the pirates. People who download your game from a torrent have all sorts of reasons to do so, most of them you can't do anything about. My advise is to ignore them and focus on the undecided bunch. The ones who may buy the game if you can catch their interest. Which you more likely do with more polish than with better DRM.
And yes, I do sell stuff online. I don't care about pirates. The extend of my "anti-piracy" measure is that you get the download link after paying, and that's it. Any and all DRM is a waste of time and money.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know how the Canadian legal system works, but wouldn't the burden of proof lie with the parents? Can they cite one study, just one fracking conclusive study that proves that it is these routers and acess points causing the children, oh the poor freaking children's ailments? Seriously. Show me one study where it has been positively shown that signals that fall in the range of the wifi consortium jurisdiction are causing people to get sick. Prove it. Prove it. Prove it. Evidence, or GTFO.
No, you see, that is the beauty of democracy - you don't need proof, nor even evidence. You just need to convince a majority of people.
We've just had part of a school reform fall through here, despite all credible evidence supporting it. A good campaign and some bullshit bingo will carry you a long way, and often longer than all this difficult "evidence" thing. Heck, most of the people allowed to vote couldn't read a good study, much less comprehend it, and don't even talk about discerning a credible study from a bullshit made-up one.
There's a guy over here in Germany who managed to get on national TV with his "electromagnetic sensitivity".
During a 30 minute program, one thing was blatantly absent, or maybe that's just because I've got a science education: An actual test. You know, a double-blind test or something. Put him in a room that's a faraday cage with nothing emitting signals inside whatsoever, but don't tell him. See if he gets sick. Bring 20 high-power Wifi routers, cellphone towers, whatever you have, to his mobile home in the woods, again without telling him, and see if he falls sick.
My guess? He'll be "sick" in the first case, and totally fine in the 2nd, because it's all in his head. Probably not even conscious, so I kind of pity him. A bit.
Same with these kids. Turn off all Wifi in the school for a week without telling anyone, well without telling the kids or the parents. Check if anything changes. If it doesn't, then it's not the Wifi, end of story.
Too much talk going on, too little verification.
But it is also true that Al Qaeda had the majority of their Middle East-based training/supply/weapons bases along with fighters & leadership inside Afghanistan
Agreed, invading Afghanistan was a less dumbshit than invading Iraq, and it actually did have something to do with the terrorists.
How about the Taliban that were in charge in Afghanistan
Fail. We came to them to fight a war. Left alone, they'd certainly harm thousands of their own people, but you must be crazy if you attribute the death of your soldiers to the evil people who dared to defend their country against a foreign invasion.
that cooperated with and allowed terrorists to set up bases there who then sent people to attack the US, hijack civilian aircraft with innocent passengers, and crash them into the WTC towers killing ~3,000 innocent people?
As many, many others have posted thousands of times: If you guys had had any actual intention of getting the real supporters and bases of those terrorists, you would have invaded Saudi Arabia.
Or is going after the actual culprits "too black & white" for you ?
Both those manufacturers and the larger part of the /. crew don't get it.
The iPad isn't successful because it is the only tablet device. In fact, it already isn't. Competing on CPU speed, graphics, hardware of any kind, is not competing.
Look, you're essentially saying that the BMW M5 is doomed because Crysler is coming out with a new model as is Ford, Honda and Toyota. But the world doesn't work like that. People who bought a BMW would probably not buy a Honda, even if it "beats" the BMW in all the hard values like fuel consumption, type of engine, crispiness of headlights, whatever.
The iPad is a seamless consumer experience, and that's what people like and want in it. You pick it up and you start browsing the web or reading your e-books. There is almost no explanation required, everything just works, and you are limited in what you can do. For people who are not computer geeks, that is actually a good thing, it makes the device easier to understand.
Put windows 7 on a notebook without keyboard isn't even in the same league. It's not even the Honda, it's a bike. Nothing against bikes, but how many people who were about to buy a BMW do you know that didn't, because some new bike just came to market?
They are already risking the lives of our soldiers by simply posting their tactics and secrets.
Counter to risking their lives by sending them into a pointless war, I presume?
If this shortens the war by just one year, it will have saved many more lives than it could cost even in the worst case.
At first, I bought the "harm" line like anyone else.
Then I started to think. Who put these kids in harm's way? The guy who sent them into a war zone, or the guy who publishes the paper trail?
Nonsense, and big one.
Government granted monopolies are not the source of trouble if they are used correctly, as economic theory requires, i.e. with government oversight or what you'd call it: "regulation".
