Invoking the "murder your family" argument is equivalent to Godwining the discussion. You are trying to make an emotional appeal that overrides logical consideration.
That being said, in the "no free will" worldview - which I do not necessarily share - laws and punishments are part of the equation. Even if a person has no free will in the sense that his decisions are considered to be predetermined given his circumstances, law and punishments are part of the circumstances and will affect the decision. Even without self-determination, whether something is forbidden / punishable will affect the outcome. However for that effect to be in force the punishment must also be implemented. So while "justice" might not really be an applicable concept, laws, punishments and the concepts of right and wrong certainly are.
If anything, considering human decisions to be deterministic makes for a more cold-blooded judicial system. If you think that a person, given exactly the same circumstances, might act differently on different occasions because of self-determination, then you can't really write off that person as a lost cause. If, on the other hand, you believe that given the same situation the person will make exactly the same decision, then your only choice is to make sure the same situation never arises again. Sometimes this can be accomplished through non-violent means. Sometimes not.
Java isn't a programming language, it is a self contained universe. Like a black hole, once you go in you never come out. And even if it's OK now, the fact that Oracle in in charge means that it is like Middle Earth if Sauron won.
Mod points! My (Minecraft) kingdom for mod points! Bravo, Sir. Bravo.
Awww, give them a break. The second one actually carried two useful pieces of information: it has a pen, and it supports USB peripherals:-)
Also, you seem to remember the ads quite well. Would that be the case if they had simply explained the features and benefits? Perhaps the whole thing is a devious plot to keep people talking about Surface simply by keeping people talking about how awful the ads are...
Sounds more like a cute story that at the same time panders to human ego than the author realistically proposing something like that might actually happen. I remember one science fiction writer saying in story notes how some sci-fi magazine editor really liked stories where some trait humans possessed made them superior to all aliens; this seems like one of those. Even in the story you describe, the ability to move things (gravity manipulation) is a weapon; the aliens could have simply bolted engines on a couple of big asteroids, bombarded Earth back to stone age and come back after the dust settled. Their matchlock weapons would have been quite enough to subdue what remained of the population.
On the other hand, another story of that type proposed that humans are uniquely gifted in weaponizing anything and everything; so perhaps there is some internal consistency there after all...
QML is used to specify the UI for an application. It is a declarative language that specifies UI components, their states and animations, etc. The syntax is JavaScript like in that it looks a bit like you are defining JavaScript objects. QML uses JavaScript to specify UI logic and calculations, and if your application is mostly UI (say, a simple game) you can code it entirely in QML + JavaScript (not unlike Flash). Nontrivial applications typically have a separate engine part written in Qt C++. The Qt signals, slots and properties system make it easy to integrate the QML part with the C++ engine part. That is actually a part of the idea with QML: it is easy enough to learn and use (there are graphical tools too) that designers can work with it to design the application UIs (instead of using Photoshop or Flash), and coders can concentrate on the engine part. So the UI design is actually working code, and if the designers get a great new idea and want to redesign the entire UI, instead of groaning (because they have to re-implement everything) the coders can just smile and tell them to go right ahead (because the designers will do the UI implementation themselves, and the engine part will be isolated behind its API).
QML is optimized for writing the kind of fluid UIs that mobile applications favor today, meaning there is a lot of support for animations and other eye candy, and everything is heavily optimized to run smoothly on mobile devices. HTML, on the other hand, is not optimized for writing such user interfaces. So, writing a non-trivial, non-web-page-like user interface takes much less time to do in QML than in HTML (if it is possible to achieve in HTML at all) and the resulting user experience will be much better.
Of course, if your main concern is portability across mobile platforms, then HTML (and something like PhoneGap) is the way to go. Or, like a (fellow) Nokia employee put it: "If you want to go fast, use QML, If you want to go deep, use Qt C++. If you want to go wide, use HTML."
