When did I ever say it was moral, ethical, or 'right'? I didn't. I said it benefits Nintendo for it to happen. Save your tirades for someone who thinks it should be legal to steal.
While I don't own Katamari Damacy, I -did- try to buy it used the other day.
On the other hand, I bought Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for the PSP when it came out, and for XBLA the other day as well. (I forgive you for getting the name wrong.) I will admit that most would not find enough entertainment in them to buy even 1 copy, but I found it to be a really great game.
I absolutely disagree with the homebrew statement, though. There's never going to be a homebrew game that competes with the heavy hitters: Oblivion, GTA, Halo, etc. There may be a few people who think there are better homebrew games, but the overwhelming majority don't think so.
I've had Gamefly for over a year. There was a period of a couple months where about 1 in 10 games got lost somehow. I had never placed it in a mailbox without a lock, so there was no issue. I don't know what they'd have said if they weren't in locked mailboxes. There was never one that didn't get to me, it was always outgoing ones that got lost.
Outside of that, I've never had any real issues with them, except that they seem to do what Netflix does: If you send them back too quickly, they delay receipt of the game for a bit so they can slow it down. I've got no proof of that, but it only happened when I was sending games back the next day. Games that got sent back a week later arrived days earlier than ones that were sent back the next day.
I've considered Blockbuster's service, but their local terms suck (5 trades per month max, I think it was) and their selection has historically sucked as well. I haven't looked in the last 2 years, though, so that could have changed.
I'm currently on a 2-at-a-time plan because there were so many games that I felt were worth a purchase (I'll learn my lesson 1 day) but I've done the 4-at-a-time plan as well. I may move to 3 soon if decent games with 0-replay keep coming out. (Bioshock, I'm looking at you!) I can always rent them again if they get addons/updates, too.
What assumption? Read it again. I said 'people with full-time jobs and disposable income.' I didn't say people that have full-time jobs HAVE disposable income, I said those with both.
It should come of no surprise to anyone that people with no disposable income don't buy luxury items. It's pretty obvious.
"It can destroy years of hard work by a team of very talented software developers, who strive to create games consumers enjoy playing."
It -can-, but it doesn't. Instead, it allows people that don't have the money to buy the game to play it anyhow, and get their friends excited, and get them interested in sequels and spinoffs. Instead of forcing the penniless gamer to go out and play in the yard for free, it keeps them addicted to video games.
On the other hand, people that -can- afford the games buy them, for the most part. I'm not talking the teenagers that have to skip lunch this month to buy a game, but the people with full-time jobs and disposable income.
And when it comes right down to it, the only difference between someone "stealing" a game using a modchip and that same person buying the game used is the timeframe. The developer doesn't get any money from either way. (Of course, GameStop gets some money on the used route, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.)
My current tactic? Rental. Any game I don't absolutely have to have right away, I just rent it. For 1/3 of a game per month, I can rent 2-4 by mail. For 3/4 of a game per month, I can rent 4-8. Since I lose interest in most games after a few hours anyhow, this works great for me. I've had some games that I thought I'd love that I spent less than an hour playing them before they were back in the mail. GameFly (and probably other services) will even let you buy the game at a reduced price if you want to keep it. That makes it really hard to justify buying it brand new.
So in the end, Nintendo can rid the market of these devices and it won't change things for the better. That isn't their goal, though. Their goal is to remind people that they are illegal and 'wrong'. And they did that.
Nintendo definitely has made themselves a new niche. I brought my Wii to my mother's house and she was hooked. She ended up getting one (I paid half as a Birthday gift) and she now has Carnival Games for it, too. She plays them both regularly. She now also has a DS, so does my father. They play Brain Age, Picross and Sudoku on them. Dad loved Sudoku on paper, but Mom wasn't really into all that... She's now totally addicted to Picross and Brain Age. My sister (already a casual gamer) is, too.
But I think the focus here was on more conventional games. I see a lot of posts in 2 categories:
I love the old games. The new ones are too complicated. I love the new games. The old ones are too simple.
Am I the only one that loves both?
I still have fun with Joust, Gauntlet and Arkanoid. I love Portal, Shadow of the Colossus, Kingdom Hearts, etc etc. There are times when I want a simple game and I'll pick up Solitaire, or when I want action and I'll pick up Dynasty Warriors. I play things from every genre and like them.
It seems to me there's a type of game that is missing: Games that appeal to both kinds of people: Simple and Complicated. Is it possible? Can you make a game simple enough for a Pong-lover to enjoy, but complicated enough for an RPG-lover? It would be fun to try, I'd think.
