A quick google will show you that there's been quite a bit of research, all of which do in fact say that the most prolific downloaders tend to be the most frequent purchasers of media.
I can't find the link, but a couple of years ago a book publisher who, like most people, bought into the myth that pirates are all freeloaders commissioned a study to see how much money pirates were costing.
A book took a couple of weeks to hit the net, so the researchers looked at sales figures to see how much of a drop there was. The researchers and the publisher who hired them were amazed to find that rather than a drop, there was a spike in sales.
On the contrary, not only was he promoted to Captain, he also was given Starfleet's most advanced, most powerful starship. So he wasn't just a starship captain, he also ran a large space station.
Also, IMO Avery Brooks was the best actor who played a starship captain. Did you ever see Spencer For Hire? He played a pimp and con man, the character was the polar opposite of Sisko.
Steward played his character in Dune pretty much the same way as he played Picard. And Shatner, well... he's no Shakespearean.
Interesting, I hadn't heard that before, and I've been tinkering with electronics for over 45 years and have read hundreds of book about it. I looked up in Wikipedia (quoted below) and found no such indication. Do you have a link? As I said, I found that intersting and would like to know more.
The thermionic triode, a vacuum tube invented in 1907, propelled the electronics age forward, enabling amplified radio technology and long-distance telephony. The triode, however, was a fragile device that consumed a lot of power. Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed a patent for a field-effect transistor (FET) in Canada in 1925, which was intended to be a solid-state replacement for the triode.[1][2] Lilienfeld also filed identical patents in the United States in 1926[3] and 1928.[4][5] However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices nor did his patents cite any specific examples of a working prototype. Since the production of high-quality semiconductor materials was still decades away, Lilienfeld's solid-state amplifier ideas would not have found practical use in the 1920s and 1930s, even if such a device were built.[6] In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device.[7]
From November 17, 1947 to December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in the United States, performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input.[8] Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors. The term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a portmanteau of the term "transfer resistor".
I'm not sure about un-bought -- he's old enough to remember how polluted things were before the EPA yet still insists that "it should be left up to the states" and "lawsuits can fix the environment."
It didn't used to, but they quietly changed that some time back. And wanting to give someone good karma is a terrible reason to mod someone up. I've modded friends down and freaks up once in a while.
Again, what does W8 offer that W7 lacks that would be worth my shelling out for a copy? Touch ain't it; I don't have a tablet and likely won't buy one, since I have a phone and a laptop.
Not just for sale, FREE. It wasn't long after I upgraded to XP before I upgraded again to Mandrake. Eight billion? How much has been spent on Linux development? Yet Linux (most distros anyway) is more secure, freer of bugs, far more hardware fault-tolerant, and has more features. Windows is a ripoff.
I wouldn't have upgraded to XP were it not for Sony's XCP trojan that my daughter innocently installed. When I reinstalled 98 I discovered I'd lost the driver disks for sound and video, and the only ones I could find on the net were for XP.
The day after I installed XP the internet stopped working. A Microsoft update had replaced my perfectly good NIC driver with one that didn't work at all. That's when I started realizing how incompetent (or lazy?) MS was and started looking at Linux in earnest.
W7's good enough that I haven't bothered installing Linux on the notebook. Yep, it's laziness that keeps Linux off of that box.
True but the environment that they have optimised us for is the one that we were in during the Stone Age.
That's the predominant view, but I don't think it's accurate. Six to eight thousand years ago when agriculture was developed, people had an evolutionary fear of cats (and some still do). But cats eat the mice that eat the grain, and we now have a symbiotic relationship with them. Why does a cat's purr make one smile? Evolution.
And even closer in time, Europeans developed a tolerance for lactose. Evolution doesn't stop.
So, just like sport, you do not want to end up with people being forced to take drugs to compete which may have deleterious long term effects.
Sports themselves have deleterious long term effects. Just look at Muhammad Ali, or any American football player, and even European football. Work has deleterious long term effects; carcinogens and other toxins in the workplace, etc.
The box with XP is an old one, and I would run Linux on it, but I need a box that will run EAC. EAC won't run in Linux, and my W7 notebook has no quaint optical drives, so EAC won't work on that, either.
That's your fault. You've let the corporate media convince you that a vote for a loser is wasted.