Qt has recently introduced Qt Quick, a collection of technologies meant to help you create animation-rich UIs similar to those used on touch phones. The most important part is the QML language, which is used to describe the user interface of a program. QML is declarative and animation-friendly, and makes it easy to create fluid interfaces. On the downside, it is not mature yet and lacks most of the standard UI widgets at the moment (basically, you have text input and clickable areas). I wouldn't have recommended it for general application writing just yet, but the original question was not very specific on the requirements so it might be suitable already in its current form.
Acceptable, unless your legal system is based on a distrust of government and fear of persecution like in US. Then you would assume that the police who broke the law when gathering the evidence will only be prosecuted for show if at all, and will get a slap on the wrist at most.
While I am no friend of DRM, there is a genuine ethical dilemma here. If someone (movie makers) is selling a product, should they be forced to sell at the same price to everyone? Especially when said product is not necessary for life and health? Note that this would harm people in the poorest countries because the seller would then set a price optimized for the more lucrative western market and would not be able to sell at a discount price in the poorer countries.
Outsourcing is a different thing - no one is being forced to do anything. It sucks for the local workers, but if the cheap labor abroad is treated fairly I do not see an ethical problem. Buyer's choice, just like you yourself can choose whether you shop at the local mom-and-pop store or at the big outside-town supermarket. Some people support the local store, others go there for convenience or buy there just those products which are better than at the supermarket, but most people just go to the supermarket because the prices are much cheaper. The corporations do exactly the same. Some feel social responsibility and hire local people, others hire locally only for jobs that are difficult to outsource, and the vast majority look at bottom line only. Supporting the community / local store is nice and often has long-term benefits, but I don't see why people not doing so should be condemned.
Everyone makes this about movie makers being the evil guys and the consumers being the victims, but isn't this essentially about consumers wanting to dictate to the movie makers the terms under which they can sell their product? I mean, it sure is nice for me as a consumer to be able to play my content anywhere I want, but I don't think that it is my god-given right. We can of course take the position that the public benefit (consumer benefit, faster development of new services, new innovative businesses, etc.) outweighs the rights of the movie makers, but that is a very complicated comparison. The state should not take away rights lightly.
All of a sudden, people who are thrilled by predator attacks and civilian deaths are outraged, outraged, I tell you that Afghanis might be at risk for collaborating with American forces. What a load. I don't believe for one second these war mongers give a rat's ass about what's going to happen to Afghani civilians who might be named in the Wikileaks papers.
You miss the point I think. They are not worried about the Afghani civilians at all. They are worried about the US ability to recruit Afghani informants.
It is insightful in the sense that companies typically ignore the law to the degree that they can get away with it, just like individual people do. And since an employee is usually at a massive disadvantage in the case of a dispute, a company can get away with quite a lot with regard to its employees. So, in that sense, they can do as they please. You can sue them, but then you have burned your bridges - it is not a viable strategy unless you are confident you can find a new job easily, or they are mistreating you so badly that unemployment is preferable by comparison. And by the way, prospective new employers do not usually appreciate workers who sued their former employer.
The last bit about standing up for yourself was somewhat unhelpful grandstanding without actionable advice, though.
If you read the articles (yes, I know... this is Slashdot) you will realize it is not a problem with companies, but with computers and cell phones in general requiring the conflict materials. For some reason, the summary included a few random names and left out others, e.g. Apple most certainly belongs in the list as it produces both computers and cell phones.
What you can do, is name the companies who do try to behave responsibly and control where their raw materials come from. Quoting one of the referenced articles: "Cell phone manufacturers like Samsung, Motorola, Apple and Nokia have long had official policies against the use of conflict minerals in their products."
No matter how much you like your shiny iPhone, the poster cited SSH as his primary use case. It means his primary use case is typing shell commands. Which means a phone with a real keyboard will work best for him. Yes, you CAN type text relatively OK with the iPhone. No, that does NOT make it the best phone to type text on. Get a clue!
If the guy had asked for a smooth web browsing experience, recommending a (3G!) iPhone would have been understandable. But for SSH? Pure fanboy, or pure ignorance. Take your pick.
