If you're a small shop, you will not be able to deal with credit cards except through intermediate handlers, such as PayPal. And most of them have massive up-front fees that you cannot afford.
For smaller sites that don't have revenue in the thousands, PayPal and Google Wallet are the main options, like it or not.
Every individual game, movie, etc. is a small monopoly, because nobody else can sell a comparable product.
You cannot compare a small indie title without DRM and an AAA game with DRM and then make claims based on that comparison. If you could buy the same title with or without DRM, then and only then could you draw a conclusion about DRM acceptance.
Your model assumes there is no, or insignificant, piracy of DRM free games and that everyone would gladly pay the retail price rather than just buy a license. I think both assumptions are wrong.
My models assumes no such thing. It's just a thought following the logical conclusion from the understanding that copyright grants small monopolies. Of course with the real world and illegal copying, it is not that simple. But as a thought experiment - see above.
You really think anyone will ever see that money? Maybe you are interested in a good investment opportunity? I have this bridge that I inherited from my grand-uncle, the general of Nigeria before he was sadly lost in a coup...
Statistics about rape vary widely, mostly because "rape" is not clearly defined. People with an agenda to push use "rape" as a term because our mental image is that of someone brutally abusing his (generally) victim, forcing sexual intercourse against physical resistance, with screams and blood and violence.
But to arrive at that 30% number, you need to include every outlandish definition of "rape", which includes statutory rape (boyfriend who is age-of-consent +1 day having consensual sex with his girlfriend who is age-of-consent -1 day), date-rape (aka you were drunk and regretted your decision when you sobered up) and various other kinds of so-called "rape" that include all the shades of grey you can imagine.
The whole topic is so emotionally charged and confusiong that it has its own Wikipedia article, and if you follow that, you get some enlightenment:
Junk statistics from advocacy groups are slung around and become common knowledge, such as the incredible factoid that one in four university students has been raped. (The claim was based on a commodious definition of rape that the alleged victims themselves never accepted; it included, for example, any incident in which a woman consented to sex after having had too much to drink and regretted it afterward.)
The National Crime Victimization Survey, which uses a narrower definitions, found that only 0.5% of women and 0.06% of men, age 12 or older, were victims of rape or sexual assault in 1995. (The NCVS groups together rape and sexual assault.) By 2010, these numbers had decreased to 0.2% of women and 0.01% of men.
Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Because it's not once. Your counterexample doesn't apply.
Kimble is a career criminal. He's shown again and again and again that he doesn't like honest work and prefers to trick people out of their money instead. He's shown that he changes his methods, but not his ways. He's shown it so often that only a complete moron would believe a single word out of his mouth.
I know at least one person who would love to buy a lot of UBIsoft games if they only offered them in a way I can agree with.
This.
It's know that the problem with monopolies is that they can offer products to the market at conditions (price or otherwise) that only a fraction of the market is willing to accept. In a non-monopoly situation, a competitor would offer the product at more acceptable conditions, and make a sale.
It's high time these monopolies get smashed. I'm for copyright, but against licensing. Why not have compulsory licensing for copyrighted works, so that you and I could start up a distributor who offers these works without DRM, or with green boxes or whatever else the market wants, and as long as we pay the same price as UBI, we can do it?
He's a career criminal, fraudster and basically the exact same of professional fraud as the corrupt politicians he's now trying to "expose". If you think his motivations are anything but 100% selfish, I have a few bridges at really good prices.
He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
In this class of sleazebags, there is no small and big or better and worse. They are all the same type of scum, and making us believe we should go after one but not the other is exactly how they thrive - because the good people are easily distracted. Scum A wants you to hate scum B. If you think scum B cares, you're stupid, because scum B is already preparing his own distracting making you hate scum C, who will distract you with scum D...
It's all a big game to make sure we never focus long enough on any of the scumbags to finally get rid of them for good.
The fact that they're doing it using your taxes
Because scum Kimble isn't using your money, yes? He grew it himself in his backyard, yes? OMG, wake up, fool. They are all using our money, because not one of these scumbags has had one honest job in their lives. The only difference is what label the money has attached, but in the end, it is all money that honest people worked honest hours for and that scumbags swindled them out of, one way or the other.
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
And this is how sleazy fraudsters survive. It's called misdirection. They're exploiting the weak minds of good people who don't realize that the other thing he's pointing at is simply the same thing in a different place. Politicians and sleazy fraudsters are of the same kind. By constantly pointing at each other, they prevent us from taking them down, because we can never decide which one to get rid of, focus and finally do it.
Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom
Which PR agency do you work for that Kimble has contracted to polish up his image?
When will the/. crowd understand that the guy is mostly a career criminal and he's the exact kind of person who will feed you to the sharks if he's your boss? His goal in life is winning and living large, and he doesn't give a fuck about politics, inventions, freedom, Internet or any of the other tools he uses to accomplish his goals.
That's often true of martyrs it doesn't stop them being influential.
Again, the problem is that it compares floats to strings. It asks "tree" > 43.65 ?.
I can make up a story about a totally fictious man and if it gets highly popular, according to this method, he would be an influential person, even though he never existed. A lot of the "influence" assigned to figures such as Jesus and Mary (but also to some of the politicians and philosophers) should rightfully be assigned to other people who simply used them as personas.
If you believe that then you believe nonsense. The lack of personal belief in the divinity of Jesus and his offer of salvation doesn't undo his enormous influence as Messiah, the subsequent spread of Christianity beyond its Jewish origin, and the enormous influence Christianity has had in turn on religion, literature, music, law, and many other aspects of life and culture across the globe.
You confuse the religion with the picture they decided to hang on their walls. It's like saying the greek gods are still very powerful because whole planets are named after them. Jesus supplied the persona unto which the church then projected everything they wanted to have accepted without questioning. At this point, he stops being a person and instead becomes an idea. To be fair, you should remove him from the comparison because he belongs into a different conceptual class.
The same is true of some ancient philosophers and many kings. We have a couple kings in history who basically did nothing, and yet their names stand for an entire period of their country.
It's more influential than you or I, but it's not more influential than Jesus.
That's another fundamental flaw. They mix up people and stories about people. Whatever you believe or do not believe about a real living person called Jesus, you would have to be utterly fanatical to not admit that a massive amount of his importance was created long after his death, by the early catholic church and the various bible editing processes. Even more so for Mary, who in the biblical text itself is only mentioned a few times.
It compares apples like scientists with oranges like religious figures and with politicians and entertainers and other people, all of which have a different meaning of "influence".
The resulting lists of the most influential men and women might surprise.
So basically, it's bullshit. With Jesus and Mary on the list, it's clear it is basically a popularity contest, and they have just re-defined influence to mean something totally different from what it usually means. Just because 50,000 people mention a probably fictional virgin in their memoires doesn't mean she has had any influence whatsoever on anyone. It just means people like to mention her (in this case, for obvious religious reasons).
Going by the names of people instead of their ideas is just incredibly stupid. Aristotle et al basically defined western thinking, even if many people they strongly influenced don't even know it. Meanwhile, entertainers are popular, but their influence rarely lasts for more than a few decades and even more rarely extends outside of the sphere of entertainment.
Finally, this approach completely ignores the problem of figureheads. I'll take Jesus again as an example. Absolutely none of the ideas or miracles or actions attributed to him in the bible are original, they've all been written about in older texts or can otherwise be traced to older sources. The same is true of some scientists, many philosophers, etc. -- the problem is that the popularity approach confuses the person who made something popular with the person who created it. It is a philosophical discussion who is more influential or more important, and if an idea without popularity is as worthless as popularity without content - but it's an important point and simply mixing the two up as if they were the same is a fundamental flaw.
At least they did consider timeframes and cultures.
Maybe I'm just to used to pointers and stuff, but I still fail to see what the fuss is all about. The behavior you describe is the exact behavior I would expect. To me, all of this is totally intuitive.
Really? That's funny, because in both JS and PHP documentation I've seen this exact construct being referred to as a closure, and in this particular case, it's even in the API documentation of the filter() method of the ArrayCollection class of the Doctrine project. And I just realized I might have been overly specific there.
I didn't say it's a matter of training, though it does play a role.
It's also a matter of expectations. As long as customers accept a crash as something that "just happens every now and then", software developers have no requirement to shape up.
It's also a matter of tools, of organisation, of structure and environment.
Many factors come in. I'm just saying right now, coding is a horrible mess and it's a miracle that anything works at all.
I've started to use closures in PHP in some places, and they're quite good if used correctly.
Basically, if you need a short, simple function that you know you will never call from anywhere else, a closure is a good way to do it. With good indendation and enough self-control to actually go and write a proper function when you have more than a few lines, it doesn't make the code any less readable.