So what are you suggesting? That they take a one-of-a-kind helicopter made from car, bike, and 747 parts seriously? That they should approach him with tons of cash and beg him to start a helicopter manufacturing plant?
I'll admit it's amazing that he managed to build it. I'll admit that he has big dreams. I'm not yet willing to admit he's capable of making a safe helicopter, and I bet they aren't either.
If he really -can- do it, he should be looking for investors, not buyers. He's never going to manage a proper, safe helicopter without a lot more money than he put into his current one. And he's never going to get a buyer until he has a prototype.
It's like saying, "I've got a small garden at my house. Why won't they pay me to grow cabbage for the whole country?"
You know what? What you just described... I don't mind. If they want to record that I spent 30 second staring at a billboard with Axe body spray, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with them logging my IP. (All of them probably do, anyhow.)
What I'm not fine with is then also taking down ANY information that is on my personal computer. They have no right to collect or use information about what hardware, software or data is on my computer.
It's a good thing I got tired of the same old MMO BS, because back when I was 'addicted' I probably would have played this crap anyhow. (That was like 10 years ago, for those who are counting.)
"The death of X as we know it" isn't always a bad thing. Here's a few things that had that happen:
Entertainment Construction Travel Communication Mathemetics Geography
All of these things are done -way- different than 100 years ago. Very few aspects of any of them could be considered worse off. Why is 'news' not the same? We used to be restricted to gossip, then the reach of the local printed paper, then the reach of the radio and television... Now the internet lets everyone communicate with everyone and self-style journalists (bloggers) can disseminate information with little or no cost to themselves. China has proven how hard it is to censor the internet and exactly how free information really is.
That was my answer as well. It wouldn't take many 'none of the above' elections to run through the typical dumbass candidates and end up with some that actually take a stand... And if enough minor elections do it first, we may not even need to vote that way in the major ones.
But let's call it something else: None of the above are worthy of office.
That'll say exactly what it means. Simply 'none of the above' implies that they might be worthy, you just aren't going to vote for them... Possibly because you like someone else better that isn't in the election for whatever reason. By expliciting having them state that the candidates aren't worthy, you can elminate them from future runs of the current election, ensuring other candidates will get a chance.
Is it just me, or do most of those fonts look exactly the same bold as regular? How stupid is that?
Also, they seem to look blurry...
And someone already mentioned that the fonts render size differently, too... I know HTML is supposed to be dynamic and all, but the size of the font is a pretty important thing when designing a page.
If I were designing a page and wanted it to have a different font, I'd be a lot more likely to suggest someone download fonts that actually look good (ones that I specify) and fallback to the known fonts if they haven't than specify Vista's fonts.
No, it's a regular XBox 360 with a few arcade games on a disc. There's no requirement for Live.
Yes, you can add an HD to it, but you'll have to buy a Microsoft one because I don't think there are any generics with the proper hookups yet. (You can later buy a generic, as the hookups are an addon... You just can't buy the hookups separately.)
With no HD, there's no backward compatibility and the ability to download games from Live would be severly hampered... The memory cards are quite expensive, especially compared to the price of a hard drive that holds a -lot- more.
There's nothing bionic about it. They are using a man-made tube to help a real nerve grow from stem cells. There's no electronics, not even any moving parts. It doesn't augment or affect the nerve in any artificial way. The end result is... A normal nerve.
I went to the site that first day and it was not at all obvious that you could put 0 and pay nothing... There was only a statement about a fee for credit card use. I chose instead to do nothing as I've never heard their music that I know of and didn't know what it might be worth to me.
I see a lot of people saying "They don't host the files!"
This is absolutely wrong. They may not be the initial point that the file enters the network, but they DO host the files on their own servers there -entire- time that it's available to their customers. Every usenet provider does this. It's how the entire system works.
Each provider can choose which groups they will bother to handle (it used to be common for free services not to handle the 'alt.' newsgroups) and they -can- remove anything from that server that they choose. It wouldn't be fun to find exactly what the RIAA has requested a takedown for without specific post IDs, but it can be done.
Places that don't host the files are merely indexing services (like newzbin.com) and truly do not host the files. It's just a list of the post IDs that you need to grab what you are looking for from usenet.
I've never heard of a usenet provider that has removed partial content... Only entire groups, and never (that I've heard of) because someone asked them to.
So while it is theoretically possible for this law to protect them, they've never complied with it and it won't do them a bit of good.
