If Activision sees that no one's buying the game, and that it's not even considered a suitable target of piracy, they'll either ditch the PC or work to make it a better experience next time. If they see a lot of grog-swillers with peg-legs, Activision will be able to play the victim and blame the failure of the game on the greed of others, instead of their own ineptitude.
Yes, but here's the thing : pretending that demand doesn't exist to justify cutting the supply doesn't make the demand exist, and Activision isn't without competition. Namely, EA's Battlefield Bad Company 2. They're catering to PC gamers' expectations for a multiplayer game, and PC gamers are going to buy it, because these days you can't pirate that kind of multiplayer game and expect a decent experience, you have to buy the real thing.
You see, if you choose to ignore a market and that you have competition, the competition will effortlessly share your marketshare between themselves. You lose, they win, the market only loses in choice.
Here's how it really works : no one (on PC) buys single player games, they only buy multiplayer games because, I don't know if you've tried lately, but if you want to be a pirate there are very few games on which you'll be able to play multiplayer, if you're lucky you'll get access to a few cracked servers.
So PC gamers buy multiplayers, they HAVE to. MW2 shipped with a multiplayer system that fell VERY short of people's expectations for a multiplayer game, henceforth they treated it like a single player game, pirated it to play its 6 hours of gameplay and went back to waiting for Bad Company 2.
If anything, that experiment proved that light didn't travel faster than the speed of light, not that something that isn't light could travel/be transmitted faster than light.
If massive particles cannot be accelerated to c, if massless particles must travel at c, shouldn't negative mass particles have to travel FTL?;-)
What really bothers me about the no FTL thing isn't that no massive particle can be accelerated to c, let alone beyond it, as it's fairly intuitive, but that there should be no way in hell that we could transmit information in any way faster than light. It just doesn't seem very clearly established that such a thing would be categorically impossible.
Not to make the discussion drift off topic, but at the core people who hold religious dogmas and scientists share the same brain structure as we all do, and there are instincts in us that work the same way as when you spray chimp with cold water when they reach for the Holy Banana until quickly no one touches it, even those who were not sprayed, even when the last chimp to be sprayed left the place a long time ago.
What I mean is, we tried hard for about a century to find cracks in Einstein's theories, and while there are many things that are wrong with it (i.e. you can't marry it with quantum mechanics too well), all attempts to disprove his predictions have failed, which gives us room to hold some aspects of his theories as scientific dogma, the impossibility of FTL information transmission being possibly one of them. That is, we act like we know for sure about that when really we don't, it's just that so far there's nothing that really goes against that assumption.
For the fellow coders out there, that's a bit like when you thoroughly test and verify a function to make sure it's bug free, but yet much later find out it caused a bug, and you wasted much time looking for a cause for it where it was not. Sorry, can't think of any car analogy.
Well, I know what you mean, you might make the house of cards of our theories fall by pulling that one out, but it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be tried, as long as the impossibility of FTL information travel isn't definitely proven. For all we know, a theory might smoothly remove it without disturbing anything too much, you know, a bit like this new theory being talked about doesn't disturb too much some of the seemingly unreconcilable properties of relativity and quantum mechanics by distinguishing in the scales involved.
Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light.
How do we know for sure that it's impossible? How can we test against it to conclude it's definitely an impossibility? We surely haven't found any way to achieve that, but given that all theories are still in the balance, how do we know for sure there's no way we possibly could?
This being said, nice to see a theory that's more intuitive than usual, that attempts to explain dark matter and dark energy by revising how things work rather than claiming there's a bunch of invisible mysterious things at work, and that does so without adding a bucketload of new unperceptible dimensions and weird vibrating strings that no one can prove. Ah, and give an alternative to the ailing theory of Big Bang.
And nice to see that it took SciAm's commenters less time than Slashdot users to make the discussion drift into some crap about religion. Maybe we're not that bad after all.
now what if you had idle processes on netbooks using up spare Atom (or whatever is out there) CPU time? Think about it, it could be the user footing part of your server energy bill.
I thought about it, and no. No one's stupid enough to run idle processes for processing. Idle priority or not, you don't run a portable device's CPU at 100% all the time unless you have a damn good reason.
And then, even if they did that, how much could they get done with a bunch of low spec machines with crappy Internet connections? If they had a problem with their energy bill and wanted to save energy in such a way they'd build a server farm out of OMAP3-based SoCs.