Oh, as for what phone to use - E70 is better if you want the regular phone form factor and have good eyes. But personally I would prefer E61i (with Blackberry form factor), as it has much larger screen (although slightly smaller resolution) which means text is easier to read. And it has more RAM, which means you can run more applications simultaneously. E.g. with E70 running a Java MIDlet and the browser simultaneously is going to be iffy because both are RAM-hungry applications. E61i is newer too, so it has a more recent version of the web browser.
Replace 'male-centered' with 'self centered', and I think that she pretty much hit it right on the nose. Really, I'm sorry that you were 'scarred' by your 'book carrying event' but men and women both say stupid things all the time. Have you ever even considered that you scared her and she was searching for a reason to explain it? (I didn't think so)
You are confusing "understandable" with "acceptable". In most cases, there is an understandable reason for unacceptable behaviour. For example, rapists have themselves frequently been molested as children. While that makes it possible to understand their behavior, it does not excuse it.
Now, in some extreme cases past experiences may be considered to be so extreme that the person in fact could not act in any other way than he/she did, and so is not responsible for his/her actions. That is also known as an insanity plea.
Since you were excusing the girl and laying all the blame on the guy, it does not seem likely you were just giving an explanation for her actions. You were in fact trying to shift blame. Exactly the same thing as first defending rapists by saying they had a bad childhood, and then going on to explain how it was the girl's fault anyway for wearing such revealing clothes.
Or perhaps you are arguing that the girl was crazy?
...didn't think so.
And yes, I am using rapists as an example exactly because this is a feminist discussion. Tends to flush out the hypocrisy...
While the "would not have bought it anyway" excuse is hogwash, the reality is a bit more subtle than you make out. People will fall into three categories:
Not interested, even if it is free.
Will not pay for it, but will take it if it is free.
Would pay for it, but will rather take it for free.
(Then there are the people who do pay for it, but they are not downloading so let's ignore them)
So your problem is the third group that would be prepared to pay for the content. These people represent actual financial loss to the content producer.
The commonly used BMW example does not hold water either, because the idea is that you could not afford a BMW. If you were able to "copy" the BMW and leave the original one intact, the seller would not have suffered a financial loss - he was never going to make a sale to you anyhow.
The interesting thing is that you can benefit from the second group, because they advertise your content via word-of-mouth. So it actually becomes a pricing problem. Typically you want to sell your product at different prices to different people, depending on how much they can afford to pay (airlines are the canonical example of this). So you need a way to extract full price from the third group while giving the product for free to the second group. This is commonly done in software with a free "personal edition" version. By adding a (valuable!) service component (web service with user accounts) to the "professional edition", you can prevent copying and entice the third group to part from their cash.
Oh, COME ON! Almost nobody would pay in advance for software, and those who would are the fraction-of-a-percent minority where an abundance of cash, a charitable mindset and idealism (or lack of realism) meet. Because:
Although a great many people may post on forums how a feature is absolutely crucial, not many people are actually passionate enough to put their money where their mouth is. Ever done a software pilot with a partner company? If you don't charge for enhancements (non-bug-fix-changes) during the pilot, you will get a hundred enhancement requests, most of them "really important", and the requests don't ever stop. If you charge for the enhancements, you will get maybe two, and they will stop the second the software does its job even remotely adequately.
The buy-a-feature process is too complex and difficult. You would have to really love the software to bother. Most people won't.
Software development is by nature an uncertain business, and small-time developers even more so. Paying in advance carries a big risk of losing your money, and you have no way of knowing what you will really get (whereas normally sold software has practically always a demo).
The number of people who pay is going to be small because of the previous points. Therefore the per-user cost will need to be high, or the total amount of money will be low which would further reduce the likelihood of the software getting finished. This will further drive down the number of users who are willing to pay.
