No, by up stream ISPs. What this does is make it more obvious where spam is coming from and provide a mechanism to filter it. If your an upstream provider and something like 95% of the e-mail coming from a downstream ISP is spam first you warn them and if they still don't clean up their act you start by filtering any non-signed e-mail coming from them. If that doesn't cut the spam then you blacklist their server.
If everything was responding correctly I suppose, but if your system is lagging and your like me and normally have something like 30 tabs open that could be a bit annoying. Besides this is a april fools prank.
It's not that it isn't unfair, it's just that there's nothing that can be reasonably done about it. In a perfect world we wouldn't need cops or courts because everyone would obey the laws, and no one would ever be mugged, raped, or murdered. Women carry pepper spray (or tazers or guns) in case they need to defend themselves, that's a reasonable response, but they don't go around holding a gun to the head of every male they run across and demanding that they prove they weren't going to mug or rape them. In the same way you as a developer can take reasonable precautions to try to protect your software but must understand that nothing you do is going to be 100% effective and if you introduce behavior that leads to hassles for your legitimate customers you're going to lose sales and have people complaining. The most important thing you need to remember is that there's no such thing as "fair" or "unfair" in the real world, their academic concepts like justice. We might aspire to fairness, and hope that our fellow human beings are decent people and will fairly compensate us for our efforts, but the reality is that most of the time they won't, and there really isn't much of anything we can do about it.
Some people place value in the artifacts of the development process itself. If you offered a downloadable PDF of your development notes (either all or select ones) and scans of early concept work or random scribbles (back of napkin kind of stuff) you'd probably be amazed at how many people would be interested in acquiring said PDF. If you do decide to go with Steam (not a bad choice all around) you might consider a "deluxe" version for a few bucks more that included some extras such as the previously mentioned design notes.
I like the concept but I'm wondering how you deal with no internet connectivity? If it can't dial home does it just assume the copy is pirated? If so that's a minor annoyance (depending on how you implement it) but hopefully not enough of one to garner complaints from paying customers. If I might suggest you probably should modify the message if it fails to contact the server to say something along the lines of "I can't contact our server to verify this key, if you paid for this game thank you for your support and please ignore the registration link. If you have pirated this game please consider registering as your support provides incentive for future work." This will hopefully prevent paying customers from feeling like you're accusing them of piracy in the event they're in a situation where they have no internet access (such as the oft reported cases of military personnel in foreign countries).
I think where you have your e-mail address at is a big factor as well. My primary e-mail is associated with my CPAN account and a few mailing lists and it seems like that's the primary source of all my spam (somewhere between 100 and 1000 a day, it varies). Of course even e-mail accounts that are brand new get the odd spam from time to time. I recently started a new project and received an e-mail account on a network belonging to a military installation and within 2 months I've already received 4 spam e-mails even though the account has never been mentioned or used outside of the local network (and I'm not the only one).
I have no interest in having my work valued at zero unless you "feel like it." I can just as easily not release it.
Having never seen or played your game (to my knowledge) I currently value it at zero. Even if I had seen it (and even played it), I'd probably still value it at or around zero, sorry, but that's just the way things go with a free market. No one is guaranteed success, and just because you wrote a game does not intrinsically mean it has value to everyone nor more importantly that it has the same value to anyone. Now, I can sympathize with you, I'm a programmer and I do like to think that what I make has value and that people are willing to pay for it, however the onus is on me to convince the public that my software is worth paying for, and no amount of DRM is going to do that for even half of the public.
Your potential market for any piece of software can be broken down into a number of categories and various things you do will effect exactly how that breakdown occurs. The categories are as follows:
Doesn't even know about your software
Is aware of your software but not interested in it
Is aware of your software but values it at less than what you're asking for it
Is aware of your software and values it at more than what you're asking for it
Now, on the topic of that third category (Is aware of your software but values it at less than what you're asking for it) this is where your pirates come from. It's important to note that some people will value your software at or very close to zero and will therefore never pay for it no matter what you do, so some of these people might as well be considered lost sales no matter what. Your job is to try to maximize sales to all categories and this is accomplished in a number of ways. In the case of categories 1 and 2 (don't know and not interested respectively) advertising and demos (either full or partial) go a long way towards shifting these two into groups 3 and 4. Group 4 is essentially sold already, all you need to do with them is keep shipping a quality product that works well and doesn't hassle the paying customer. Group 3 is the problem group. Your options to win them over are to lower your prices, or convince them that your product has more value in it (demos, and various incentives are a great way to do this as the demo gets them actually interacting with your product and able to more fully evaluate it, and the incentives are effectively added to the value of the base product).