This being said, if Google gets $1 everytime you click on one of their ads, it won't take too long before a $50 machine is paid for.
"Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google's head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger."
Oh old Rupert, is it really Google's head, or did you write G O O G L E on your toes? (Yeah that's right, Rupert Murdoch has 6 toes on each foot, you heard it here first!)
Sure, although on the other hand there's only so many ways we could be able to detect any eventual technological civilisation, so we might as well try them. I mean think about it, optical systems aren't yet able to resolve a body the size of Earth even if it was around a nearby star, and our probes might find basic life on Mars, in Europe or on Titan, but even if they do that'll be some microbiology crap. If there's some dudes (or super smart land-squids) out there in the sky who mastered electricity the only way we can find out right now is by pointing our radiotelescopic ears and listening carefully. The odds are thin, and I for one think they will be fruitless.
To add my little bit of worthless speculation : I think that within the 21st century we might be able to detect significant biological activity on other celestial bodies, but either we'll find microbiological stuff in the solar system or we'll only get spectral signs of biological activity on planets, nothing else. I find the odds are awfully small that we'd find anything the SETI way (the fact that we've found nothing for decades means we'd have to be awfully lucky to find something this century), I find it more likely (which is not saying much) that we'd find an alien civilisation's equivalent of a Mars rover on or near Earth. For all we know we might have seen one of them and called it a UFO (among the countless other things we've called UFO).
The message is irrelevant, there's only so much they can learn from us even if they understand the message. What really matters is that they know we're there somewhere up in the sky.
What puzzles me is that we do it once every 35 years for a few minutes, yet the rest of the time we spend it carefully listening, as if aliens would do what we do not do, which is actively trying to communicate with them. They won't pick up a damn thing unless we beam it to them specifically, so if they're as dumb as us and only listen and don't try to send then not much is every going to happen.
Curing people doesn't come into it - it's about keeping them sick enough to stay profitable.
No, it's about taking the money of the healthy people and finding any excuse to get rid of the sick (cause they cost money). What you said doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, people should always make all their e-mails public, and release all their data while it's still work in progress! Transparency, people! I show you my e-mails and you show me yours!
They are trying to get people (journal editors) fired, based on their perceived loyalty (or lack thereof) to 'the cause'.
Yeah, nice spin, here, let me de-spin it for you:
They are trying to get people (journal editors) fired, because it seems apparent that these editors are trying to push a political agenda instead of evaluating papers purely for their scientific merits, while still trying to pass as an apoliticised scientific journal.
Because there's something that is true since even before the days of John D. Rockefeller, our sources of energy are hugely important, economically, politically and so forth. Wars have been fought for them, empires have risen and fallen because of them. So it's no surprise that the branch of science that would tell us what's wrong with what we do with our sources of energy and what we should do would be heavily politicised. The future of some of the most powerful companies in the world depend directly on the policies decided by the facts established by scientists in the field of climatology. And this immensely powerful and influential industry's interests are directly at odds with what the scientific consensus established, and with all their weight they're trying to tip the scale in the other direction to make the scientific facts a matter of debate, as to slow down the progress of policies towards addressing the issues highlighted by the scientific community.
In other words, by keeping the debate alive when it shouldn't, they're buying themselves time to continue with the profitable business as usual. The funny thing is that in that clash of science versus industrial interests, you find idiots without any direct industrial interest partaking in the fight on the side of the energy industries when they have strictly no interest there. Because you always get some dumbass with a boner for conspiracy theories who can't let go the fact that a scientific consensus could be debated, because that means "OMG teh whoel scientific community is at the source of a huge conspiracy against the interest of our benevolent oil producers!!! Waek up sheeple!!!".
You do realize that some of the emails are about hiding data from public view, obstructing freedom of information requests
Yeah, I mean why would a legitimate scientist working on a hot topic wouldn't want to release all his work and data all the time to a bunch of nosey asswipes who'll look hard into whatever they've done to see only what they want to see and prove, and then harass the said scientists with questioning, criticism and even threats? I don't see it.
and campaign to discredit a peer reviewed journal that published something that disagreed with their public stance, right?
Oh I know that one, cause the editors at that journals decided to push their political agenda with the journal rather than fairly reviewing and rejecting/publishing papers for their pure scientific value, and therefore the journal in question stopped being a scientific publication but rather a vector of propaganda?