There are only a handful of states where your vote for President will matter at all. For the rest of us, a vote for a "third party" is the only vote that isn't wasted.
My daughter lives in Ohio, so I encouraged her to vote Obama (she was going to anyway). But I live in Illinois where Obama will win by a landslide, my vote for him or Romney is wasted. However, a vote for a Green sends a message: keep the environment clean and legalize pot.
Someone else not affiliated with Chevrolet will fix it for you though.
Only MS can fix Windows; that's a big difference. Another big difference is that if your '57 Chevy's engine blows up, it's because of wear or lack of maintenance. Software doesn't wear out, if Windows blows up it's because of a design defect.
My car is an '02, I bought a copy of XP in '04. If a design defect makes my engine blow up, the manufacturer will fix it for free. If XP blows up, tough tittie, you're SOL.
Why would we want to create a situation where software has to be so expensive as to fund a development team indefinitely for sale?
It's already insanely expensive. I paid $125 for an XP home upgrade from W98. You can buy a computer for twice that much now. And they sell millions of copies every single year. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, MS is one of the richest companies in the world. Why can't they devote some of the profits to making an OS that doesn't need to be patched every month?
The only support I need is what an auto manufacturer would do a recall for. My car is ten years old, if a defect in the braking system crops up five years from now, they'll fix it for free -- and it will cost them a bundle. They only stopped selling XP what, a year or two ago?
If there's a security vulnerability in the OS MS wrote, they fucked up. Why should I pay for Microsoft's mistakes?
I don't consider the contributions I make to my church as "charity", even though almost all of it goes to poor people. The bible diffrentiates "alms" from "tithing" and in Romney's case, his religion (unlike mine) requires a 10% tithe. So of that 13.45%, only 3% is actual charity. I give a lot larger percentage of my income to the poor (and the same amount as Romney to my church).
From your link:
The information released by the Romney camp Friday also made a point of noting that in combination the Romneys have paid close to 40% on average of their adjusted gross income to various taxes and charities.
I pay a larger percentage in taxes alone. Of course, my federal tax is over twice the capital gains tax he's paying, plus SS and medicare tax, plus 6% state income tax, 7% state sales tax, property tax (which I pay for my landlord; his taxes go up, so does my rent), plus gasoline tax, beer taxes, etc.
I'll bet when he tips a waiter he makes a "charity" deduction on it.
How much of the Mormon church's tithes go to the poor? My ex-wife is a Mormon, and according to my daughter, damned little. Most of it goes to the building and church elders (unlike my church).
The problem is that most people quit thinking like kids; they get afraid to try new things.
I'm 60 and not afraid to try new things, provided there's a reason. And I have yet to see anyone put forth a single reason to try W8.
Also, arguments can be made all day about the interface being designed to be easier, but it's not what we're used to; it's a shallower learning curve for new users, but all our new users are kids, and learning the new interface for existing users is a waste of what could otherwise be productive time blah blah blah MS Office Ribbon blah blah...
OK, we have the new Microsoft Car. The brake's on the right and the throttle's on the left and you have a joystick instead of a steering wheel. A brand new driver would have no more triouble learning to drive it than a normal car, but someone who's been driving for twenty years is going to wreck the damned thing as soon as he drives it off of the car lot.
Microsoft has given compelling reasons why it's in their interest to make the desktop act like a phone, but they've given exactly zero reasons of how it's beneficial to a user.
If a change makes the job easier, that's a good change. If it has a learning curve and makes the task harder even after you're over the curve, that is NOT innovation, that's just stupidity.
Jacob Neilson, one of the prominant useability experts, says W8 is crap for useability, and it's not just an opinion, he did the research.
Most disturbing to Microsoft should be the reaction of Jakob Nielsen, a user interface expert at the Nielsen Norman Group. Nielsen has been testing interfaces for years with users, so what he has to say carries a lot of weight. In his tests of people using Windows 8, he found that people had "a lot of struggles," especially when trying to switch between the traditional desktop and the new Windows 8 start screen. He said Windows 8 was fine for tablets, but not traditional PCs. He concluded:
"I just think when it comes to the traditional customer base, the office computer user, they're essentially being thrown under the bus."