An unregulated monopoly is always a problem, because it will always strive to realize monopoly rent.
It doesn't matter whether it came to pass by the government granting a monopoly without oversight, or by market consolidation, or by being a natural monopoly.
Let all 8 companies all run their lines to each house. Yes, it's physically messy, but it would definitely solve the problem.
It doesn't happen. It is economical nonsense. What will happen is what already happens in countries with deregulated telecom industries: Whoever has his line in someones house rents it to whatever company is providing the service. In almost all cases that means that there is - at least locally - one big player who owns the lines and can, within limits, manipulate the prices of his competitors by changing the last mile charges.
Economics is a lot more complicated than "supply and demand meet at the optimal price, the market fixes everything else". Stop living in a simplified dream world!
So "choice" is your criterium that matters above all, yes?
You completely ignore that "choice" is not in itself a value. On the contrary, there are cases where choice is actually detrimental and many cases where more choices don't by itself improve anything.
If all your choices are meaningless, then choice is a negative contribution, because it takes effort to choose. For example, if all ISPs decide to dumb net neutrality, then you don't have a choice on that matter. Your choices are regarding brand, price, maybe bandwidth and service, but not regarding the topic you're talking about.
And, as someone else pointed out already, there are also the upstream and backbone providers that you can't choose, but who directly affect whether or not your link is neutral.
So, in fact, in almost all real-world circumstances, there will be no choice, at least not regarding net neutrality.
If you've done Economics 101, you know that this is a classic case of where regulations are the right thing to do, even according to free market theory.
Wow, you really beat the crap out that straw man .
Which one? The one that "regulation" automatically equals bad and "competition" automatically equals good? That the FCC can not possibly do something right, but various ISPs will automatically do the right thing?
Nobody is making those exaggerated claims about free markets as you claim;
But the claims that are being made can only be made if that is the thinking behind it. The argument of the GP explicitly was that the FCC will surely fuck it up and ISPs should be the ones who run the show and set the rules.
That only works in an idealized world where that approach really would result in choice.
Render your expression with the inverted bias:
Is just as false, I agree on that. Since very, very few people actually argue that point, however, there isn't a need to rip into it very often. But, if you read more of the stuff I post, you'll find that I don't have much love for the corrupt palm-greasing, lobbyist-ass-kissing machine we call "government" these days.
Nevertheless, my distrust of politicians doesn't make me blind to the fact that corporations are any better. In fact, more often than not it's the corporations who are responsible for the lobbying and corruption.
Regulation and Free Market are no opposites. Corporatism and Big Government are no opposites. If you really believe they are, you have been sold a bridge, and a rusty one at that.
So, idealists only exist on one side of the debate? Give me a break.
These skills of reading things that were not written is quite fascinating. Where do you learn it? Assumptions 101?
No, there are left-wing fanatics who still think Marx was right in everything and the answers to all problems are a socialist society. However, in this discussion we are talking about, I haven't seen those opinions voiced yet, so it would be pointless to argue against them just because, just in case, just because we feel like it.
If you don't like your internet service provider's policies, you can simply switch to another one.
Assuming, of course, you actually do have a choice, the market works, the providers do not collude on anything and the big players don't dictate de factor policies.
Or, in other words: In the ideal dreamworld of the free market fanatics, there's always this "competition" solution that solves every problem and gives the best answer to every question. In the real world, things are quite a bit more complicated.
The worst troubles in the West since WW2 were comparatively minor; the worst troubles in China during that timespan
How about you don't arbitrarily select a timespan that specifically excludes the worst event?
Pick the entire 20th century for a less arbitrary timespan. Then compare famines to two world wars and a pandemic, a world economic crisis, over 50 minor wars started by the US alone (and a dozen or so by other western powers) and a couple other things.
No, I'm not trying to whitewash the chinese. They've done horrible things and many mistakes. But so have we.
As inept and incompetent as the economists of the Federal Reserve are in the US, the ones running the Chinese economy are light years beyond them in terms of incompetence. You just can't assume that currency manipulation and central planning is going to get you anywhere in the long term. They flat out don't understand what it is that they're doing and it's going to cost us all dearly.
Which is why all the financial crashes, crisis and other problems of the past decades started in China, yes?
They may be incompetent. May. The problem with the people in comparable positions in the west is that they are not only incompetent, they are also corrupt, greedy and malicious.