How do you spin what you quoted into something bad? They've identified a journal that's gone rogue by setting proper scientific peer reviewing aside to push a particular agenda. That the scientific community would boycott them and try to bring them down for passing a propaganda journal as a legitimate specialised scientific journal is the expected behaviour. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, there is no "playing nice with the other side", because there's no other side, you're either in it for apolitical science or you're there for political propaganda disguised as science, and if you're in it to push an agenda then the legitimate players (scientist, scientific journals etc..) will try to push you out.
Actually that's just like the White House concluding that Fox News is a propaganda network trying to pass for a news network and that therefore they should boycott them.
From the looks of it it seems like it'll be more meant for people such as your grandma who only want a simple machine that works and that takes little maintenance or knowledge. A sort of TV set of the Internet, the kind of machine your mom will never give you a maintenance call for. Not necessarily what a Slashdotter would want for himself.
BS. Sure you can get used to one and be uneasy with the other as a result, but there is such a thing as one thing being more intuitive and better designed than the other. GIMP's interface design doesn't seem to have been designed with easy of use in mind.
You can make acronyms for anything you want that spell whatever you desire. I should know, I'm the one who created the Analysis & Reconstruction Sound Engine. Which I did rename once I wanted to put it down on my CV.
Fair enough. You also said earlier that you don't think that will change: you don't think people will share your program once they buy it. Is that correct? You don't need copyright?
That's correct, I don't directly need the protection offered by copyright. Not saying that I'd fare as well in a copyright-less world, but my business model doesn't really rely on copyrights.
Not at all. If you think you can make money selling copies of your software without relying on a government-enforced monopoly, go right ahead.
Good! Well, maybe you're not that stupid and stubborn after all!
Can you do that? You say you don't rely on a government-enforced monopoly, but can you put your money where your mouth is? Because if you're willing to make a legally binding promise not to take any legal action against people who distribute or crack your software, I'll applaud your wise choice, and I just might buy a copy myself.
Dude, I'm broke, and even if I had the money I couldn't be arsed to take legal action on anyone. See, there's this dude I know of who used the output from the demo of my program in a commercial release, he recorded the output because the file saving is disabled in the demo, when you're supposed to buy a commercial license to be able to use your work in a commercial release. I'm not going after him, I don't really give a crap, plus he's kind enough to write me a testimonial lol. And that licenses thing is bullshit too anyway, I have two licenses, one commercial and one non-commercial, but every single difference in licensing terms is bullshit as far as I'm concerned. That's more like pay me $40 if you want, or pay me $145 if you prefer. Although while I wouldn't take any legal action for anything I still would disable licenses, so that's reason enough not to distribute your license around. And I'm no dummy, I won't advertise "hey it's cool if you pirate me";-).
... you've completely missed the distinction between goods and services.
And you've completely missed the fact that software is a good. I know it sounds counter intuitive, but think about it, a book is a good, a DVD is a good, yet they're all information on a media, and could be made immaterial. And if you get a movie, music or e-book online, you might consider it a service, but in reality it's the online store that sells you it that's a service, just like the book store is a service, but you still buy a good. So I sell goods, immaterial goods, even if to further blur things it's bundled with a couple of services, like support or updates. A good doesn't magically become a service because it goes immaterial.
Providing services for money. The "world's oldest profession" is a service, not a good.
Yep, but that's not my primary business. My primary business is, selling a good, an immaterial good. You wouldn't argue that a computer program isn't a good if it was sold as something like a ROM, and that the only way for someone else to duplicate it was to make a forged copy. But at that point the forged copy is no different than a forged Rollex, so you see, it's still all like a good, it's just easier to forge and distribute.
And the ultimate point that will enlighten things : how do you pirate and copy a service? You can copy the distribution service, but it goes together with the bookstore as a service example. You can't copy and distribute a service, you can't copy the services of a prostitute (unless you yourself become one, at which point that's not copying but becoming legitimate competition, which is what you do when you choose to distribute my immaterial goods, you become a competition for my distribution service), you can't copy the services a nurse, of a marketing agency, of a personal coach, of an accountant, and so forth. So software itself isn't a service, cause if it was it couldn't be copied. Making the software is a sort of service (although often enough done not for the end users but done for the distributi
Slashdot Mirror
If Activision sees that no one's buying the game, and that it's not even considered a suitable target of piracy, they'll either ditch the PC or work to make it a better experience next time. If they see a lot of grog-swillers with peg-legs, Activision will be able to play the victim and blame the failure of the game on the greed of others, instead of their own ineptitude.