In general, the whole attitude of "content creators should accept piracy and find other means of generating revenue" is horse manure. It is just saying that because something illegal is suddenly technically easy and difficult to prevent, it should be accepted. You cannot ban the software and machines used for the illegal activity because they have legitimate uses. Compare with guns: shooting somebody is technically easy and difficult to prevent, and we do not want to ban guns (as a society - at least yet). Yet we did not just resign ourselves to accepting murder, did we? (insert obligatory joke about US gun violence rates)
I have no sympathy for media companies that are ripping off artists and trying to charge you multiple times for the same content. But neither do I think that it is your god-given right to freely enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
But since this is turning into a rant, and those are rarely productive, here's my suggestion: Integrate the application with a server-side service that requires the application to log in to your server. You have to maintain your own server then but should be feasible for a small user base. Then you can keep track of the paid accounts and kill the compromised ones. The server-side thing should be important enough though that pirates don't just cut out that part from the application (or so intertwined with how the application operates that cutting it out is not feasible).
If you can't do that, then the only alternatives I see are either making such a niche application that the pirates don't bother (but then your application has to be best-in-class because market is so small), or focusing your application on people who aren't likely to pirate it (business and security applications, applications for novice users).
Finally - always make sure it is really easy to find and buy your application legitimately. People often are on the fence about whether to pay for it or not. A less-than-easy buying process will convince them not to pay (and probably pirate it and feel righteous about it...).
Even better: don't do it for profit. A patent allows you to forbid people from using the patented idea, there is nothing that forces you to license a patent. If you can patent the fix to a critical Windows vulnerability, and refuse to license it, Microsoft would probably need to remove the affected feature from all installations.
That's the theory. In practice, a) Microsoft would sue you to oblivion, or, failing that, lobby a law change and b) with all the difficulties already mentioned in implementing the scheme, the website is most likely a spoof meant to provide free zero-day vulnerabilities to bot-net creators.
You didn't read the previous post carefully enough. The argument is not that you are forced into becoming "forever an iPod user", the argument is that many people don't realize they are becoming forever iPod users when they buy a lot of music from iTunes.
What is it you can't do with your iTunes songs? Well, say Creative gets its act together and releases a killer MP3 player which becomes the must-have object of desire. With that player your music library would be worthless. So basically you are fine only as long as you will never want any other player than iPod. Which, I believe, was the main point all along.
Yep, it "just works" and people buy into that. The problem is they don't realize it's the same contract the Devil traditionally gives you: We give you all that alluring stuff you want now, and in return we own you later. It's fine if people really decide that they are willing to be forevermore iPod users in return for the ease-of-use. But I don't think most iTunes users realize that.
Of course the iPod is the reason iTunes is so popular. But once a music service gets to be the dominant player it doesn't matter how it got there, it still has the potential to be anti-competitive. iTunes has the biggest selection of music, it has TV shows, and is the most well-known brand. Previously people used iTunes because they bought an iPod; now some people already buy an iPod because they want to use iTunes.
The strict coupling between iTunes and iPod allows Apple to use discriminatory policies to maintain its dominance in the music service and MP3 player market. If you create a better MP3 player than iPod, it will still be crippled because it cannot be used with the most popular music store. If you create a better music service than iTunes, it will still be crippled because it cannot be used with the most popular MP3 player. If it were just a question of Apple vs. the competing companies, I would say Apple won fair and square; to the victor go the spoils. But it is also a question of Apple vs. the consumer. A market where one player dominates the field is seldom a good thing for the consumer, and we are witnessing this now.
The elitist thing is not in assuming everyone can rip their CDs. Yes, it is simple enough for non-technical people. The elitist thing is that you assume everyone realizes the implications of buying music from the iTunes shop. It is not as if there was a big sign saying "Warning! Any music you buy from iTunes can only be played on iPod brand players, without an iPod player the music is worthless. If you want to be able to use also other players, rip CDs instead."
Not a double standard. Apple does not allow other companies to use FairPlay - if they would, every MP3 player would support it. The whole point for Apple is to support iPod sales and customer lock-in. And Apple does not enable other DRM systems to work on iPod either. They are using the fact that they have the dominant online music store and dominant MP3 player to lock down iTunes users to iPods (because only those can play iTunes music) and to lock down iPod users to iTunes (because only iTunes can sell DRM'd music for the iPods, and major labels currently only sell DRM'd music).