It won't do the RIAA any good, either, though... Hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world mirror the same information from 3 to 200 days... They would have to individually ask for the files to be removed from each of them individually.
(Before anyone objects, I know they aren't stored as 'files', but that's irrelevant to the conversation.)
If they're so much better at communication, why are they reading nuances where they don't exist? I don't buy that for a minute.
No, instead, women have been taught to be dainty, and men have been taunt to treat them as such and not to use 'foul' words in front of them. They make more of it because there's a social taboo involved that is being broken. It has nothing to do with which sex communicates better.
I think that's kind of the point, though. The meta tags and stuff are the easy bits and don't make your site look like trash. To get ahead of all the others already using meta tags, you have to trash your site to increase your Google ranking beyond that.
I actually learned some stuff about Google ranking there... I've never tried to optimize for that (well, not in many years) so I wouldn't have thought of some of that. (Including other tips in the other reply to your post.)
Yes, for about the first 5 'levels'. After that, no, but then, it wasn't long enough for that. (That's different than saying it was too short, though I think it could have stood to be a bit longer.)
I didn't need the slides to know that 'GLaDoS' was 'alive'. It was pretty obvious anyhow, almost from the start. In fact, as far as 'hints' go, it was more like a getting whacked on the head with a 2x4 than a 'hints'.
Yes, no stupid end speech dumbing it down further. Thank God. Tricks me? Attempts to. None of her 'tricks' would have fooled even the least self-aware of us primates.
The puzzles were all slightly different, each building on the last. Even the last 'puzzle' only incorporated tricks you learned in all the others. It was actually one of the easy ones.
Sorry, but if you're going to hold Portal up as 'art', you might do better to look into games that have more substance. Personally, I think even GTA San Andreas has more 'art' value than Portal. It was a vivid world with interactions that meant something and a story that would take more than a couple sentences to tell.
All that makes it sound like I didn't like Portal, and that couldn't be further from the truth. I bought Orange Box for the PC -just- for Portal, and at the rate of $16+/hr, I still consider it well worth the money. I just don't buy the 'art' bit for even a second.
The importance of Portal is the the ART!? Are you kidding?
It has less story than most games. The areas are all virtually identical. There is only 1 way to interact with the environment.
The only thing that might qualify it as art is the AMAZING ending and awesome song at the end. I didn't realize that was JoCo that made that song (mainly because he usually sings them himself)... It's a very compelling song.
No, the game is much more important for the 'portal' technology and their ability to make a very compelling and fun puzzle game in a typical FPS environment.
Well damn, you can't even be honest anymore without someone suing or stealing from you.
In that case, I guess the IFPI could kiss their domain goodbye, because they can't legally return it and compensate the source without it costing them money. Fsck that.
Still, I'm not TPB, and they may have other tricks up their sleeves. Will still bear watching.
I think it's hilarious, if a bit cruel. So far, I'd probably have done the same thing, though.
The turning point will come when the original IFPI asks for the domain back. I'd let them buy it from me at normal cost, and reimburse the guy who snagged it. Will they? I don't think they did anything illegal, so they are under no obligation to help an organization that is dead set on putting them out of business. It'll probably depend on the IFPI's reaction, I guess.
No matter how you look at it, this is interesting and will be fun to watch, as with everything TPB does.
It depends on how you use the drive. I've killed a few drives in my time. 1 was from kicking the computer while it was on (I was young and stupid.) The other 2 died from excessive use. They were being read and written constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for about a year. I know it was constant because it was stuff I was grabbing from the net, and a lot of it ended up deleted before it was ever fully looked through. (I had my reasons.)
This kind of constant use is apparently too hard on consumer hard drives. After I killed the second one like this, I reworked how I was doing things and haven't lost a drive since. The manufacturer replaced both of those hard drives and they've been fine since as well.
The computer shop I used to work for had a 'server' machine with SCSI hard drives. Cheetahs, I think they were. The other day I was looking at it to try to fix it for him and 1 drive was totally dead, 1 was flaky (half speed) and the other 3 seemed to be fine. He's lost other drives just like them before in that machine. This 'server' hosts his webpage that nobody ever goes to and a couple email accounts in Windows Server. It sees basically no use, and yet the drives died.
The moral? Just because you don't see hard drives die doesn't mean they don't.
Slashdot Mirror
I once had '#1 abuser' title at an ISP and I call tell you this: They don't care.
They -want- all the heavy users to leave and leave them with only light users that pay full price. It's their dream situation.