(again, by particular standards that codify ethics - I don't want to assume that everyone shares my sense of ethics).
Your "sense of ethics" is called "morals." "Ethics" is a code of professional conduct. It's unethical for a doctor to date his or her patient, it's not unethical for a barber to do so.
Insider trading by politicians is immoral, but it's not unethical.
Let XP die already. It's "unsafe at any speed", to piggy-back on your metaphor.
What about the computers it's running on that won't support anything newer? And if it's unsafe, that's not my fault, it's MS's for releasing a buggy OS made from Swiss cheese. If any vulns are found in any MS OS since W95, by God they should fix THEIR FUCKING MISTAKES.
I'll tell you what's "unsafe", throwing a perfectly good computer in a landfill. You won't suffer personal damage from a virus, you will from toxic waste.
Who cares what the old man says anymore? As the Salesforce chap said,Windows is irrelevant these days.
What grade are you in, son? Freshman in college? Junior in high school? because it's pretty damned obvious that you've never seen the inside of an office building. Every single PC in almost every office (Ernie Ball notwithstanding) is running Windows. On desktops. And there are a lot more PCs in offices than in homes. That said, I'm running kubuntu at home and anyone who has seen many of my comments knows I'm no MS apologist, I much prefer the far superior kubuntu, but your comment was just moronic.
Irrelevant? Son, I feel sorry for you, having all that ignorance and such little knowledge of the world.
BTW, mods, his comment wasn't flamebait, it was just stupid.
If it isn't broke, we should still try to make it better.
The trouble is, they don't improve, they simply change. Take that stupid ribbon interface: renaming "edit" to "home" was brain-dead retarded. That's not an improvement, that's a degradation. Taking away all text from the file menu and moving it to where you expect the max/min/close usually are isn't an improvement, it's a degradation.
How is anything about W8 in any way an improvement?
Or look and take advantage of the new features
What new features?
Often such design changes offer tradeoffs, so you get something better and you may lose something.
If any functionality is lost, that's NOT improvement.
My Laptop has a multi-touch screen and Windows 7 doesn't cut it
Prove you're not lying. What touch screen laptop comes with W7? You're insulting our intelligence.
Windows 7 doesn't cut it, Hard to click small icons, zooming is choppy...
Odd, I don't have those problems on my small W7 laptop or my kubuntu tower, and never had them with any other MS OS.
Slashdot Mirror
A quick google will show you that there's been quite a bit of research, all of which do in fact say that the most prolific downloaders tend to be the most frequent purchasers of media.
I can't find the link, but a couple of years ago a book publisher who, like most people, bought into the myth that pirates are all freeloaders commissioned a study to see how much money pirates were costing.
A book took a couple of weeks to hit the net, so the researchers looked at sales figures to see how much of a drop there was. The researchers and the publisher who hired them were amazed to find that rather than a drop, there was a spike in sales.
The research is there if you care to look for it.
Sisko wasn't a captain like the rest
On the contrary, not only was he promoted to Captain, he also was given Starfleet's most advanced, most powerful starship. So he wasn't just a starship captain, he also ran a large space station.
Also, IMO Avery Brooks was the best actor who played a starship captain. Did you ever see Spencer For Hire? He played a pimp and con man, the character was the polar opposite of Sisko.
Steward played his character in Dune pretty much the same way as he played Picard. And Shatner, well... he's no Shakespearean.
Transistors were initially though to be useless.
Interesting, I hadn't heard that before, and I've been tinkering with electronics for over 45 years and have read hundreds of book about it. I looked up in Wikipedia (quoted below) and found no such indication. Do you have a link? As I said, I found that intersting and would like to know more.
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that
(Humor lesson... it's not the joke, it's how you tell it.)
I'm not sure about un-bought -- he's old enough to remember how polluted things were before the EPA yet still insists that "it should be left up to the states" and "lawsuits can fix the environment."
Bought or stupid? My money's on bought.
If you're on the west coast that's not surprising. OT, but about your sig...
The layout. However, I haven't tried Gnome in ten years, familiarity is part of it.
Funny doesn't apply any kind of karma bonus
It didn't used to, but they quietly changed that some time back. And wanting to give someone good karma is a terrible reason to mod someone up. I've modded friends down and freaks up once in a while.