Yes, but here's the thing : pretending that demand doesn't exist to justify cutting the supply doesn't make the demand exist, and Activision isn't without competition. Namely, EA's Battlefield Bad Company 2. They're catering to PC gamers' expectations for a multiplayer game, and PC gamers are going to buy it, because these days you can't pirate that kind of multiplayer game and expect a decent experience, you have to buy the real thing.
You see, if you choose to ignore a market and that you have competition, the competition will effortlessly share your marketshare between themselves. You lose, they win, the market only loses in choice.
Here's how it really works : no one (on PC) buys single player games, they only buy multiplayer games because, I don't know if you've tried lately, but if you want to be a pirate there are very few games on which you'll be able to play multiplayer, if you're lucky you'll get access to a few cracked servers.
So PC gamers buy multiplayers, they HAVE to. MW2 shipped with a multiplayer system that fell VERY short of people's expectations for a multiplayer game, henceforth they treated it like a single player game, pirated it to play its 6 hours of gameplay and went back to waiting for Bad Company 2.
If anything, that experiment proved that light didn't travel faster than the speed of light, not that something that isn't light could travel/be transmitted faster than light.
If massive particles cannot be accelerated to c, if massless particles must travel at c, shouldn't negative mass particles have to travel FTL? ;-)
What really bothers me about the no FTL thing isn't that no massive particle can be accelerated to c, let alone beyond it, as it's fairly intuitive, but that there should be no way in hell that we could transmit information in any way faster than light. It just doesn't seem very clearly established that such a thing would be categorically impossible.
Not to make the discussion drift off topic, but at the core people who hold religious dogmas and scientists share the same brain structure as we all do, and there are instincts in us that work the same way as when you spray chimp with cold water when they reach for the Holy Banana until quickly no one touches it, even those who were not sprayed, even when the last chimp to be sprayed left the place a long time ago.
What I mean is, we tried hard for about a century to find cracks in Einstein's theories, and while there are many things that are wrong with it (i.e. you can't marry it with quantum mechanics too well), all attempts to disprove his predictions have failed, which gives us room to hold some aspects of his theories as scientific dogma, the impossibility of FTL information transmission being possibly one of them. That is, we act like we know for sure about that when really we don't, it's just that so far there's nothing that really goes against that assumption.
For the fellow coders out there, that's a bit like when you thoroughly test and verify a function to make sure it's bug free, but yet much later find out it caused a bug, and you wasted much time looking for a cause for it where it was not. Sorry, can't think of any car analogy.
Well, I know what you mean, you might make the house of cards of our theories fall by pulling that one out, but it doesn't mean that it shouldn't be tried, as long as the impossibility of FTL information travel isn't definitely proven. For all we know, a theory might smoothly remove it without disturbing anything too much, you know, a bit like this new theory being talked about doesn't disturb too much some of the seemingly unreconcilable properties of relativity and quantum mechanics by distinguishing in the scales involved.
Gia Dvali, a quantum gravity expert at CERN, remains cautious. A few years ago he tried a similar trick, breaking apart space and time in an attempt to explain dark energy. But he abandoned his model because it allowed information to be communicated faster than the speed of light.
How do we know for sure that it's impossible? How can we test against it to conclude it's definitely an impossibility? We surely haven't found any way to achieve that, but given that all theories are still in the balance, how do we know for sure there's no way we possibly could?
This being said, nice to see a theory that's more intuitive than usual, that attempts to explain dark matter and dark energy by revising how things work rather than claiming there's a bunch of invisible mysterious things at work, and that does so without adding a bucketload of new unperceptible dimensions and weird vibrating strings that no one can prove. Ah, and give an alternative to the ailing theory of Big Bang.
And nice to see that it took SciAm's commenters less time than Slashdot users to make the discussion drift into some crap about religion. Maybe we're not that bad after all.
now what if you had idle processes on netbooks using up spare Atom (or whatever is out there) CPU time? Think about it, it could be the user footing part of your server energy bill.
I thought about it, and no. No one's stupid enough to run idle processes for processing. Idle priority or not, you don't run a portable device's CPU at 100% all the time unless you have a damn good reason.
And then, even if they did that, how much could they get done with a bunch of low spec machines with crappy Internet connections? If they had a problem with their energy bill and wanted to save energy in such a way they'd build a server farm out of OMAP3-based SoCs.
This being said, if Google gets $1 everytime you click on one of their ads, it won't take too long before a $50 machine is paid for.