Also, to those who say that it doesn't matter because you can rip CDs: you are being elitistic. That means you expect every user to have the technological savvy to understand that the song collection they bought so easily and conveniently online is just a worthless bunch of bytes if they ever want to use another brand of MP3 player. Didn't someone say iTunes has two billion downloads by now? That's an awful lot of users. Entrapment of users is not more acceptable just because it is possible to evade the trap if you are smart enough. If it were Microsoft doing this, they would get chewed out quickly enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, Grey's Law: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Invoking the "murder your family" argument is equivalent to Godwining the discussion. You are trying to make an emotional appeal that overrides logical consideration.
That being said, in the "no free will" worldview - which I do not necessarily share - laws and punishments are part of the equation. Even if a person has no free will in the sense that his decisions are considered to be predetermined given his circumstances, law and punishments are part of the circumstances and will affect the decision. Even without self-determination, whether something is forbidden / punishable will affect the outcome. However for that effect to be in force the punishment must also be implemented. So while "justice" might not really be an applicable concept, laws, punishments and the concepts of right and wrong certainly are.
If anything, considering human decisions to be deterministic makes for a more cold-blooded judicial system. If you think that a person, given exactly the same circumstances, might act differently on different occasions because of self-determination, then you can't really write off that person as a lost cause. If, on the other hand, you believe that given the same situation the person will make exactly the same decision, then your only choice is to make sure the same situation never arises again. Sometimes this can be accomplished through non-violent means. Sometimes not.
Java isn't a programming language, it is a self contained universe. Like a black hole, once you go in you never come out. And even if it's OK now, the fact that Oracle in in charge means that it is like Middle Earth if Sauron won.
Mod points! My (Minecraft) kingdom for mod points! Bravo, Sir. Bravo.
Long shelf life when not exposed to light (like vampires, it bursts into flame in direct sunlight?)
Safe to use in a controlled environment (a hermetically sealed laboratory?)
Low environmental impact with proper disposal (encased in lead and stored in an abandoned mine which is subsequently sealed with concrete?)
The qualifiers make it sound like a software EULA.
Awww, give them a break. The second one actually carried two useful pieces of information: it has a pen, and it supports USB peripherals :-)
Also, you seem to remember the ads quite well. Would that be the case if they had simply explained the features and benefits? Perhaps the whole thing is a devious plot to keep people talking about Surface simply by keeping people talking about how awful the ads are...
Isaac Asimov once said that almost every story edited by John W. Campbell had a Humans Are Special theme.
Sounds more like a cute story that at the same time panders to human ego than the author realistically proposing something like that might actually happen. I remember one science fiction writer saying in story notes how some sci-fi magazine editor really liked stories where some trait humans possessed made them superior to all aliens; this seems like one of those. Even in the story you describe, the ability to move things (gravity manipulation) is a weapon; the aliens could have simply bolted engines on a couple of big asteroids, bombarded Earth back to stone age and come back after the dust settled. Their matchlock weapons would have been quite enough to subdue what remained of the population.
On the other hand, another story of that type proposed that humans are uniquely gifted in weaponizing anything and everything; so perhaps there is some internal consistency there after all...
QML is used to specify the UI for an application. It is a declarative language that specifies UI components, their states and animations, etc. The syntax is JavaScript like in that it looks a bit like you are defining JavaScript objects. QML uses JavaScript to specify UI logic and calculations, and if your application is mostly UI (say, a simple game) you can code it entirely in QML + JavaScript (not unlike Flash). Nontrivial applications typically have a separate engine part written in Qt C++. The Qt signals, slots and properties system make it easy to integrate the QML part with the C++ engine part. That is actually a part of the idea with QML: it is easy enough to learn and use (there are graphical tools too) that designers can work with it to design the application UIs (instead of using Photoshop or Flash), and coders can concentrate on the engine part. So the UI design is actually working code, and if the designers get a great new idea and want to redesign the entire UI, instead of groaning (because they have to re-implement everything) the coders can just smile and tell them to go right ahead (because the designers will do the UI implementation themselves, and the engine part will be isolated behind its API).