Do two things. First, just use a simple key system (don't require online authentication, that's just a pain, just validate that it's a potentially valid key), and don't worry about people installing their friends copy, they'd do it anyway if they're so inclined and nothing you can do that wouldn't also cost you paying customers is going to change that. Second require them to register on your website with the provided key in order to receive support by way of updates, patches, forums, and maybe some sort of incentive they can download that's fun to have but not strictly necessary (like say maybe a new interface skin or something). This maintains balance by not requiring anything of the paying customers, but also provides incentive in the way of eliminating hassles and providing minor bonuses for those that do actually pay.
Not sure what the GP is talking about, but I was under the impression this sort of technology has been around for a very long time (based on description in summary and article). I only see two really new bits of design here, one being the conductive element changing conductivity based on pressure (this to a certain extent has been used before, but it sounds like this material offers finer sensitivity than previous approaches), and more crucially the software used to process the signal coming from this thing. For all intents and purposes the hardware side of this thing sounds decidedly ho-hum, but the software that's doing the interpolation from the resistance data seems like the magic that actually makes it worth anything.
They also bring up an excellent point towards the end of the article where they point out one of the biggest challenges is going to be integrating this thing into a display. On the plus side I imagine it should be fairly straightforward to layer it over a piece of glass, but I'd be worried about scratching and such as any damage to the top grid would ruin the pressure sensitivity around that area and who knows what the software driving the thing would interpret that as.
You assume that there's some inherit difference between the lobster feeling a "pain" signal and it's instinctual reaction, and a human feeling a "pain" signal and reacting. It's merely one of degrees of development, in the human it's a much more complicated reaction, but essentially it's identical to the lobster. It's funny watching people try to come to grips with the fact that people are animals just like any other animal, merely one with a more advanced neural capacity. In the end, it all boils down to stimulus and reactions, people are no different than lobsters in that respect.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a vegetarian or anything, I eat and enjoy a steak as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I want the animal that steak came from to suffer unnecessarily.
if they feel pain? Cattle defiantly do, we still eat them.. As, I'm sure, a wide variety of other food stuffs feels pain as well..
I think the point is more that it's traditional to kill most crustaceans in a decidedly nasty manner. In the case of crabs (and sometimes lobsters) they're boiled alive, and in the case of lobsters they're often ripped in half (tail end is twisted off while it's still alive). The issue here would be that if they can be demonstrated to feel pain (sort of assumed they do myself, most all animals do) then there would be a demand for them to be "humanely" killed prior to being cooked.
- No Windows support (apparently a Linux-only VM in the plans)
The article says it's going to be based on LLVM which most definitely is cross-platform (and being touted as the logical successor to GCC). Unless they go out of their way to use some Linux only calls while implementing their Python VM on top of LLVM it should be trivially easy to get it running in Windows.
Essentially your point boils down to "the law is broken, so lets make an example out of people being charged under it unfairly so hopefully it gets changed". Much as I agree with part of your sentiment I can't honestly condone ruining the life of innocent children in the hope that it encourages the laws to be changed.
Are you a complete moron? WTF did the parents do? I assure you, at that age if all the kids are doing is sending nude pictures to their boyfriends they're practically saints. Also the only reason the kids would be "messed up now" is all this BS "think of the children" legal posturing. People need to wake up to the fact that once a child hits puberty they're going to start experimenting with sexual things, it's damn near the definition of "puberty".
They all need each other which is why this whole thing is so bloody stupid and only serves to highlight the flaws with the patent system. I can't imagine what any of these companies are thinking, once you start pulling the patents out none of them are left with a single marketable product they can legally manufacture (ironically NVIDIA is probably in the best overall shape in terms of patent encumbrance).
The only thing I can figure is that all the manufacturers will agree to continue business as usual while all this plays out in the courts otherwise this whole thing is going to bring computer manufacturing and development to a grinding halt (at least on the dominate 80x86 platform, the niche players like PowerPC, Motorolla, and the various embedded chipsets will be fine).