When did I ever say it was moral, ethical, or 'right'? I didn't. I said it benefits Nintendo for it to happen. Save your tirades for someone who thinks it should be legal to steal.
While I don't own Katamari Damacy, I -did- try to buy it used the other day.
On the other hand, I bought Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for the PSP when it came out, and for XBLA the other day as well. (I forgive you for getting the name wrong.) I will admit that most would not find enough entertainment in them to buy even 1 copy, but I found it to be a really great game.
I absolutely disagree with the homebrew statement, though. There's never going to be a homebrew game that competes with the heavy hitters: Oblivion, GTA, Halo, etc. There may be a few people who think there are better homebrew games, but the overwhelming majority don't think so.
I've had Gamefly for over a year. There was a period of a couple months where about 1 in 10 games got lost somehow. I had never placed it in a mailbox without a lock, so there was no issue. I don't know what they'd have said if they weren't in locked mailboxes. There was never one that didn't get to me, it was always outgoing ones that got lost.
Outside of that, I've never had any real issues with them, except that they seem to do what Netflix does: If you send them back too quickly, they delay receipt of the game for a bit so they can slow it down. I've got no proof of that, but it only happened when I was sending games back the next day. Games that got sent back a week later arrived days earlier than ones that were sent back the next day.
I've considered Blockbuster's service, but their local terms suck (5 trades per month max, I think it was) and their selection has historically sucked as well. I haven't looked in the last 2 years, though, so that could have changed.
I'm currently on a 2-at-a-time plan because there were so many games that I felt were worth a purchase (I'll learn my lesson 1 day) but I've done the 4-at-a-time plan as well. I may move to 3 soon if decent games with 0-replay keep coming out. (Bioshock, I'm looking at you!) I can always rent them again if they get addons/updates, too.
What assumption? Read it again. I said 'people with full-time jobs and disposable income.' I didn't say people that have full-time jobs HAVE disposable income, I said those with both.
It should come of no surprise to anyone that people with no disposable income don't buy luxury items. It's pretty obvious.
"It can destroy years of hard work by a team of very talented software developers, who strive to create games consumers enjoy playing."
It -can-, but it doesn't. Instead, it allows people that don't have the money to buy the game to play it anyhow, and get their friends excited, and get them interested in sequels and spinoffs. Instead of forcing the penniless gamer to go out and play in the yard for free, it keeps them addicted to video games.
On the other hand, people that -can- afford the games buy them, for the most part. I'm not talking the teenagers that have to skip lunch this month to buy a game, but the people with full-time jobs and disposable income.
And when it comes right down to it, the only difference between someone "stealing" a game using a modchip and that same person buying the game used is the timeframe. The developer doesn't get any money from either way. (Of course, GameStop gets some money on the used route, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.)
My current tactic? Rental. Any game I don't absolutely have to have right away, I just rent it. For 1/3 of a game per month, I can rent 2-4 by mail. For 3/4 of a game per month, I can rent 4-8. Since I lose interest in most games after a few hours anyhow, this works great for me. I've had some games that I thought I'd love that I spent less than an hour playing them before they were back in the mail. GameFly (and probably other services) will even let you buy the game at a reduced price if you want to keep it. That makes it really hard to justify buying it brand new.
So in the end, Nintendo can rid the market of these devices and it won't change things for the better. That isn't their goal, though. Their goal is to remind people that they are illegal and 'wrong'. And they did that.
Nintendo definitely has made themselves a new niche. I brought my Wii to my mother's house and she was hooked. She ended up getting one (I paid half as a Birthday gift) and she now has Carnival Games for it, too. She plays them both regularly. She now also has a DS, so does my father. They play Brain Age, Picross and Sudoku on them. Dad loved Sudoku on paper, but Mom wasn't really into all that... She's now totally addicted to Picross and Brain Age. My sister (already a casual gamer) is, too.
But I think the focus here was on more conventional games. I see a lot of posts in 2 categories:
I love the old games. The new ones are too complicated.
I love the new games. The old ones are too simple.
Am I the only one that loves both?
I still have fun with Joust, Gauntlet and Arkanoid. I love Portal, Shadow of the Colossus, Kingdom Hearts, etc etc. There are times when I want a simple game and I'll pick up Solitaire, or when I want action and I'll pick up Dynasty Warriors. I play things from every genre and like them.
It seems to me there's a type of game that is missing: Games that appeal to both kinds of people: Simple and Complicated. Is it possible? Can you make a game simple enough for a Pong-lover to enjoy, but complicated enough for an RPG-lover? It would be fun to try, I'd think.