For example:
public function getActiveUsers() {
return $this->getUsers()->filter(
function($entry) {
return ($entry->isActive());
}
); }
Immutable arrays are defined exactly the same in several other languages. If you want an array of constants, you need to defined its contents as constants, not just the array itself. It's good behaviour to give you this choice.
Same for collections passed by reference. Again, several other programming languages do it exactly this way, implicitly passing collections by reference because collections can become large and implicitly copying them every time you touch them would be a performance nightmare. If you want a copy, clone or whatever it's called in your favorite language, you simply tell the language so and you're good.
Wake me when I can ditch PHP for Swift. Using the same programming language for both server and client code is a massive advantage that cannot be overstated.
This is not the case for many embedded systems. They are designed to be installed and then you forget about them. So the "classic" mitigation technique doesn't work. This is a big problem.
Only because software development sucks and nobody takes the time and effort for not-so-much-fun things like code review.
If you want to fight your government - the government that spends more money on the military then everyone else in the top 5 military spending countries combined, you don't need guns. You need stealth fighters, tanks and ICBMs.
Good luck with your "honest people defending the country against the government" fantasy.
No they haven't. They've only completed their official sentence, and they are getting a second chance to live in society, BUT in most cases, felons have committed some irreparable harm.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 2014... B.C.
Oh, there are plenty of criminals, fraudsters, scammers, and dishonest folks who are never formally convicted of anything. This does not mean they are not dangerous.
There are also plenty of innocent folks who are accused and sometimes even convicted of a crime, and only years, sometimes decades later their innocence is proven. Their life has already been ruined once, now you want to keep ruining it? Nice attitude.
People have a right of free speech to air their complaints and not have them arbitrarily suppressed, just because it is inconvenient for the subject of the complaints or poor reviews.
It's not "inconvenient" you imbecile. When you're false accused of something like pedophelia, your life is fucking destroyed. The absolute least we can do for these victims is to stop the lies from perpetuating.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a small shop, you will not be able to deal with credit cards except through intermediate handlers, such as PayPal. And most of them have massive up-front fees that you cannot afford.
For smaller sites that don't have revenue in the thousands, PayPal and Google Wallet are the main options, like it or not.
The studios are hardly monopolies
You misunderstood the point.
Every individual game, movie, etc. is a small monopoly, because nobody else can sell a comparable product.
You cannot compare a small indie title without DRM and an AAA game with DRM and then make claims based on that comparison. If you could buy the same title with or without DRM, then and only then could you draw a conclusion about DRM acceptance.
Your model assumes there is no, or insignificant, piracy of DRM free games and that everyone would gladly pay the retail price rather than just buy a license. I think both assumptions are wrong.
My models assumes no such thing. It's just a thought following the logical conclusion from the understanding that copyright grants small monopolies. Of course with the real world and illegal copying, it is not that simple. But as a thought experiment - see above.
rotfl
You really think anyone will ever see that money? Maybe you are interested in a good investment opportunity? I have this bridge that I inherited from my grand-uncle, the general of Nigeria before he was sadly lost in a coup...
I'd mod you up if I had points today. Glad at least a few people here see through the facade.
This is bullshit fear mongering.
Statistics about rape vary widely, mostly because "rape" is not clearly defined. People with an agenda to push use "rape" as a term because our mental image is that of someone brutally abusing his (generally) victim, forcing sexual intercourse against physical resistance, with screams and blood and violence.
But to arrive at that 30% number, you need to include every outlandish definition of "rape", which includes statutory rape (boyfriend who is age-of-consent +1 day having consensual sex with his girlfriend who is age-of-consent -1 day), date-rape (aka you were drunk and regretted your decision when you sobered up) and various other kinds of so-called "rape" that include all the shades of grey you can imagine.
The whole topic is so emotionally charged and confusiong that it has its own Wikipedia article, and if you follow that, you get some enlightenment:
Junk statistics from advocacy groups are slung around and become common knowledge, such as the incredible factoid that one in four university students has been raped. (The claim was based on a commodious definition of rape that the alleged victims themselves never accepted; it included, for example, any incident in which a woman consented to sex after having had too much to drink and regretted it afterward.)
The National Crime Victimization Survey, which uses a narrower definitions, found that only 0.5% of women and 0.06% of men, age 12 or older, were victims of rape or sexual assault in 1995. (The NCVS groups together rape and sexual assault.) By 2010, these numbers had decreased to 0.2% of women and 0.01% of men.
Yeah, I'm aware of most of that. Still, I'm not sure how relevant some of that is?
Because it's not once. Your counterexample doesn't apply.