QML is optimized for writing the kind of fluid UIs that mobile applications favor today, meaning there is a lot of support for animations and other eye candy, and everything is heavily optimized to run smoothly on mobile devices. HTML, on the other hand, is not optimized for writing such user interfaces. So, writing a non-trivial, non-web-page-like user interface takes much less time to do in QML than in HTML (if it is possible to achieve in HTML at all) and the resulting user experience will be much better.
Of course, if your main concern is portability across mobile platforms, then HTML (and something like PhoneGap) is the way to go. Or, like a (fellow) Nokia employee put it: "If you want to go fast, use QML, If you want to go deep, use Qt C++. If you want to go wide, use HTML."
Qt has recently introduced Qt Quick, a collection of technologies meant to help you create animation-rich UIs similar to those used on touch phones. The most important part is the QML language, which is used to describe the user interface of a program. QML is declarative and animation-friendly, and makes it easy to create fluid interfaces. On the downside, it is not mature yet and lacks most of the standard UI widgets at the moment (basically, you have text input and clickable areas). I wouldn't have recommended it for general application writing just yet, but the original question was not very specific on the requirements so it might be suitable already in its current form.
Acceptable, unless your legal system is based on a distrust of government and fear of persecution like in US. Then you would assume that the police who broke the law when gathering the evidence will only be prosecuted for show if at all, and will get a slap on the wrist at most.
Who knows, you might be right.
While I am no friend of DRM, there is a genuine ethical dilemma here. If someone (movie makers) is selling a product, should they be forced to sell at the same price to everyone? Especially when said product is not necessary for life and health? Note that this would harm people in the poorest countries because the seller would then set a price optimized for the more lucrative western market and would not be able to sell at a discount price in the poorer countries.
Outsourcing is a different thing - no one is being forced to do anything. It sucks for the local workers, but if the cheap labor abroad is treated fairly I do not see an ethical problem. Buyer's choice, just like you yourself can choose whether you shop at the local mom-and-pop store or at the big outside-town supermarket. Some people support the local store, others go there for convenience or buy there just those products which are better than at the supermarket, but most people just go to the supermarket because the prices are much cheaper. The corporations do exactly the same. Some feel social responsibility and hire local people, others hire locally only for jobs that are difficult to outsource, and the vast majority look at bottom line only. Supporting the community / local store is nice and often has long-term benefits, but I don't see why people not doing so should be condemned.
Everyone makes this about movie makers being the evil guys and the consumers being the victims, but isn't this essentially about consumers wanting to dictate to the movie makers the terms under which they can sell their product? I mean, it sure is nice for me as a consumer to be able to play my content anywhere I want, but I don't think that it is my god-given right. We can of course take the position that the public benefit (consumer benefit, faster development of new services, new innovative businesses, etc.) outweighs the rights of the movie makers, but that is a very complicated comparison. The state should not take away rights lightly.
Perhaps a WowWee Rovio (http://www.wowwee.com/en/products/tech/telepresence/rovio) would have worked better for you? Video is only 1-way, though.
You miss the point I think. They are not worried about the Afghani civilians at all. They are worried about the US ability to recruit Afghani informants.
It is insightful in the sense that companies typically ignore the law to the degree that they can get away with it, just like individual people do. And since an employee is usually at a massive disadvantage in the case of a dispute, a company can get away with quite a lot with regard to its employees. So, in that sense, they can do as they please. You can sue them, but then you have burned your bridges - it is not a viable strategy unless you are confident you can find a new job easily, or they are mistreating you so badly that unemployment is preferable by comparison. And by the way, prospective new employers do not usually appreciate workers who sued their former employer.
The last bit about standing up for yourself was somewhat unhelpful grandstanding without actionable advice, though.
If you read the articles (yes, I know... this is Slashdot) you will realize it is not a problem with companies, but with computers and cell phones in general requiring the conflict materials. For some reason, the summary included a few random names and left out others, e.g. Apple most certainly belongs in the list as it produces both computers and cell phones.