Agreed, but his attitude is not 'teach me' but rather 'nobody wants to pay me.' It's not helping him any.
So what are you suggesting? That they take a one-of-a-kind helicopter made from car, bike, and 747 parts seriously? That they should approach him with tons of cash and beg him to start a helicopter manufacturing plant?
I'll admit it's amazing that he managed to build it. I'll admit that he has big dreams. I'm not yet willing to admit he's capable of making a safe helicopter, and I bet they aren't either.
If he really -can- do it, he should be looking for investors, not buyers. He's never going to manage a proper, safe helicopter without a lot more money than he put into his current one. And he's never going to get a buyer until he has a prototype.
It's like saying, "I've got a small garden at my house. Why won't they pay me to grow cabbage for the whole country?"
You know what? What you just described... I don't mind. If they want to record that I spent 30 second staring at a billboard with Axe body spray, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with them logging my IP. (All of them probably do, anyhow.)
What I'm not fine with is then also taking down ANY information that is on my personal computer. They have no right to collect or use information about what hardware, software or data is on my computer.
It's a good thing I got tired of the same old MMO BS, because back when I was 'addicted' I probably would have played this crap anyhow. (That was like 10 years ago, for those who are counting.)
"The death of X as we know it" isn't always a bad thing. Here's a few things that had that happen:
Entertainment
Construction
Travel
Communication
Mathemetics
Geography
All of these things are done -way- different than 100 years ago. Very few aspects of any of them could be considered worse off. Why is 'news' not the same? We used to be restricted to gossip, then the reach of the local printed paper, then the reach of the radio and television... Now the internet lets everyone communicate with everyone and self-style journalists (bloggers) can disseminate information with little or no cost to themselves. China has proven how hard it is to censor the internet and exactly how free information really is.
That was my answer as well. It wouldn't take many 'none of the above' elections to run through the typical dumbass candidates and end up with some that actually take a stand... And if enough minor elections do it first, we may not even need to vote that way in the major ones.
But let's call it something else: None of the above are worthy of office.
That'll say exactly what it means. Simply 'none of the above' implies that they might be worthy, you just aren't going to vote for them... Possibly because you like someone else better that isn't in the election for whatever reason. By expliciting having them state that the candidates aren't worthy, you can elminate them from future runs of the current election, ensuring other candidates will get a chance.
Is it just me, or do most of those fonts look exactly the same bold as regular? How stupid is that?
Also, they seem to look blurry...
And someone already mentioned that the fonts render size differently, too... I know HTML is supposed to be dynamic and all, but the size of the font is a pretty important thing when designing a page.
If I were designing a page and wanted it to have a different font, I'd be a lot more likely to suggest someone download fonts that actually look good (ones that I specify) and fallback to the known fonts if they haven't than specify Vista's fonts.
No, it's a regular XBox 360 with a few arcade games on a disc. There's no requirement for Live.
Yes, you can add an HD to it, but you'll have to buy a Microsoft one because I don't think there are any generics with the proper hookups yet. (You can later buy a generic, as the hookups are an addon... You just can't buy the hookups separately.)
With no HD, there's no backward compatibility and the ability to download games from Live would be severly hampered... The memory cards are quite expensive, especially compared to the price of a hard drive that holds a -lot- more.
There's nothing bionic about it. They are using a man-made tube to help a real nerve grow from stem cells. There's no electronics, not even any moving parts. It doesn't augment or affect the nerve in any artificial way. The end result is... A normal nerve.
I went to the site that first day and it was not at all obvious that you could put 0 and pay nothing... There was only a statement about a fee for credit card use. I chose instead to do nothing as I've never heard their music that I know of and didn't know what it might be worth to me.
I see a lot of people saying "They don't host the files!"
This is absolutely wrong. They may not be the initial point that the file enters the network, but they DO host the files on their own servers there -entire- time that it's available to their customers. Every usenet provider does this. It's how the entire system works.
Each provider can choose which groups they will bother to handle (it used to be common for free services not to handle the 'alt.' newsgroups) and they -can- remove anything from that server that they choose. It wouldn't be fun to find exactly what the RIAA has requested a takedown for without specific post IDs, but it can be done.
Places that don't host the files are merely indexing services (like newzbin.com) and truly do not host the files. It's just a list of the post IDs that you need to grab what you are looking for from usenet.
I've never heard of a usenet provider that has removed partial content... Only entire groups, and never (that I've heard of) because someone asked them to.