No, YouTube started with the idea of providing a service that would allow people to post videos they made (whether those videos are rips of copyrighted material, wholly original, or a mashup of copyrighted content that may or may not be legal under fair use is irrelevant). They are a service provider and under no obligation to pre-screen content uploaded to their servers even though they do make an effort to filter obviously objectionable material (that is, contents that violates the terms of use, and even then it's not an immediate thing). There's also a very real difference between analyzing a tune someone whistles to see if it matches the signature of probably a few thousand songs when someone calls a particular number (and probably doesn't receive more than a few calls an hour) and attempting to filter all copyrighted content from the thousands (millions?) of hours of video that gets uploaded to YouTube daily, and that doesn't even consider issues of fair use.
PRS goes to google and says agree to pay us this ongoing blanket fee and you don't need to worry about removing our copyrighted material from your servers, otherwise we'll sue. Google responds by saying fine, you can keep your copyrighted material, we'll just change our terms of use to make it a violation to upload your music, and we'll do you a "favor" and help you track down all those pesky violations (which is of course the complete opposite of what the PRS actually wants). How exactly is Google the bad guy here? They're going out of their way to attempt to prevent the behavior people are objecting to even though strictly speaking they don't need to. PRS is just pissed that instead of signing a big check over to them rather than dealing with the problem google has opted to try to prevent the infringement in the first place.
In the past I feel I've been unfairly modded, both up and down, although generally more down than up, and more often than not my posts receive no moderation at all. Still, even with the odd down mod (oddly enough the ones I disagree with the most tend to be meta-mods, overrated in particular seems to be used quite often), and a few not so odd that I probably did deserve, so far as I've been able to tell my karma has always remained excellent. How much down modding would you need to receive in a day to go from excellent to neutral or bad? Is there a way to see a numeric value for you karma? What's the karma cap?
I like you tend to try to post in as neutral and non-confrontational a way as possible, as I tend to think of/. comments as a debate rather than a shouting match where well reasoned thoughts and strongly supported arguments will carry far more weight than any personal attack (even if that isn't always strictly speaking the case).
I think in the case of this proposed business model the hardest part is going to be fine tuning the rating system, and cultivating a active, motivated, and beneficial community around the company, with that last part being the most important factor. Often times the difference between a successful open source project and a failure can be traced directly back to the community surrounding it, and I have a feeling introducing monetary incentive into the mix is probably going to be a strong attractor for exactly the wrong kind of crowd you're looking for. I'm going to be watching this experiment as it's an interesting concept even if I'm not particularly optimistic about its chances for success. Who knows, maybe if this one fails we'll learn something that will improve the odds of the next attempt actually working.
I can't speak for the OP, but in my case it was to evaluate a movie before paying to go see it (usually 10 minutes watching a shaky low quality cam shot was enough to tell me if it was worth it or not and I wouldn't bother watching the rest), or to watch TV series that weren't available in my country yet. Most of the TV shows I downloaded I later went back and purchased once they became available (approximately 2 years after I originally downloaded them).
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually you can show someone under 17 an NC-17 movie, it's just that movie theaters have all essentially agreed not to. There's nothing stopping a theater from doing so other than the fact that it would probably lead to massive protests by the nanny-state faction, and quite a few conservatives, plus fallout with the various movie studios and most likely the inability of the theater to ever get movies from the studios again.
As for the movie, yeah it was violent, but I don't think it was unrealistically so, which is kind of the point. Probably the two worst scenes in the entire movie are at the end with the exploded body (not going to say who's cause I don't want to spoil it for anyone), and when that one guy gets his arms cut off, but aside from that it wasn't particularly bad. Personally I feel movies like SAW are much worse in terms of gore and violence. As for the sex and nudity, they did an amazing job of making it realistic which is something that can be said of very few movies out there which is perhaps what so many people are upset over. Everyone seems to want to make sex and nudity out to be some huge deal in one way or another when the reality is much less so, and I think this movie captured that very well.
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Even if they assumed that, when they went to order the tickets and saw the R rating that should have made them at least question why the movie was rated R. I'm not much of a fan of the MPAA (for various reasons including that they're a psuedo-official form of censorship), but they at least do give some hint as to what the content of a film is even if they're a bit heavy handed sometimes. Anyone that takes their kids to go see a R rated movie and then bitches about the movie content should have their kids taken away by child services as they're clearly not capable of looking after themselves let alone a small child. To be clear I'm not saying there's anything wrong with taking a child to a R rated movie, that's for the parent to decide, but it has to be the parents decision, and bitching about having your kid at an R rated movie means that you didn't see it yourself or even look into it so you're failing as a parent.
Re:I think you jumped the gun a little.