What you can do, is name the companies who do try to behave responsibly and control where their raw materials come from. Quoting one of the referenced articles: "Cell phone manufacturers like Samsung, Motorola, Apple and Nokia have long had official policies against the use of conflict minerals in their products."
You know what this means: Next Star Trek movie will have a new ship in the historical Enterprises display...
(Yeah, I know the name has been known for a long time, but just came across it now and couldn't resist.)
No matter how much you like your shiny iPhone, the poster cited SSH as his primary use case. It means his primary use case is typing shell commands. Which means a phone with a real keyboard will work best for him. Yes, you CAN type text relatively OK with the iPhone. No, that does NOT make it the best phone to type text on. Get a clue!
If the guy had asked for a smooth web browsing experience, recommending a (3G!) iPhone would have been understandable. But for SSH? Pure fanboy, or pure ignorance. Take your pick.
Oh, as for what phone to use - E70 is better if you want the regular phone form factor and have good eyes. But personally I would prefer E61i (with Blackberry form factor), as it has much larger screen (although slightly smaller resolution) which means text is easier to read. And it has more RAM, which means you can run more applications simultaneously. E.g. with E70 running a Java MIDlet and the browser simultaneously is going to be iffy because both are RAM-hungry applications. E61i is newer too, so it has a more recent version of the web browser.
You are confusing "understandable" with "acceptable". In most cases, there is an understandable reason for unacceptable behaviour. For example, rapists have themselves frequently been molested as children. While that makes it possible to understand their behavior, it does not excuse it.
Now, in some extreme cases past experiences may be considered to be so extreme that the person in fact could not act in any other way than he/she did, and so is not responsible for his/her actions. That is also known as an insanity plea.
Since you were excusing the girl and laying all the blame on the guy, it does not seem likely you were just giving an explanation for her actions. You were in fact trying to shift blame. Exactly the same thing as first defending rapists by saying they had a bad childhood, and then going on to explain how it was the girl's fault anyway for wearing such revealing clothes.
Or perhaps you are arguing that the girl was crazy?
...didn't think so.
And yes, I am using rapists as an example exactly because this is a feminist discussion. Tends to flush out the hypocrisy...
While the "would not have bought it anyway" excuse is hogwash, the reality is a bit more subtle than you make out. People will fall into three categories:
(Then there are the people who do pay for it, but they are not downloading so let's ignore them)
So your problem is the third group that would be prepared to pay for the content. These people represent actual financial loss to the content producer.
The commonly used BMW example does not hold water either, because the idea is that you could not afford a BMW. If you were able to "copy" the BMW and leave the original one intact, the seller would not have suffered a financial loss - he was never going to make a sale to you anyhow.
The interesting thing is that you can benefit from the second group, because they advertise your content via word-of-mouth. So it actually becomes a pricing problem. Typically you want to sell your product at different prices to different people, depending on how much they can afford to pay (airlines are the canonical example of this). So you need a way to extract full price from the third group while giving the product for free to the second group. This is commonly done in software with a free "personal edition" version. By adding a (valuable!) service component (web service with user accounts) to the "professional edition", you can prevent copying and entice the third group to part from their cash.
Oh, COME ON! Almost nobody would pay in advance for software, and those who would are the fraction-of-a-percent minority where an abundance of cash, a charitable mindset and idealism (or lack of realism) meet. Because:
In general, the whole attitude of "content creators should accept piracy and find other means of generating revenue" is horse manure. It is just saying that because something illegal is suddenly technically easy and difficult to prevent, it should be accepted. You cannot ban the software and machines used for the illegal activity because they have legitimate uses. Compare with guns: shooting somebody is technically easy and difficult to prevent, and we do not want to ban guns (as a society - at least yet). Yet we did not just resign ourselves to accepting murder, did we? (insert obligatory joke about US gun violence rates)
I have no sympathy for media companies that are ripping off artists and trying to charge you multiple times for the same content. But neither do I think that it is your god-given right to freely enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
But since this is turning into a rant, and those are rarely productive, here's my suggestion: Integrate the application with a server-side service that requires the application to log in to your server. You have to maintain your own server then but should be feasible for a small user base. Then you can keep track of the paid accounts and kill the compromised ones. The server-side thing should be important enough though that pirates don't just cut out that part from the application (or so intertwined with how the application operates that cutting it out is not feasible).