Oops, yeah I meant Europa.
"Rupert Murdoch is pointing a gun to Google's head, and Microsoft is helping him pull back the trigger."
Oh old Rupert, is it really Google's head, or did you write G O O G L E on your toes? (Yeah that's right, Rupert Murdoch has 6 toes on each foot, you heard it here first!)
Sure, although on the other hand there's only so many ways we could be able to detect any eventual technological civilisation, so we might as well try them. I mean think about it, optical systems aren't yet able to resolve a body the size of Earth even if it was around a nearby star, and our probes might find basic life on Mars, in Europe or on Titan, but even if they do that'll be some microbiology crap. If there's some dudes (or super smart land-squids) out there in the sky who mastered electricity the only way we can find out right now is by pointing our radiotelescopic ears and listening carefully. The odds are thin, and I for one think they will be fruitless.
To add my little bit of worthless speculation : I think that within the 21st century we might be able to detect significant biological activity on other celestial bodies, but either we'll find microbiological stuff in the solar system or we'll only get spectral signs of biological activity on planets, nothing else. I find the odds are awfully small that we'd find anything the SETI way (the fact that we've found nothing for decades means we'd have to be awfully lucky to find something this century), I find it more likely (which is not saying much) that we'd find an alien civilisation's equivalent of a Mars rover on or near Earth. For all we know we might have seen one of them and called it a UFO (among the countless other things we've called UFO).
The message is irrelevant, there's only so much they can learn from us even if they understand the message. What really matters is that they know we're there somewhere up in the sky.
What puzzles me is that we do it once every 35 years for a few minutes, yet the rest of the time we spend it carefully listening, as if aliens would do what we do not do, which is actively trying to communicate with them. They won't pick up a damn thing unless we beam it to them specifically, so if they're as dumb as us and only listen and don't try to send then not much is every going to happen.
Curing people doesn't come into it - it's about keeping them sick enough to stay profitable.
No, it's about taking the money of the healthy people and finding any excuse to get rid of the sick (cause they cost money). What you said doesn't make any sense.
Whatchu babbling about, fool?!
Do you really expect me to read all of that?
Yeah, people should always make all their e-mails public, and release all their data while it's still work in progress! Transparency, people! I show you my e-mails and you show me yours!
They are trying to get people (journal editors) fired, based on their perceived loyalty (or lack thereof) to 'the cause'.
Yeah, nice spin, here, let me de-spin it for you :
They are trying to get people (journal editors) fired, because it seems apparent that these editors are trying to push a political agenda instead of evaluating papers purely for their scientific merits, while still trying to pass as an apoliticised scientific journal.
Because there's something that is true since even before the days of John D. Rockefeller, our sources of energy are hugely important, economically, politically and so forth. Wars have been fought for them, empires have risen and fallen because of them. So it's no surprise that the branch of science that would tell us what's wrong with what we do with our sources of energy and what we should do would be heavily politicised. The future of some of the most powerful companies in the world depend directly on the policies decided by the facts established by scientists in the field of climatology. And this immensely powerful and influential industry's interests are directly at odds with what the scientific consensus established, and with all their weight they're trying to tip the scale in the other direction to make the scientific facts a matter of debate, as to slow down the progress of policies towards addressing the issues highlighted by the scientific community.
In other words, by keeping the debate alive when it shouldn't, they're buying themselves time to continue with the profitable business as usual. The funny thing is that in that clash of science versus industrial interests, you find idiots without any direct industrial interest partaking in the fight on the side of the energy industries when they have strictly no interest there. Because you always get some dumbass with a boner for conspiracy theories who can't let go the fact that a scientific consensus could be debated, because that means "OMG teh whoel scientific community is at the source of a huge conspiracy against the interest of our benevolent oil producers!!! Waek up sheeple!!!".
You do realize that some of the emails are about hiding data from public view, obstructing freedom of information requests
Yeah, I mean why would a legitimate scientist working on a hot topic wouldn't want to release all his work and data all the time to a bunch of nosey asswipes who'll look hard into whatever they've done to see only what they want to see and prove, and then harass the said scientists with questioning, criticism and even threats? I don't see it.
and campaign to discredit a peer reviewed journal that published something that disagreed with their public stance, right?
Oh I know that one, cause the editors at that journals decided to push their political agenda with the journal rather than fairly reviewing and rejecting/publishing papers for their pure scientific value, and therefore the journal in question stopped being a scientific publication but rather a vector of propaganda?
