If you download (steal/copy whatever the fuck makes you sleep at night) the game, then clearly you were in the target market and wanted it. But you just shrunk that potential target market by 1.
False assumption. Some, if not most, people who download illegal copies of software have no interest in purchasing the software in the first place. They were never potential buyers.
You might as well claim, "Hey, slashdot should start charging for pageviews! They're serving a million pages a day for free! If they started charging $1/page, they'd make a million dollars a day!"
As you raise the price of an item, (from $0 to the actual MSRP) the number of people willing to buy at that price decreases. Basic economics.
I understand that you want to get paid for you work. So do I. But copyright violation is not theft, and you can't assume that every copyright violation is a lost sale.
When you pirate a work, you must by definition make a new copy. That copy can only be legally produced by the copyright holder. It would make no sense to simply destroy it, and so ownership of it reverts to the one legally able to produce it in the first place. Most of the time illegally-produced copies get destroyed anyway, but that need not be the case.
In any case, you now have a copy of the software that belongs to the copyright holder. By not returning the copy to them or buying it outright, you are in fact depriving them of something: a copy to sell or otherwise do with as they will.
And so, piracy equals theft.
Bullshit. If EA has 250,000 copies of Madden 2k10 on the shelf, and I download a copy via bittorrent, they'll still have 250,000 copies on the shelf.
Now, if I walk in to the store and pocket one, *then* they'll be down to 249,999.
By the logic you present, visiting a website displaying copyrighted images (which describes most of the web) is theft as well, since a copy of each image is made when you view it in your browser.
He'll probably make more cash being a commentator on Fox News pushing their particular agenda. He's been defanged but no one's cut his vocal cords.
His disbarment would discredit him in a very real way. For a major television network to present him as a credible expert after this, they'd have to think their viewers complete idiots.
It remains to be seen just how low an opinion fox news holds of their viewers.
Every time I see someone post this, it saddens me -- Communities.com (the folks that own the domain now are completely unrelated) aka Electric Communities built a secure, distributed virtual world (under the names ECHabitats/Microcosm), in the mid-to-late nineties. Most people didn't get it.
It's obvious that, having seen Second Life, people are starting to understand -- "Hey, having things on centralized servers kind of sucks. I want to run my own 'sim', and be able to connect it to other peoples'"
There are few traces of the project left on the 'net -- a few mentions in Koster's MUD history timeline and a few entries in the internet archive...
Hopefully someone will pick up the idea and run with it one of these days.
That's such a delusion. People you talk to online are not anything like what you think of them. You're not interacting with a person, you're interacting with your own imagination, seeded with a few select facts or fictions from someone else.
Apparently you, too, feel that there's some value in these interactions, or you wouldn't have bothered to post this reply.
Honestly, I'm with you -- internet communications only show you a part of the people you communicate with, and it's good to be mindful of that. But they're not *total* fiction.
The problem isn't new, either. People have been dealing with this for ages -- communication by snail mail shares the same difficulties. Hell, we have literature dating back centuries describing emotional connection shared over snail mail.
For 50 quid more, you get an Acer. And they all come with 12 month warranties, often extensible. Who actually wants the eepc?
Among other things, the battery life on the Acer is probably 25-50% that of the Eee PC.
Your average low end laptop usually lasts 1-2 hours on battery. The Eee PC and macbook both enjoy around 4 hours of battery life for light workloads. That can make a really big difference to some people.
JSON is a text-based serialization format. "Protocol buffer" has a binary format, in addition to a text format. The binary format is where the size & speed benefits come from. Text formats introduce overhead.
It also handles all the schema compliance and schema versioning for you. JSON doesn't do any of that.
My wife signed us up for Comcast's VOIP service. You get a cable modem with an ethernet jack, a phone jack, and a built-in battery, good enough to keep it running for a few hours.
I don't actually know how long the battery lasts. Never tried it.
At any rate, theoretically, you should be able to make calls on Comcast's VOIP during a power outage, as installed. No modifications necessary.
1) It has a binary format, far more compact (and faster to unserialize) than PHP's text-based serialized format. 2) It handles multiple versions of the same objects (e.g., your server can interact with both PhoneNumber 2.0 and PhoneNumber 3.0 objects relatively trivially) 3) It generates code for converting each format into objects in their 3 supported languages.