Again, what does W8 offer that W7 lacks that would be worth my shelling out for a copy? Touch ain't it; I don't have a tablet and likely won't buy one, since I have a phone and a laptop.
So which is it dude?
It isn't either/or, it's two separate issues. What laptop comes with a touch screen? I've never heard of one.
They were for sale and you choose XP instead.
Not just for sale, FREE. It wasn't long after I upgraded to XP before I upgraded again to Mandrake. Eight billion? How much has been spent on Linux development? Yet Linux (most distros anyway) is more secure, freer of bugs, far more hardware fault-tolerant, and has more features. Windows is a ripoff.
I wouldn't have upgraded to XP were it not for Sony's XCP trojan that my daughter innocently installed. When I reinstalled 98 I discovered I'd lost the driver disks for sound and video, and the only ones I could find on the net were for XP.
The day after I installed XP the internet stopped working. A Microsoft update had replaced my perfectly good NIC driver with one that didn't work at all. That's when I started realizing how incompetent (or lazy?) MS was and started looking at Linux in earnest.
W7's good enough that I haven't bothered installing Linux on the notebook. Yep, it's laziness that keeps Linux off of that box.
P.p.s. sent on a phone and the editor's slow as hell for some reason
It wasn't your phone, slashdot was on its knees this morning. 504s and "Guru Meditations" for a couple of hours.
True but the environment that they have optimised us for is the one that we were in during the Stone Age.
That's the predominant view, but I don't think it's accurate. Six to eight thousand years ago when agriculture was developed, people had an evolutionary fear of cats (and some still do). But cats eat the mice that eat the grain, and we now have a symbiotic relationship with them. Why does a cat's purr make one smile? Evolution.
And even closer in time, Europeans developed a tolerance for lactose. Evolution doesn't stop.
So, just like sport, you do not want to end up with people being forced to take drugs to compete which may have deleterious long term effects.
Sports themselves have deleterious long term effects. Just look at Muhammad Ali, or any American football player, and even European football. Work has deleterious long term effects; carcinogens and other toxins in the workplace, etc.
The box with XP is an old one, and I would run Linux on it, but I need a box that will run EAC. EAC won't run in Linux, and my W7 notebook has no quaint optical drives, so EAC won't work on that, either.
3rd parties ARE LOCKED OUT.
That's your fault. You've let the corporate media convince you that a vote for a loser is wasted.
There are only a handful of states where your vote for President will matter at all. For the rest of us, a vote for a "third party" is the only vote that isn't wasted.
My daughter lives in Ohio, so I encouraged her to vote Obama (she was going to anyway). But I live in Illinois where Obama will win by a landslide, my vote for him or Romney is wasted. However, a vote for a Green sends a message: keep the environment clean and legalize pot.
Someone else not affiliated with Chevrolet will fix it for you though.
Only MS can fix Windows; that's a big difference. Another big difference is that if your '57 Chevy's engine blows up, it's because of wear or lack of maintenance. Software doesn't wear out, if Windows blows up it's because of a design defect.
My car is an '02, I bought a copy of XP in '04. If a design defect makes my engine blow up, the manufacturer will fix it for free. If XP blows up, tough tittie, you're SOL.
Why would we want to create a situation where software has to be so expensive as to fund a development team indefinitely for sale?
It's already insanely expensive. I paid $125 for an XP home upgrade from W98. You can buy a computer for twice that much now. And they sell millions of copies every single year. Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, MS is one of the richest companies in the world. Why can't they devote some of the profits to making an OS that doesn't need to be patched every month?
The only support I need is what an auto manufacturer would do a recall for. My car is ten years old, if a defect in the braking system crops up five years from now, they'll fix it for free -- and it will cost them a bundle. They only stopped selling XP what, a year or two ago?
If there's a security vulnerability in the OS MS wrote, they fucked up. Why should I pay for Microsoft's mistakes?
I don't consider the contributions I make to my church as "charity", even though almost all of it goes to poor people. The bible diffrentiates "alms" from "tithing" and in Romney's case, his religion (unlike mine) requires a 10% tithe. So of that 13.45%, only 3% is actual charity. I give a lot larger percentage of my income to the poor (and the same amount as Romney to my church).
