I would suggest that the 'one unifying factor' in terrorism is their extreme disenfranchisement and hopelessness at changing their situation through legal means. Islam is not a unifying factor for all terrorists.. only Islamic terrorists.
There are non-islamic terrorists who kill people and blow up buildings. And there are peaceful and even feminist Muslims. I'm not sure that their religion really has a meaningful impact on terrorists' thought-processes. It's more of an excuse to commit terrorism against innocent civilians than a cause. They would be terrorists no matter their religion.
Yeah, it should be just like computers! Sure the computers of yesteryear were slow, but at least they were cheap! And complaining about how long it takes to get a computer is stupid. After all, the free market isn't intended to provide better products at cheaper prices! It is, of course, intended to make people who collude together to rig the market as rich as possible! Everyone knows that... you idiots.
Perhaps I'm completely moronic here, but if I cannot judge a company's products by my past experience with this company's products, what exactly is a good metric to use?
Perhaps I should just buy one of everything and then return all the devices but the one I like best? I'm guessing you buy an eMachines brand PC regularly, or a (insert least favorite car manufacturer) when you go looking for a new car?
Sure, you should read reviews and make a judgement, but if you had two equal reviews, making your decision based on past business practices seems like a perfectly reasonable criteria.
I agree wholeheartedly about the prison culture in the U.S. being completely out of whack. There is an interesting talk by Bryan Stevenson where he describes the need to discuss things like this and not just ignore it. There are a lot of personal anecdotes in his TED talk, but the overall point is very similar to yours.
Bryan Stevenson at TED
My point was that it was a gamble for him, as he described in several interviews. He funded the entire thing out of his own pocket, from the show, to the DVD, to hiring a couple of guys to do the website and finance side. He didn't have ANY publisher support because they all swore to him that it would be pirated all over the internet and it would lose him a million dollars.
If you think he would be pirated LESS because he is super popular, I think you may not be 100% sure what you're talking about.
He was pirated less because it cost 5 dollars and was downloadable immediately.
Obviously you and I have rather divergent understandings of the pirate culture. We'll have to agree to disagree on the idea that piracy will not fall dramatically as the price lowers. Give a kid 60 bucks a week for an allowance, and he'll never pirate. People naturally prefer to do things legally if they can. $60 games make that decision harder for a LOT of people.
Now, to your point about lowering the price not being worth fighting piracy, well, I would challenge your idea that if that is, in fact, true, then piracy isn't much of a problem at all. There are upsides to piracy of software of course. Word of mouth advertising being a major one. Piracy is effectively the Black Market of software. And just like the Black Market for so many other things, the legitimate price of a good or service being too high causes that market demand to get satisfied in a different manner. Abortions, Designer Purses, Software. All are cheaper on the black market, and with each you are taking your chance that you'll get ripped off.
God help me for not going AC with this reply, but here goes: Piracy is a direct result of the cost of digital goods.
If game companies want people to stop pirating their games, lower the price. That is the silver bullet. In general people don't pirate games because they are too lazy to go to the store (or even better, the website) and buy it. The VAST majority of piracy is due to people not seeing the cost/value ratio of that entertainment within acceptable parameters.
Obviously people don't necessary consciously think those things. But if you look at Louis C.K.'s latest gamble with his DVD. Charging a fair (or beyond fair) price makes piracy almost completely disappear. Louis made money hand over fist, and piracy was almost non-existent.
They weren't popular because they radically unbalanced most games in favor of the KB and Mouse players. Basically it became a 'pay for results' sort of thing. Apparently in testing a few games in the last console generation in order to make the games even slightly competitive between the two options, auto-aim had to be turned up to an unacceptable degree for the joystick players.
I'm sorry, but are you completely insane. We may be the country that introduced SOPA, but we are also the country that, through massive public outcry shot it down. Care to mention how the UN would be in any way, shape, or form MORE beholden to the public than the US goverment?
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of problems with the US government, but the rise and swift demise of SOPA is one of the great success stories of public vs private good.
Short of cooking up cinnamon rolls every day for breakfast and frying bologna in Crisco for lunch, then melting velveeta with bacon over nachos for dinner every single day. I'm pretty sure you would have to work pretty damn hard to match the fat/carb/calorie content per ounce of food at home as you get with chicken mcnuggets or cereal or pizza.
Fair enough everyone. I don't see why we don't just come up with inertialess drives, and instantly accelerate to the speed of light like they do in Star Trek/Wars. That would be pretty cool.
Ummm.. I would imagine the same amount of biomass in stinkbugs as in one human would require roughly the same air, water, and food intake. Perhaps a bit less since they are different kingdoms. But if we take animal kingdom biomass, and compared an equal amount of human mass, and I dunno, ferret biomass, they would use pretty much equal resources to sustain themselves.