Softlayer has multi-core boxes starting at $150/month; we've got a box with them with a 15k RPM SCSI drive for about $300/mo.
For dinky personal projects, I've got a dedicated Athlon XP 2400+ with half a gig of ram with a little no-name provider -- and it only runs me $50/mo.
I've seen all sorts of prices in the $50 - $300 range for varying hardware. If you're willing to gamble on a lesser known host, you can get hardware cheap.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend running an established webapp with thousands of active users in a datacenter like this, but when you're at the "garage" stage, they're more than sufficient. They're certainly preferable to shared hosting on a grade-A provider, from what I've seen.
Ironically, the people who made these lame jokes the most (Apple fanbois) now advocate Intel chips as being the best. Yet another example of do as I do, not as I say from the Apple camp.
I know I'm wasting my time responding to such a blatant troll, but they're nothing hypocritical about saying that the original Pentium 1 was a pretty bad chip, and the Core 2 Duo is a pretty great one.
Failing to reliably perform basic floating point ops is pretty embarrassing. But Intel's come a long way since then.
That was my point. I'd anticipate that *many* people would find these terms unacceptable, and choose not to "use 'em". I would also expect that amazon's well aware of this, and would never implement such absurd terms in the first place.
Add a $1000 (or more) charge to the TOS each time someone gets caught spamming through them
As a web app developer, that's potentially a dealbreaker for me. Who determines what spam is?
According to the five-ten DNSBL, anything that's sent w/o a closed loop opt in is spam. So they block all sorts of ips the rest of us might think of as legitimate, like "microsoft, multiple public radio newsletters (from different radio stations in different states), travel notifications and newsletters from Expedia and Hotwire, lots of other newsletters and news updates from various newspapers and TV shows, and even the newsletter from my favorite pizza place back in my home town of Minneapolis." (source)
So, who's definition of spam are they using? Hell, half the email I get from digg ends up in my yahoo spam folder automatically.
Without a strict definition of what is and isn't spam, that TOS clause is absolutely unacceptable.
While the individual parts are nothing special, the end result is still far superior.
The last two laptops I purchased were HPs, both of which developed serious issues inside of a year -- one had a CPU fan go out in under 6 months, and the hinge failed at about 12 months. The power connector on the other broke free from the motherboard, and the spacebar on the keyboard failed, under normal usage conditions. Both HPs had a battery life of about an hour, were larger and heavier than the low end macbook, and cost about as much.
Fed up with HP's lame hardware, I bought a 13" macbook. The battery lasts 2-5 hours depending on workload (2 hrs gaming, 4-5 hrs web surfing/coding), it's smaller, lighter, and has a better GPU, and the magsafe power connector means I'll never have to worry about the socket breaking free from the motherboard. Over a year, the thing's taken at least as much abuse as the HP's have, and it's no worse for wear.
So, yeah, they may be using the same CPU, ram, and processor as everyone else, but it's still a better built machine at the end of the day. And at $1100, the 13" macbook is extremely competitive with comparably priced hardware.
You may be able to put the same muffler, tires, and rims on a Kia and a BMW, but that doesn't make them the same car.
And how do you know which files to download? You know because from somewhere you got a key that told you WHICH files you need.
The key is where this falls down. The key is an encrypted representation of the original. Trading the key is where the infringement occurs.
That's not immediately clear. The Pirate Bay's entire purpose is distributing "keys" that point to external resources where copyrighted data can be found.
Similarly, a HTTP URL of a copyrighted file is a "key" that instructs your browser where it can fetch copyrighted data.
At the very least, under Swedish law, neither of these have been demonstrated to be illegal. IANAL, but IMO, this is the legal equivalent of bittorrent, with the added benefit that the "seeds" never actually store copyrighted data.
As the GP said, the only infringement occurs when you actually reconstruct the file after downloading.
Personally, when I see a very fast migration I tend to think the last version must really have sucked. If it did what people wanted already, they'd not be in any big hurry to upgrade. Sure, there's been some exceptions where the new version is the best thing since sliced bread, but they're few and far between by comparison.