What would China know about civilization? (runs)
You mean, aside from having had one when America was run by Indians and the people in Europe considered straw huts a really great new invention?
Funny how the "evil communist country" gets important things done while the "modern" west endlessly bickers about it. I wouldn't yet want to live in China, with all the oppression that's also a part of the package, but I'd exchange our lobbyist-servile, stupid, fucked-up idiot politicians for some chinese dictator-wannabe with the balls to tell the big industry to go fuck themselves and do as the government says.
The only thing they're missing is that it should be a government by the people, for the people. Then again, we don't have that in the west anymore, either.
As I said back then: There is no such thing as "premium service" in things like networking, no matter what you call it. On an airplane you can offer additional things above and beyond the transport itself (say, a nice menu, or naked stewardesses, whatever). But on a network, if you provide "better" quality for some services, it really translates to degraded quality of the rest. You can't serve bytes a Martini as a special comfort.
That is exactly why net neutrality is so important, and it's important to get it done and over with finally and irrevocably before the lawyers, marketing people and lobbyists get their teeth into it. These are all people who are experts at spinning a simple matter, say, you can't make information move faster than the speed of light (plus switching), pump it up with nonsense terms, complicate the matter needlessly, twist and turn it around and then publish a convulted explanation of whatever their profit-hungry masters want.
Once upon a time, entire nations were founded on simple, straightforward principles. You do not need lawyer-weasling to find out what's right and wrong. On the contrary, far on the contrary, he who can't state his purpose in simple, straight up words is hiding his real purpose. Life may be complicated, but human desires and goals and dreams aren't. If your corporate mission statement is more than ten words, you can very probably replace it by one word: Greed. The rest is just lies and bullshit and attempts to find a nicely sounding description for the ugly truth.
Net neutrality is simple, like equal rights or emancipation.
Those against have again and again failed to make a simple, straightforward, convincing argument. They are talking around the matter in the same language all crooks use to hide their true intentions.
Maybe it is time to find a different search engine. Or found one, since MS isn't exactly an alternative.
You do realize I was making a half-joking attempt at pointing out that the "wheee, the evil pirates! we are going bancrupt!!" pirate fraction is very tiny compared to the number of people who never seriously entertained the thought of buying it in the first place?
Really, Bill Gates knowns nothing about anything of importance. His books are ample testimony to that. Read them now and check where his predictions ended up.
If he were to write a book titles "Becoming rich through trickery, deceit and having the right parents", I'd buy it since that is the one area where he beats out everyone else and really knows what he's talking about. Everything else, his guesses are as good as any random tramp on the subway. Seriously.
On the topic, there is not an issue of "some studies have shown". It is generally accepted among all experts in the field of education, that people learn differently. For some, a video feed certainly works - maybe Gates is one of them and makes the usual human error of assuming that everyone else is like him. Other people need the physical presence, or the ability to ask questions. Yet others don't learn anything from the teaching, they learn from the notes they take during class. Often they don't know that, so they need an environment that entices or even forces them to take note - a video feed that they feel they can replay at leisure would mean they lose their means of learning, without noticing. There is a lot more to this, but this is /. so I'll keep it short.
In group 2, why would any of them pay for a game when they can have it for free?
Because it's the right thing to do, because it's more convenient, because they buy it as a gift for someone else, because they want you to make another game, because they don't care about getting it as cheap as possible, there are other criteria besides price, because they want the nice, printed manual or the CD or whatever, because because because.
Just the way people have a hundred reason to download a torrent even though they have enough disposable income to buy it, other people have a hundred reasons not to, even if they could.
Why should they pay for it and worry about their next purchase when they could have both it for free AND the next purchase?
Mostly, because people are people and on average a lot more honest and moral than, say, corporations which do not have to burden themselves with such things as culture and emotions.
I thought the financial crises would've served to drive that point home. Banks are "afraid" of people defaulting on their houses, and yet it turns out that a) banks themselves are a lot worse in handling money and risk than home owners (on average) are and b) rich people default on houses a lot more often than poor people.
It is not about money. It's about honesty and values. Funny how capitalism ignores some of the most fundamental elements of humanity. Maybe we should have realized that it is a theoretical system to describe economic interactions in an idealized thought-world, not a religion.
Thanks for correction. It was a direct translation from the term in my native tongue, didn't check the english term.
Now, how many copies would they have sold if there was 100% unbreakable DRM? Obviously that data is impossible to gather... But I'd bet that most people who pirate games weren't going to buy them anyways.