From your link:
I pay a larger percentage in taxes alone. Of course, my federal tax is over twice the capital gains tax he's paying, plus SS and medicare tax, plus 6% state income tax, 7% state sales tax, property tax (which I pay for my landlord; his taxes go up, so does my rent), plus gasoline tax, beer taxes, etc.
I'll bet when he tips a waiter he makes a "charity" deduction on it.
How much of the Mormon church's tithes go to the poor? My ex-wife is a Mormon, and according to my daughter, damned little. Most of it goes to the building and church elders (unlike my church).
Maybe you should actually try Windows 8 before ranting about it.
Why? I have yet to see any compelling reason to try it.
There is a lot more to it then just the metro stuff.
Such as?
The problem is that most people quit thinking like kids; they get afraid to try new things.
I'm 60 and not afraid to try new things, provided there's a reason. And I have yet to see anyone put forth a single reason to try W8.
Also, arguments can be made all day about the interface being designed to be easier, but it's not what we're used to; it's a shallower learning curve for new users, but all our new users are kids, and learning the new interface for existing users is a waste of what could otherwise be productive time blah blah blah MS Office Ribbon blah blah...
OK, we have the new Microsoft Car. The brake's on the right and the throttle's on the left and you have a joystick instead of a steering wheel. A brand new driver would have no more triouble learning to drive it than a normal car, but someone who's been driving for twenty years is going to wreck the damned thing as soon as he drives it off of the car lot.
Microsoft has given compelling reasons why it's in their interest to make the desktop act like a phone, but they've given exactly zero reasons of how it's beneficial to a user.
If a change makes the job easier, that's a good change. If it has a learning curve and makes the task harder even after you're over the curve, that is NOT innovation, that's just stupidity.
Jacob Neilson, one of the prominant useability experts, says W8 is crap for useability, and it's not just an opinion, he did the research.
As to the "thinking like kids", well,
(again, by particular standards that codify ethics - I don't want to assume that everyone shares my sense of ethics).
Your "sense of ethics" is called "morals." "Ethics" is a code of professional conduct. It's unethical for a doctor to date his or her patient, it's not unethical for a barber to do so.
Insider trading by politicians is immoral, but it's not unethical.
Let XP die already. It's "unsafe at any speed", to piggy-back on your metaphor.
What about the computers it's running on that won't support anything newer? And if it's unsafe, that's not my fault, it's MS's for releasing a buggy OS made from Swiss cheese. If any vulns are found in any MS OS since W95, by God they should fix THEIR FUCKING MISTAKES.
I'll tell you what's "unsafe", throwing a perfectly good computer in a landfill. You won't suffer personal damage from a virus, you will from toxic waste.
LOL, well modded!
Who cares what the old man says anymore? As the Salesforce chap said,Windows is irrelevant these days.
What grade are you in, son? Freshman in college? Junior in high school? because it's pretty damned obvious that you've never seen the inside of an office building. Every single PC in almost every office (Ernie Ball notwithstanding) is running Windows. On desktops. And there are a lot more PCs in offices than in homes. That said, I'm running kubuntu at home and anyone who has seen many of my comments knows I'm no MS apologist, I much prefer the far superior kubuntu, but your comment was just moronic.
Irrelevant? Son, I feel sorry for you, having all that ignorance and such little knowledge of the world.
BTW, mods, his comment wasn't flamebait, it was just stupid.
If it isn't broke, we should still try to make it better.
The trouble is, they don't improve, they simply change. Take that stupid ribbon interface: renaming "edit" to "home" was brain-dead retarded. That's not an improvement, that's a degradation. Taking away all text from the file menu and moving it to where you expect the max/min/close usually are isn't an improvement, it's a degradation.
How is anything about W8 in any way an improvement?
Or look and take advantage of the new features
What new features?
Often such design changes offer tradeoffs, so you get something better and you may lose something.
If any functionality is lost, that's NOT improvement.
My Laptop has a multi-touch screen and Windows 7 doesn't cut it
Prove you're not lying. What touch screen laptop comes with W7? You're insulting our intelligence.
Windows 7 doesn't cut it, Hard to click small icons, zooming is choppy...
Odd, I don't have those problems on my small W7 laptop or my kubuntu tower, and never had them with any other MS OS.