Personally, I've historically not upgraded browsers because frequently the new version is *worse* than the old version. A browser vendor would really have to demonstrate the ability to consistently *not* break things when they upgrade for me to trust that upgrading immediately is a risk worth taking.
You're also implying that there exists a browse that's "good enough". I'd counter that there never has been, and that there won't be for quite some time. There's plenty of room for improvement over the state of the art. The currently available browsers aren't fully standards compliant, they're slow, they're memory hogs, and unstable to varying degrees. All of them.
FF3 is better by all of those metrics, but there's still room for improvement. Something better will come eventually, and it too will see rapid adoption.
Huh? This means absolutely nothing. If you want to give us data that's meaningful, tell us how many converts to IE7 there were in the first week, or wait 1.5 years and see how many people are using FF3 versus old versions.
How about this, then: FF2 was released about 20 months ago. I'm looking at the logs of a site that served 2 million hits since the beginning of the month (not huge, but a decent sample size). Less than 1% of our firefox hits are from versions older than 2.0. Roughly 65% are from FF 2.0.x, and 33% are from FF 3.
38% of our IE hits are from IE 6 or older.
So, in 20 months, 99% of our firefox users have upgraded to 2.0 or higher. In 18 months, about 62% of our IE users have upgraded to IE 7 or higher.
For clarity's sake, what you're describing is perhaps a subconcious effect, but not a subliminal one. You don't *know* when you've been subjected to a subliminal message. From the GP:
I see ads ALL THE DAMN TIME, when I'm driving, or watching TV, or listening to the radio
Since the GP *knows* he sees the ads, they are, by definition, not subliminal. Now, if the ads have an effect on him that he's not consciously aware of (e.g., he sees a bunch of ads, never thinks "hey, I'll really ought to buy some coke", but he buys some anyway, when he otherwise might not have), then you might describe that effect as subconscious.
The efficacy of "subliminal advertising" is controversial, at best. Advertising that you actually perceive, on the other hand, has definitely been demonstrated to be effective.
I know a ex-yahoo employee who liked wearing this shirt around the office. It has a bunch of 'net acronyms on it -- "omg wtf stfu pwn4d uran00b lmaorotf kthxbye:p" -- in the format of an eye chart.
Sadly, apparently many of his fellow yahoos recognized few, if any of the acronyms. You'd hope these guys would be a little more in touch with the people who use their products...
Suffice it to say, I'm willing to cut this teacher a little slack. Most people in the US don't speak our language. Even those in the industry, apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
False assumption. Some, if not most, people who download illegal copies of software have no interest in purchasing the software in the first place. They were never potential buyers.
You might as well claim, "Hey, slashdot should start charging for pageviews! They're serving a million pages a day for free! If they started charging $1/page, they'd make a million dollars a day!"
As you raise the price of an item, (from $0 to the actual MSRP) the number of people willing to buy at that price decreases. Basic economics.
I understand that you want to get paid for you work. So do I. But copyright violation is not theft, and you can't assume that every copyright violation is a lost sale.
Bullshit. If EA has 250,000 copies of Madden 2k10 on the shelf, and I download a copy via bittorrent, they'll still have 250,000 copies on the shelf.
Now, if I walk in to the store and pocket one, *then* they'll be down to 249,999.
By the logic you present, visiting a website displaying copyrighted images (which describes most of the web) is theft as well, since a copy of each image is made when you view it in your browser.
His disbarment would discredit him in a very real way. For a major television network to present him as a credible expert after this, they'd have to think their viewers complete idiots.
It remains to be seen just how low an opinion fox news holds of their viewers.
At risk of answering a facetious post seriously, period characters in version numbers (which "web 2.0" is an homage to) are pronounced "point".
I hear Microsoft is about to release their version of Web 2009 in Home, Business, Premium, and Ultimate Editions.
Looks like they can be had for around $4, shipped:
http://cgi.ebay.com/CF-to-44-Pin-2-5-LAPTOP-IDE-Hard-Drive-Adapter-bootable_W0QQitemZ150268212084QQcmdZViewItem
Every time I see someone post this, it saddens me -- Communities.com (the folks that own the domain now are completely unrelated) aka Electric Communities built a secure, distributed virtual world (under the names ECHabitats/Microcosm), in the mid-to-late nineties. Most people didn't get it.