If you are suggesting that humans are worse for the planet due to their technology, who can disagree with that? But to say you don't compete with resources with stinkbugs and daffodils is mistaken.
Of course you compete for the same resources... it's just that you always win.
First, that's a funny way of putting it. After all if you are describing things in biomass terms, how is human biomass any worse than stinkbug or daffodil biomass?
Secondly, I agree that without a good reason to curtail a right, the right should not be curtailed.
If I could mod this up any farther I would. How, on Slashdot of all places, this point isn't made in the first five comments (after the obligatory sarcastic first comment) is absolutely beyond me.
The concept of owning the game as a component of it's purchased value is the single major argument against this type of blatant money grabbing. Recently, Tycho recently made a point on Penny-Arcade that no one seems to complain about Steam having this exact same business model. And that in fact, digital distribution has an even more unforgiving consumer contract. You cannot resell digital copies AT ALL, even handicapped versions of them. Where's all the internet vitriol for Steam?
I believe the answer to that lies in the comment above. You can get good games on Steam at MUCH reduced prices. Sure, if I want Skyrim on release day, it will be $59.99. But six months later? We can likely pick it up, un-handicapped, for likely half the cost. A lot of these price reductions are done according to demand (shocking I know), so maybe Skyrim wasn't the best example. But still: try going into Walmart a year after an A1 title is released and see how much the price as come down.
And lastly, Origin is like some horrific mutant child of the worst of both models. Want to buy the vanilla Sims 3 on Origin four years after launch? Congratulations! It's been reduced to only $30! This makes me wonder, how much of this is ALL game companies, and how much of this is just EA?
My understanding is this particular measure is 28 Terabytes/Day... so in bits per second it would go to...224teraBITS/Day which equals roughly.0026 TeraBITS/Sec... which is roughly 2.6megabits/sec.. 24 hours a day without a pause. Does that help clear it up, you monster?
Just to let you know, Fox News was sued for exactly what you're speaking on. Their defense in this case and others was that they are NOT a 'News Organization' and therefore the FCC rules don't apply to them.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest that the 'one unifying factor' in terrorism is their extreme disenfranchisement and hopelessness at changing their situation through legal means. Islam is not a unifying factor for all terrorists.. only Islamic terrorists.
There are non-islamic terrorists who kill people and blow up buildings. And there are peaceful and even feminist Muslims. I'm not sure that their religion really has a meaningful impact on terrorists' thought-processes. It's more of an excuse to commit terrorism against innocent civilians than a cause. They would be terrorists no matter their religion.
I would upvote if I could. I've had to explain this to several friends over the years.
I'm sorry, which cable companies give HBO away free? I've never seen this before.
Yeah, it should be just like computers! Sure the computers of yesteryear were slow, but at least they were cheap! And complaining about how long it takes to get a computer is stupid. After all, the free market isn't intended to provide better products at cheaper prices! It is, of course, intended to make people who collude together to rig the market as rich as possible! Everyone knows that... you idiots.
Perhaps I'm completely moronic here, but if I cannot judge a company's products by my past experience with this company's products, what exactly is a good metric to use?
Perhaps I should just buy one of everything and then return all the devices but the one I like best? I'm guessing you buy an eMachines brand PC regularly, or a (insert least favorite car manufacturer) when you go looking for a new car?
Sure, you should read reviews and make a judgement, but if you had two equal reviews, making your decision based on past business practices seems like a perfectly reasonable criteria.
Holy cow. Successful troll is VERY Successful!
I agree wholeheartedly about the prison culture in the U.S. being completely out of whack. There is an interesting talk by Bryan Stevenson where he describes the need to discuss things like this and not just ignore it. There are a lot of personal anecdotes in his TED talk, but the overall point is very similar to yours. Bryan Stevenson at TED
I think that's a very succinct and appropriate quote, and I shall use it elsewhere to make myself seem more intelligent. Thank you.
My point was that it was a gamble for him, as he described in several interviews. He funded the entire thing out of his own pocket, from the show, to the DVD, to hiring a couple of guys to do the website and finance side. He didn't have ANY publisher support because they all swore to him that it would be pirated all over the internet and it would lose him a million dollars.
If you think he would be pirated LESS because he is super popular, I think you may not be 100% sure what you're talking about.
He was pirated less because it cost 5 dollars and was downloadable immediately.
Obviously you and I have rather divergent understandings of the pirate culture. We'll have to agree to disagree on the idea that piracy will not fall dramatically as the price lowers. Give a kid 60 bucks a week for an allowance, and he'll never pirate. People naturally prefer to do things legally if they can. $60 games make that decision harder for a LOT of people.