Bingo.
Here's how you could get an approximation of those numbers:
Have piratebay.org and the other torrent sites check the referrers in their logfiles. See how many of them came from amazon or some other online sales site. Those are the people who apparently thought about buying it, then went looking for a download. A part of those may go back and buy it if it can't find a download. Everyone else very likely never had the thought of buying it cross their minds.
The third group are those who have money, would have bought it but preferred to warez it instead. Those two groups together are 90% of the games market. If the game had strong DRM, so that you could not pirate it, people in the third group would be enticed to buy the game.
Unlikely. They have other reasons not to do it. For example, I know a lot of people who were burnt once too often and have sworn themselves to never, ever, buy a game again if it doesn't have a demo so they can check that it fucking works at all. I know people who bought several games that had mid-game bugs that made it impossible to continue playing (famously, NWN2 had such a bug). After several of these experiences, you would have to be dumb to buy another game, it would show you are unable to learn from your experiences. So you can stop playing games, or you can go and pirate them.
Amongst the people that I know, not one would go and buy it instead if some game he wants to download is not available on the usual sites. Not one.
The demographics your are thinking about certainly exists. The cheapskates who have no real reason to be cheap (i.e. money is available), but choose to anyways, for no deeper reason at all. I doubt that is more than 1%.
But you know what the next step to prevent piracy will be?
Fully online games. You can already see this with the Ubisoft's DRM, the recent Starcraft 2 and the movement to multiplayer, co-op (left4dead), and mmo games.
Yes, it is a current trend.
Also, it's the reason I've not bought Starcraft 2 and likely won't. This is a game I'll play either on my own or with my girlfriend, so leaving out LAN play was a deal-breaker for me - and many other people I know.
If you cripple your game in a pointless effort to thwart piracy, you lose actual customers who are not willing to pay full price for a crippled game.
Really, is it the pirates who are destroying PC gaming? The pirates who have always been here? Now, suddenly, after 30 years they are the ones killing gaming? That doesn't make sense. Has there been a massive change in piracy over the past few years? No, there hasn't. What has changed is the approach of publishers, who have become to greedy to accept what they can't change, and who have started to actively cripple their games as anti-piracy measures.
I don't pay for crippled games. If you do, I feel sorry for you. They won't stop there. It is never enough. As long as there is a single pirate left, there will be functionality that they can cripple to drive him off. Until one day, they can proudly announce that their title has a 0% piracy rate - oh, also 0 sales, because nobody, not even the pirates, cares anymore about this broken, crippled piece of shit.
So what?
The "piracy rate" is a totally bogus number. It doesn't mean anything. Most importantly, what it definitely not means is "lost sales". You can't do mathematics with an illusionary number. It's like me saying the Bogeyman number is 12.5 - it doesn't mean anything. You can't say "oh wow, that means for today (8h), I earned (8*12.5 = 100) a hundred dollars!" Uh, no. Same thing, taking a "piracy rate" number and multiplying it by another made-up number (say, "potential conversion rate") and then multiplying it by an arbitrarily set number-with-unit (sales price) to arrive at a totally made-up number and then call that "loss due to piracy" is just dishonest.
I'll be interested in the results of this guy, but my guess is any additional sales have nothing to do with piracy and everything with advertisement.
Do yourself a favour and step away from this movie-and-music-industry created phantom that piracy == lost sales. There is something called "structural unemployment", to use a non-car metaphor. What it means is that you can never, ever, have 0% unemployment. There are always people without a job, even if there are a hundred open positions for every person looking for one. You have people on the move, people who just quit and haven't yet signed up for a new one, some people are just impossible to employ, and so on. You always have some unemployment that you can not get rid of no matter what you do (aside from playing statistics tricks).
Same thing with piracy, just on a different scale. No matter what DRM you use, no matter how low the price, no matter what else, there will always be people who don't pay for your game.
I've said this before. Think about your players as being in three groups:
1.) the ones that will certainly buy your game
2.) the ones that may or may not buy your game
3.) the ones that will certainly not buy your game
where 3.) includes the pirates. People who download your game from a torrent have all sorts of reasons to do so, most of them you can't do anything about. My advise is to ignore them and focus on the undecided bunch. The ones who may buy the game if you can catch their interest. Which you more likely do with more polish than with better DRM.
And yes, I do sell stuff online. I don't care about pirates. The extend of my "anti-piracy" measure is that you get the download link after paying, and that's it. Any and all DRM is a waste of time and money.