If you can't do that, then the only alternatives I see are either making such a niche application that the pirates don't bother (but then your application has to be best-in-class because market is so small), or focusing your application on people who aren't likely to pirate it (business and security applications, applications for novice users).
Finally - always make sure it is really easy to find and buy your application legitimately. People often are on the fence about whether to pay for it or not. A less-than-easy buying process will convince them not to pay (and probably pirate it and feel righteous about it...).
Even better: don't do it for profit. A patent allows you to forbid people from using the patented idea, there is nothing that forces you to license a patent. If you can patent the fix to a critical Windows vulnerability, and refuse to license it, Microsoft would probably need to remove the affected feature from all installations.
That's the theory. In practice,
a) Microsoft would sue you to oblivion, or, failing that, lobby a law change and
b) with all the difficulties already mentioned in implementing the scheme, the website is most likely a spoof meant to provide free zero-day vulnerabilities to bot-net creators.
You didn't read the previous post carefully enough. The argument is not that you are forced into becoming "forever an iPod user", the argument is that many people don't realize they are becoming forever iPod users when they buy a lot of music from iTunes.
What is it you can't do with your iTunes songs? Well, say Creative gets its act together and releases a killer MP3 player which becomes the must-have object of desire. With that player your music library would be worthless. So basically you are fine only as long as you will never want any other player than iPod. Which, I believe, was the main point all along.
Yep, it "just works" and people buy into that. The problem is they don't realize it's the same contract the Devil traditionally gives you: We give you all that alluring stuff you want now, and in return we own you later. It's fine if people really decide that they are willing to be forevermore iPod users in return for the ease-of-use. But I don't think most iTunes users realize that.
Of course the iPod is the reason iTunes is so popular. But once a music service gets to be the dominant player it doesn't matter how it got there, it still has the potential to be anti-competitive. iTunes has the biggest selection of music, it has TV shows, and is the most well-known brand. Previously people used iTunes because they bought an iPod; now some people already buy an iPod because they want to use iTunes.
The strict coupling between iTunes and iPod allows Apple to use discriminatory policies to maintain its dominance in the music service and MP3 player market. If you create a better MP3 player than iPod, it will still be crippled because it cannot be used with the most popular music store. If you create a better music service than iTunes, it will still be crippled because it cannot be used with the most popular MP3 player. If it were just a question of Apple vs. the competing companies, I would say Apple won fair and square; to the victor go the spoils. But it is also a question of Apple vs. the consumer. A market where one player dominates the field is seldom a good thing for the consumer, and we are witnessing this now.
The elitist thing is not in assuming everyone can rip their CDs. Yes, it is simple enough for non-technical people. The elitist thing is that you assume everyone realizes the implications of buying music from the iTunes shop. It is not as if there was a big sign saying "Warning! Any music you buy from iTunes can only be played on iPod brand players, without an iPod player the music is worthless. If you want to be able to use also other players, rip CDs instead."
Not a double standard. Apple does not allow other companies to use FairPlay - if they would, every MP3 player would support it. The whole point for Apple is to support iPod sales and customer lock-in. And Apple does not enable other DRM systems to work on iPod either. They are using the fact that they have the dominant online music store and dominant MP3 player to lock down iTunes users to iPods (because only those can play iTunes music) and to lock down iPod users to iTunes (because only iTunes can sell DRM'd music for the iPods, and major labels currently only sell DRM'd music).
Also, to those who say that it doesn't matter because you can rip CDs: you are being elitistic. That means you expect every user to have the technological savvy to understand that the song collection they bought so easily and conveniently online is just a worthless bunch of bytes if they ever want to use another brand of MP3 player. Didn't someone say iTunes has two billion downloads by now? That's an awful lot of users. Entrapment of users is not more acceptable just because it is possible to evade the trap if you are smart enough. If it were Microsoft doing this, they would get chewed out quickly enough.