It's obvious that, having seen Second Life, people are starting to understand -- "Hey, having things on centralized servers kind of sucks. I want to run my own 'sim', and be able to connect it to other peoples'"
There are few traces of the project left on the 'net -- a few mentions in Koster's MUD history timeline and a few entries in the internet archive...
Hopefully someone will pick up the idea and run with it one of these days.
Apparently you, too, feel that there's some value in these interactions, or you wouldn't have bothered to post this reply.
Honestly, I'm with you -- internet communications only show you a part of the people you communicate with, and it's good to be mindful of that. But they're not *total* fiction.
The problem isn't new, either. People have been dealing with this for ages -- communication by snail mail shares the same difficulties. Hell, we have literature dating back centuries describing emotional connection shared over snail mail.
E.g., Love Letters Of Great Men And Women: From The Eighteenth Century To The Present Day
No, it's not the same as face to face communication, but there's some solid evidence for real emotional connection through the written word.
Among other things, the battery life on the Acer is probably 25-50% that of the Eee PC.
Your average low end laptop usually lasts 1-2 hours on battery. The Eee PC and macbook both enjoy around 4 hours of battery life for light workloads. That can make a really big difference to some people.
JSON is a text-based serialization format. "Protocol buffer" has a binary format, in addition to a text format. The binary format is where the size & speed benefits come from. Text formats introduce overhead.
It also handles all the schema compliance and schema versioning for you. JSON doesn't do any of that.
My wife signed us up for Comcast's VOIP service. You get a cable modem with an ethernet jack, a phone jack, and a built-in battery, good enough to keep it running for a few hours.
I don't actually know how long the battery lasts. Never tried it.
At any rate, theoretically, you should be able to make calls on Comcast's VOIP during a power outage, as installed. No modifications necessary.
1) It has a binary format, far more compact (and faster to unserialize) than PHP's text-based serialized format.
2) It handles multiple versions of the same objects (e.g., your server can interact with both PhoneNumber 2.0 and PhoneNumber 3.0 objects relatively trivially)
3) It generates code for converting each format into objects in their 3 supported languages.
So, no, not really.
The flash video player was central to youtube's success. Embedded mpeg sucks.
Softlayer has multi-core boxes starting at $150/month; we've got a box with them with a 15k RPM SCSI drive for about $300/mo.
For dinky personal projects, I've got a dedicated Athlon XP 2400+ with half a gig of ram with a little no-name provider -- and it only runs me $50/mo.
I've seen all sorts of prices in the $50 - $300 range for varying hardware. If you're willing to gamble on a lesser known host, you can get hardware cheap.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend running an established webapp with thousands of active users in a datacenter like this, but when you're at the "garage" stage, they're more than sufficient. They're certainly preferable to shared hosting on a grade-A provider, from what I've seen.
I know I'm wasting my time responding to such a blatant troll, but they're nothing hypocritical about saying that the original Pentium 1 was a pretty bad chip, and the Core 2 Duo is a pretty great one.
Failing to reliably perform basic floating point ops is pretty embarrassing. But Intel's come a long way since then.
I've been using the same "technique" of, essentially, just not executing untrustworthy software for years.
I know my hardware well enough that I notice when it inexplicably starts running slower.
And I run a free online virus scan periodically, and whenever I suspect I may have picked up something:
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
I fail to see the need for installing the bloated, always-on scanners when you can just manually scan now and then.
That was my point. I'd anticipate that *many* people would find these terms unacceptable, and choose not to "use 'em". I would also expect that amazon's well aware of this, and would never implement such absurd terms in the first place.
...Why do they keep giving these 800 people laptops if they're each losing over 12 per week?
As a web app developer, that's potentially a dealbreaker for me. Who determines what spam is?
According to the five-ten DNSBL, anything that's sent w/o a closed loop opt in is spam. So they block all sorts of ips the rest of us might think of as legitimate, like "microsoft, multiple public radio newsletters (from different radio stations in different states), travel notifications and newsletters from Expedia and Hotwire, lots of other newsletters and news updates from various newspapers and TV shows, and even the newsletter from my favorite pizza place back in my home town of Minneapolis." (source)
So, who's definition of spam are they using? Hell, half the email I get from digg ends up in my yahoo spam folder automatically.