Now, to your point about lowering the price not being worth fighting piracy, well, I would challenge your idea that if that is, in fact, true, then piracy isn't much of a problem at all. There are upsides to piracy of software of course. Word of mouth advertising being a major one. Piracy is effectively the Black Market of software. And just like the Black Market for so many other things, the legitimate price of a good or service being too high causes that market demand to get satisfied in a different manner. Abortions, Designer Purses, Software. All are cheaper on the black market, and with each you are taking your chance that you'll get ripped off.
God help me for not going AC with this reply, but here goes: Piracy is a direct result of the cost of digital goods.
If game companies want people to stop pirating their games, lower the price. That is the silver bullet. In general people don't pirate games because they are too lazy to go to the store (or even better, the website) and buy it. The VAST majority of piracy is due to people not seeing the cost/value ratio of that entertainment within acceptable parameters.
Obviously people don't necessary consciously think those things. But if you look at Louis C.K.'s latest gamble with his DVD. Charging a fair (or beyond fair) price makes piracy almost completely disappear. Louis made money hand over fist, and piracy was almost non-existent.
$60 dollar games cause piracy. It is that simple.
Even better. Now you can slice them up into 20 micron thin sheets!
They weren't popular because they radically unbalanced most games in favor of the KB and Mouse players. Basically it became a 'pay for results' sort of thing. Apparently in testing a few games in the last console generation in order to make the games even slightly competitive between the two options, auto-aim had to be turned up to an unacceptable degree for the joystick players.
I'm sorry, but are you completely insane. We may be the country that introduced SOPA, but we are also the country that, through massive public outcry shot it down. Care to mention how the UN would be in any way, shape, or form MORE beholden to the public than the US goverment?
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of problems with the US government, but the rise and swift demise of SOPA is one of the great success stories of public vs private good.
Short of cooking up cinnamon rolls every day for breakfast and frying bologna in Crisco for lunch, then melting velveeta with bacon over nachos for dinner every single day. I'm pretty sure you would have to work pretty damn hard to match the fat/carb/calorie content per ounce of food at home as you get with chicken mcnuggets or cereal or pizza.
Fair enough everyone. I don't see why we don't just come up with inertialess drives, and instantly accelerate to the speed of light like they do in Star Trek/Wars. That would be pretty cool.
Actually, if you were accelerating toward the planet at a constant rate, despite what Ender may have suggested, the destination planet would be up.
Ummm.. I would imagine the same amount of biomass in stinkbugs as in one human would require roughly the same air, water, and food intake. Perhaps a bit less since they are different kingdoms. But if we take animal kingdom biomass, and compared an equal amount of human mass, and I dunno, ferret biomass, they would use pretty much equal resources to sustain themselves.
If you are suggesting that humans are worse for the planet due to their technology, who can disagree with that? But to say you don't compete with resources with stinkbugs and daffodils is mistaken.
Of course you compete for the same resources... it's just that you always win.
Apparently Visa does cover fradulent purchases.
"...no need to increase the human biomass."
First, that's a funny way of putting it. After all if you are describing things in biomass terms, how is human biomass any worse than stinkbug or daffodil biomass?
Secondly, I agree that without a good reason to curtail a right, the right should not be curtailed.
If I could mod this up any farther I would. How, on Slashdot of all places, this point isn't made in the first five comments (after the obligatory sarcastic first comment) is absolutely beyond me.
The concept of owning the game as a component of it's purchased value is the single major argument against this type of blatant money grabbing. Recently, Tycho recently made a point on Penny-Arcade that no one seems to complain about Steam having this exact same business model. And that in fact, digital distribution has an even more unforgiving consumer contract. You cannot resell digital copies AT ALL, even handicapped versions of them. Where's all the internet vitriol for Steam?
I believe the answer to that lies in the comment above. You can get good games on Steam at MUCH reduced prices. Sure, if I want Skyrim on release day, it will be $59.99. But six months later? We can likely pick it up, un-handicapped, for likely half the cost. A lot of these price reductions are done according to demand (shocking I know), so maybe Skyrim wasn't the best example. But still: try going into Walmart a year after an A1 title is released and see how much the price as come down.
And lastly, Origin is like some horrific mutant child of the worst of both models. Want to buy the vanilla Sims 3 on Origin four years after launch? Congratulations! It's been reduced to only $30! This makes me wonder, how much of this is ALL game companies, and how much of this is just EA?
crap, got my prefixes wrong... 2.6 Gigabits/sec
My understanding is this particular measure is 28 Terabytes/Day... so in bits per second it would go to...224teraBITS/Day which equals roughly .0026 TeraBITS/Sec... which is roughly 2.6megabits/sec.. 24 hours a day without a pause. Does that help clear it up, you monster?
Lol.. how long did the ad firm work to come up with that last line?
Just to let you know, Fox News was sued for exactly what you're speaking on. Their defense in this case and others was that they are NOT a 'News Organization' and therefore the FCC rules don't apply to them.