So while it is theoretically possible for this law to protect them, they've never complied with it and it won't do them a bit of good.
It won't do the RIAA any good, either, though... Hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world mirror the same information from 3 to 200 days... They would have to individually ask for the files to be removed from each of them individually.
(Before anyone objects, I know they aren't stored as 'files', but that's irrelevant to the conversation.)
If they're so much better at communication, why are they reading nuances where they don't exist? I don't buy that for a minute.
No, instead, women have been taught to be dainty, and men have been taunt to treat them as such and not to use 'foul' words in front of them. They make more of it because there's a social taboo involved that is being broken. It has nothing to do with which sex communicates better.
Why? Amazon did nothing illegal. While they were suing, they had a valid, approved patent. Amazon has not broken any laws or contracts.
I think that's kind of the point, though. The meta tags and stuff are the easy bits and don't make your site look like trash. To get ahead of all the others already using meta tags, you have to trash your site to increase your Google ranking beyond that.
I actually learned some stuff about Google ranking there... I've never tried to optimize for that (well, not in many years) so I wouldn't have thought of some of that. (Including other tips in the other reply to your post.)
"Where you bored even ONCE?"
Yes, for about the first 5 'levels'. After that, no, but then, it wasn't long enough for that. (That's different than saying it was too short, though I think it could have stood to be a bit longer.)
I didn't need the slides to know that 'GLaDoS' was 'alive'. It was pretty obvious anyhow, almost from the start. In fact, as far as 'hints' go, it was more like a getting whacked on the head with a 2x4 than a 'hints'.
Yes, no stupid end speech dumbing it down further. Thank God. Tricks me? Attempts to. None of her 'tricks' would have fooled even the least self-aware of us primates.
The puzzles were all slightly different, each building on the last. Even the last 'puzzle' only incorporated tricks you learned in all the others. It was actually one of the easy ones.
Sorry, but if you're going to hold Portal up as 'art', you might do better to look into games that have more substance. Personally, I think even GTA San Andreas has more 'art' value than Portal. It was a vivid world with interactions that meant something and a story that would take more than a couple sentences to tell.
All that makes it sound like I didn't like Portal, and that couldn't be further from the truth. I bought Orange Box for the PC -just- for Portal, and at the rate of $16+/hr, I still consider it well worth the money. I just don't buy the 'art' bit for even a second.
The importance of Portal is the the ART!? Are you kidding?
It has less story than most games. The areas are all virtually identical. There is only 1 way to interact with the environment.
The only thing that might qualify it as art is the AMAZING ending and awesome song at the end. I didn't realize that was JoCo that made that song (mainly because he usually sings them himself)... It's a very compelling song.
No, the game is much more important for the 'portal' technology and their ability to make a very compelling and fun puzzle game in a typical FPS environment.
Well damn, you can't even be honest anymore without someone suing or stealing from you.
In that case, I guess the IFPI could kiss their domain goodbye, because they can't legally return it and compensate the source without it costing them money. Fsck that.
Still, I'm not TPB, and they may have other tricks up their sleeves. Will still bear watching.
I think it's hilarious, if a bit cruel. So far, I'd probably have done the same thing, though.
The turning point will come when the original IFPI asks for the domain back. I'd let them buy it from me at normal cost, and reimburse the guy who snagged it. Will they? I don't think they did anything illegal, so they are under no obligation to help an organization that is dead set on putting them out of business. It'll probably depend on the IFPI's reaction, I guess.
No matter how you look at it, this is interesting and will be fun to watch, as with everything TPB does.
It depends on how you use the drive. I've killed a few drives in my time. 1 was from kicking the computer while it was on (I was young and stupid.) The other 2 died from excessive use. They were being read and written constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for about a year. I know it was constant because it was stuff I was grabbing from the net, and a lot of it ended up deleted before it was ever fully looked through. (I had my reasons.)
This kind of constant use is apparently too hard on consumer hard drives. After I killed the second one like this, I reworked how I was doing things and haven't lost a drive since. The manufacturer replaced both of those hard drives and they've been fine since as well.
The computer shop I used to work for had a 'server' machine with SCSI hard drives. Cheetahs, I think they were. The other day I was looking at it to try to fix it for him and 1 drive was totally dead, 1 was flaky (half speed) and the other 3 seemed to be fine. He's lost other drives just like them before in that machine. This 'server' hosts his webpage that nobody ever goes to and a couple email accounts in Windows Server. It sees basically no use, and yet the drives died.
The moral? Just because you don't see hard drives die doesn't mean they don't.