Kimble is a career criminal. He's shown again and again and again that he doesn't like honest work and prefers to trick people out of their money instead. He's shown that he changes his methods, but not his ways. He's shown it so often that only a complete moron would believe a single word out of his mouth.
I know at least one person who would love to buy a lot of UBIsoft games if they only offered them in a way I can agree with.
This.
It's know that the problem with monopolies is that they can offer products to the market at conditions (price or otherwise) that only a fraction of the market is willing to accept. In a non-monopoly situation, a competitor would offer the product at more acceptable conditions, and make a sale.
It's high time these monopolies get smashed. I'm for copyright, but against licensing. Why not have compulsory licensing for copyrighted works, so that you and I could start up a distributor who offers these works without DRM, or with green boxes or whatever else the market wants, and as long as we pay the same price as UBI, we can do it?
Kim Dotcom [is a massive asshat]
What a misleading edit.
He's a career criminal, fraudster and basically the exact same of professional fraud as the corrupt politicians he's now trying to "expose". If you think his motivations are anything but 100% selfish, I have a few bridges at really good prices.
He's small-time scum, but he's being pursued heavily buy much worse, scummier big-time scum.
In this class of sleazebags, there is no small and big or better and worse. They are all the same type of scum, and making us believe we should go after one but not the other is exactly how they thrive - because the good people are easily distracted. Scum A wants you to hate scum B. If you think scum B cares, you're stupid, because scum B is already preparing his own distracting making you hate scum C, who will distract you with scum D...
It's all a big game to make sure we never focus long enough on any of the scumbags to finally get rid of them for good.
The fact that they're doing it using your taxes
Because scum Kimble isn't using your money, yes? He grew it himself in his backyard, yes? OMG, wake up, fool. They are all using our money, because not one of these scumbags has had one honest job in their lives. The only difference is what label the money has attached, but in the end, it is all money that honest people worked honest hours for and that scumbags swindled them out of, one way or the other.
If I had to choose between a sleazy fraudster going to jail, and the uncovering (and correction) of government corruption, I'd choose the latter. Government corruption, at least in this particular case, is far scarier to me.
And this is how sleazy fraudsters survive. It's called misdirection. They're exploiting the weak minds of good people who don't realize that the other thing he's pointing at is simply the same thing in a different place. Politicians and sleazy fraudsters are of the same kind. By constantly pointing at each other, they prevent us from taking them down, because we can never decide which one to get rid of, focus and finally do it.
Internet mega-entrepreneur, uber-gamer and now NZ political corruption-buster Kim DotCom
Which PR agency do you work for that Kimble has contracted to polish up his image?
When will the /. crowd understand that the guy is mostly a career criminal and he's the exact kind of person who will feed you to the sharks if he's your boss? His goal in life is winning and living large, and he doesn't give a fuck about politics, inventions, freedom, Internet or any of the other tools he uses to accomplish his goals.
Suckers, all of you.
That's often true of martyrs it doesn't stop them being influential.
Again, the problem is that it compares floats to strings. It asks "tree" > 43.65 ?.
I can make up a story about a totally fictious man and if it gets highly popular, according to this method, he would be an influential person, even though he never existed. A lot of the "influence" assigned to figures such as Jesus and Mary (but also to some of the politicians and philosophers) should rightfully be assigned to other people who simply used them as personas.
If you believe that then you believe nonsense. The lack of personal belief in the divinity of Jesus and his offer of salvation doesn't undo his enormous influence as Messiah, the subsequent spread of Christianity beyond its Jewish origin, and the enormous influence Christianity has had in turn on religion, literature, music, law, and many other aspects of life and culture across the globe.
You confuse the religion with the picture they decided to hang on their walls. It's like saying the greek gods are still very powerful because whole planets are named after them. Jesus supplied the persona unto which the church then projected everything they wanted to have accepted without questioning. At this point, he stops being a person and instead becomes an idea. To be fair, you should remove him from the comparison because he belongs into a different conceptual class.
The same is true of some ancient philosophers and many kings. We have a couple kings in history who basically did nothing, and yet their names stand for an entire period of their country.
It's more influential than you or I, but it's not more influential than Jesus.
That's another fundamental flaw. They mix up people and stories about people. Whatever you believe or do not believe about a real living person called Jesus, you would have to be utterly fanatical to not admit that a massive amount of his importance was created long after his death, by the early catholic church and the various bible editing processes. Even more so for Mary, who in the biblical text itself is only mentioned a few times.