How do you spin what you quoted into something bad? They've identified a journal that's gone rogue by setting proper scientific peer reviewing aside to push a particular agenda. That the scientific community would boycott them and try to bring them down for passing a propaganda journal as a legitimate specialised scientific journal is the expected behaviour. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, there is no "playing nice with the other side", because there's no other side, you're either in it for apolitical science or you're there for political propaganda disguised as science, and if you're in it to push an agenda then the legitimate players (scientist, scientific journals etc..) will try to push you out.
Actually that's just like the White House concluding that Fox News is a propaganda network trying to pass for a news network and that therefore they should boycott them.
If Windows has a back door that the NSA can use, how would they prevent foreign intelligence agencies from using it?
The same way I have a SSH "backdoor" to my system that I can access from anywhere but that the NSA can't get into?
From the looks of it it seems like it'll be more meant for people such as your grandma who only want a simple machine that works and that takes little maintenance or knowledge. A sort of TV set of the Internet, the kind of machine your mom will never give you a maintenance call for. Not necessarily what a Slashdotter would want for himself.
BS. Sure you can get used to one and be uneasy with the other as a result, but there is such a thing as one thing being more intuitive and better designed than the other. GIMP's interface design doesn't seem to have been designed with easy of use in mind.
You can make acronyms for anything you want that spell whatever you desire. I should know, I'm the one who created the Analysis & Reconstruction Sound Engine. Which I did rename once I wanted to put it down on my CV.
Fair enough. You also said earlier that you don't think that will change: you don't think people will share your program once they buy it. Is that correct? You don't need copyright?
That's correct, I don't directly need the protection offered by copyright. Not saying that I'd fare as well in a copyright-less world, but my business model doesn't really rely on copyrights.
Not at all. If you think you can make money selling copies of your software without relying on a government-enforced monopoly, go right ahead.
Good! Well, maybe you're not that stupid and stubborn after all!
Can you do that? You say you don't rely on a government-enforced monopoly, but can you put your money where your mouth is? Because if you're willing to make a legally binding promise not to take any legal action against people who distribute or crack your software, I'll applaud your wise choice, and I just might buy a copy myself.
Dude, I'm broke, and even if I had the money I couldn't be arsed to take legal action on anyone. See, there's this dude I know of who used the output from the demo of my program in a commercial release, he recorded the output because the file saving is disabled in the demo, when you're supposed to buy a commercial license to be able to use your work in a commercial release. I'm not going after him, I don't really give a crap, plus he's kind enough to write me a testimonial lol. And that licenses thing is bullshit too anyway, I have two licenses, one commercial and one non-commercial, but every single difference in licensing terms is bullshit as far as I'm concerned. That's more like pay me $40 if you want, or pay me $145 if you prefer. Although while I wouldn't take any legal action for anything I still would disable licenses, so that's reason enough not to distribute your license around. And I'm no dummy, I won't advertise "hey it's cool if you pirate me" ;-).
And you've completely missed the fact that software is a good. I know it sounds counter intuitive, but think about it, a book is a good, a DVD is a good, yet they're all information on a media, and could be made immaterial. And if you get a movie, music or e-book online, you might consider it a service, but in reality it's the online store that sells you it that's a service, just like the book store is a service, but you still buy a good. So I sell goods, immaterial goods, even if to further blur things it's bundled with a couple of services, like support or updates. A good doesn't magically become a service because it goes immaterial.
Providing services for money. The "world's oldest profession" is a service, not a good.
Yep, but that's not my primary business. My primary business is, selling a good, an immaterial good. You wouldn't argue that a computer program isn't a good if it was sold as something like a ROM, and that the only way for someone else to duplicate it was to make a forged copy. But at that point the forged copy is no different than a forged Rollex, so you see, it's still all like a good, it's just easier to forge and distribute.
And the ultimate point that will enlighten things : how do you pirate and copy a service? You can copy the distribution service, but it goes together with the bookstore as a service example. You can't copy and distribute a service, you can't copy the services of a prostitute (unless you yourself become one, at which point that's not copying but becoming legitimate competition, which is what you do when you choose to distribute my immaterial goods, you become a competition for my distribution service), you can't copy the services a nurse, of a marketing agency, of a personal coach, of an accountant, and so forth. So software itself isn't a service, cause if it was it couldn't be copied. Making the software is a sort of service (although often enough done not for the end users but done for the distributi