Without a strict definition of what is and isn't spam, that TOS clause is absolutely unacceptable.
While the individual parts are nothing special, the end result is still far superior.
The last two laptops I purchased were HPs, both of which developed serious issues inside of a year -- one had a CPU fan go out in under 6 months, and the hinge failed at about 12 months. The power connector on the other broke free from the motherboard, and the spacebar on the keyboard failed, under normal usage conditions. Both HPs had a battery life of about an hour, were larger and heavier than the low end macbook, and cost about as much.
Fed up with HP's lame hardware, I bought a 13" macbook. The battery lasts 2-5 hours depending on workload (2 hrs gaming, 4-5 hrs web surfing/coding), it's smaller, lighter, and has a better GPU, and the magsafe power connector means I'll never have to worry about the socket breaking free from the motherboard. Over a year, the thing's taken at least as much abuse as the HP's have, and it's no worse for wear.
So, yeah, they may be using the same CPU, ram, and processor as everyone else, but it's still a better built machine at the end of the day. And at $1100, the 13" macbook is extremely competitive with comparably priced hardware.
You may be able to put the same muffler, tires, and rims on a Kia and a BMW, but that doesn't make them the same car.
That's not immediately clear. The Pirate Bay's entire purpose is distributing "keys" that point to external resources where copyrighted data can be found.
Similarly, a HTTP URL of a copyrighted file is a "key" that instructs your browser where it can fetch copyrighted data.
At the very least, under Swedish law, neither of these have been demonstrated to be illegal. IANAL, but IMO, this is the legal equivalent of bittorrent, with the added benefit that the "seeds" never actually store copyrighted data.
As the GP said, the only infringement occurs when you actually reconstruct the file after downloading.
If "keys" are illegal to distribute, then let's make everyone who reads this thread an infringer:
http://rapidshare.com/files/58489700/Metallica-TheEarlyDays.rar
Personally, I've historically not upgraded browsers because frequently the new version is *worse* than the old version. A browser vendor would really have to demonstrate the ability to consistently *not* break things when they upgrade for me to trust that upgrading immediately is a risk worth taking.
You're also implying that there exists a browse that's "good enough". I'd counter that there never has been, and that there won't be for quite some time. There's plenty of room for improvement over the state of the art. The currently available browsers aren't fully standards compliant, they're slow, they're memory hogs, and unstable to varying degrees. All of them.
FF3 is better by all of those metrics, but there's still room for improvement. Something better will come eventually, and it too will see rapid adoption.
How about this, then:
FF2 was released about 20 months ago. I'm looking at the logs of a site that served 2 million hits since the beginning of the month (not huge, but a decent sample size). Less than 1% of our firefox hits are from versions older than 2.0. Roughly 65% are from FF 2.0.x, and 33% are from FF 3.
38% of our IE hits are from IE 6 or older.
So, in 20 months, 99% of our firefox users have upgraded to 2.0 or higher. In 18 months, about 62% of our IE users have upgraded to IE 7 or higher.
For clarity's sake, what you're describing is perhaps a subconcious effect, but not a subliminal one. You don't *know* when you've been subjected to a subliminal message. From the GP:
Since the GP *knows* he sees the ads, they are, by definition, not subliminal. Now, if the ads have an effect on him that he's not consciously aware of (e.g., he sees a bunch of ads, never thinks "hey, I'll really ought to buy some coke", but he buys some anyway, when he otherwise might not have), then you might describe that effect as subconscious.
The efficacy of "subliminal advertising" is controversial, at best. Advertising that you actually perceive, on the other hand, has definitely been demonstrated to be effective.
I know a ex-yahoo employee who liked wearing this shirt around the office. It has a bunch of 'net acronyms on it -- "omg wtf stfu pwn4d uran00b lmaorotf kthxbye:p" -- in the format of an eye chart.
Sadly, apparently many of his fellow yahoos recognized few, if any of the acronyms. You'd hope these guys would be a little more in touch with the people who use their products...
Suffice it to say, I'm willing to cut this teacher a little slack. Most people in the US don't speak our language. Even those in the industry, apparently.