It compares apples like scientists with oranges like religious figures and with politicians and entertainers and other people, all of which have a different meaning of "influence".
The resulting lists of the most influential men and women might surprise.
So basically, it's bullshit. With Jesus and Mary on the list, it's clear it is basically a popularity contest, and they have just re-defined influence to mean something totally different from what it usually means. Just because 50,000 people mention a probably fictional virgin in their memoires doesn't mean she has had any influence whatsoever on anyone. It just means people like to mention her (in this case, for obvious religious reasons).
Going by the names of people instead of their ideas is just incredibly stupid. Aristotle et al basically defined western thinking, even if many people they strongly influenced don't even know it. Meanwhile, entertainers are popular, but their influence rarely lasts for more than a few decades and even more rarely extends outside of the sphere of entertainment.
Finally, this approach completely ignores the problem of figureheads. I'll take Jesus again as an example. Absolutely none of the ideas or miracles or actions attributed to him in the bible are original, they've all been written about in older texts or can otherwise be traced to older sources. The same is true of some scientists, many philosophers, etc. -- the problem is that the popularity approach confuses the person who made something popular with the person who created it. It is a philosophical discussion who is more influential or more important, and if an idea without popularity is as worthless as popularity without content - but it's an important point and simply mixing the two up as if they were the same is a fundamental flaw.
At least they did consider timeframes and cultures.
Maybe I'm just to used to pointers and stuff, but I still fail to see what the fuss is all about. The behavior you describe is the exact behavior I would expect. To me, all of this is totally intuitive.
Really? That's funny, because in both JS and PHP documentation I've seen this exact construct being referred to as a closure, and in this particular case, it's even in the API documentation of the filter() method of the ArrayCollection class of the Doctrine project. And I just realized I might have been overly specific there.
I didn't say it's a matter of training, though it does play a role.
It's also a matter of expectations. As long as customers accept a crash as something that "just happens every now and then", software developers have no requirement to shape up.
It's also a matter of tools, of organisation, of structure and environment.
Many factors come in. I'm just saying right now, coding is a horrible mess and it's a miracle that anything works at all.
I've started to use closures in PHP in some places, and they're quite good if used correctly.
Basically, if you need a short, simple function that you know you will never call from anywhere else, a closure is a good way to do it. With good indendation and enough self-control to actually go and write a proper function when you have more than a few lines, it doesn't make the code any less readable.
For example:
I completely fail to see what your problem is.
Immutable arrays are defined exactly the same in several other languages. If you want an array of constants, you need to defined its contents as constants, not just the array itself. It's good behaviour to give you this choice.
Same for collections passed by reference. Again, several other programming languages do it exactly this way, implicitly passing collections by reference because collections can become large and implicitly copying them every time you touch them would be a performance nightmare. If you want a copy, clone or whatever it's called in your favorite language, you simply tell the language so and you're good.
This.
Wake me when I can ditch PHP for Swift. Using the same programming language for both server and client code is a massive advantage that cannot be overstated.
This is not the case for many embedded systems. They are designed to be installed and then you forget about them. So the "classic" mitigation technique doesn't work. This is a big problem.
Only because software development sucks and nobody takes the time and effort for not-so-much-fun things like code review.
Yeah, I definitely want my country to look more like theirs.
That was a foreign power attacking people at home.
This would be the people rising up against their government.
Two different scenarios. The US government doesn't have to eradicate americans to win, it just needs to stay put exactly where it is.
It's 2014, not 1914.
If you want to fight your government - the government that spends more money on the military then everyone else in the top 5 military spending countries combined, you don't need guns. You need stealth fighters, tanks and ICBMs.
Good luck with your "honest people defending the country against the government" fantasy.
No they haven't. They've only completed their official sentence, and they are getting a second chance to live in society, BUT in most cases, felons have committed some irreparable harm.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 2014 ... B.C.
Oh, there are plenty of criminals, fraudsters, scammers, and dishonest folks who are never formally convicted of anything. This does not mean they are not dangerous.
There are also plenty of innocent folks who are accused and sometimes even convicted of a crime, and only years, sometimes decades later their innocence is proven. Their life has already been ruined once, now you want to keep ruining it? Nice attitude.
People have a right of free speech to air their complaints and not have them arbitrarily suppressed, just because it is inconvenient for the subject of the complaints or poor reviews.
It's not "inconvenient" you imbecile. When you're false accused of something like pedophelia, your life is fucking destroyed. The absolute least we can do for these victims is to stop the lies from perpetuating.