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 2, Informative
Looked letterbox to me. From where I was sitting the screen look massive, and I only remember seeing bars at the top and bottom, but they didn't seem to be very thick or anything, certainly not very noticeable.
Re:It's just been reviewed - not good
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Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 1
After seeing this movie, anyone who thinks it's a turkey is either a moron or saw a different movie than I did, and if the lines I saw are anything to go by I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Re:Not very "Family Friendly" either
on
Watchmen Watched
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Too much graphic sex and foul language.
It's rated R for a reason, and several plot summaries I've read use words like "dystopian" and "gritty" so it boggles the mind how so many people are upset the movie isn't "family friendly", like they somehow expect an R rated movie to have fluffy bunnies farting rainbows or something.
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No, by up stream ISPs. What this does is make it more obvious where spam is coming from and provide a mechanism to filter it. If your an upstream provider and something like 95% of the e-mail coming from a downstream ISP is spam first you warn them and if they still don't clean up their act you start by filtering any non-signed e-mail coming from them. If that doesn't cut the spam then you blacklist their server.
If everything was responding correctly I suppose, but if your system is lagging and your like me and normally have something like 30 tabs open that could be a bit annoying. Besides this is a april fools prank.
Bah, everyone knows the real achievement is getting a frist post!
It's not that it isn't unfair, it's just that there's nothing that can be reasonably done about it. In a perfect world we wouldn't need cops or courts because everyone would obey the laws, and no one would ever be mugged, raped, or murdered. Women carry pepper spray (or tazers or guns) in case they need to defend themselves, that's a reasonable response, but they don't go around holding a gun to the head of every male they run across and demanding that they prove they weren't going to mug or rape them. In the same way you as a developer can take reasonable precautions to try to protect your software but must understand that nothing you do is going to be 100% effective and if you introduce behavior that leads to hassles for your legitimate customers you're going to lose sales and have people complaining. The most important thing you need to remember is that there's no such thing as "fair" or "unfair" in the real world, their academic concepts like justice. We might aspire to fairness, and hope that our fellow human beings are decent people and will fairly compensate us for our efforts, but the reality is that most of the time they won't, and there really isn't much of anything we can do about it.
Some people place value in the artifacts of the development process itself. If you offered a downloadable PDF of your development notes (either all or select ones) and scans of early concept work or random scribbles (back of napkin kind of stuff) you'd probably be amazed at how many people would be interested in acquiring said PDF. If you do decide to go with Steam (not a bad choice all around) you might consider a "deluxe" version for a few bucks more that included some extras such as the previously mentioned design notes.
I like the concept but I'm wondering how you deal with no internet connectivity? If it can't dial home does it just assume the copy is pirated? If so that's a minor annoyance (depending on how you implement it) but hopefully not enough of one to garner complaints from paying customers. If I might suggest you probably should modify the message if it fails to contact the server to say something along the lines of "I can't contact our server to verify this key, if you paid for this game thank you for your support and please ignore the registration link. If you have pirated this game please consider registering as your support provides incentive for future work." This will hopefully prevent paying customers from feeling like you're accusing them of piracy in the event they're in a situation where they have no internet access (such as the oft reported cases of military personnel in foreign countries).
I think where you have your e-mail address at is a big factor as well. My primary e-mail is associated with my CPAN account and a few mailing lists and it seems like that's the primary source of all my spam (somewhere between 100 and 1000 a day, it varies). Of course even e-mail accounts that are brand new get the odd spam from time to time. I recently started a new project and received an e-mail account on a network belonging to a military installation and within 2 months I've already received 4 spam e-mails even though the account has never been mentioned or used outside of the local network (and I'm not the only one).
I have no interest in having my work valued at zero unless you "feel like it." I can just as easily not release it.
Having never seen or played your game (to my knowledge) I currently value it at zero. Even if I had seen it (and even played it), I'd probably still value it at or around zero, sorry, but that's just the way things go with a free market. No one is guaranteed success, and just because you wrote a game does not intrinsically mean it has value to everyone nor more importantly that it has the same value to anyone. Now, I can sympathize with you, I'm a programmer and I do like to think that what I make has value and that people are willing to pay for it, however the onus is on me to convince the public that my software is worth paying for, and no amount of DRM is going to do that for even half of the public.
Your potential market for any piece of software can be broken down into a number of categories and various things you do will effect exactly how that breakdown occurs. The categories are as follows:
Now, on the topic of that third category (Is aware of your software but values it at less than what you're asking for it) this is where your pirates come from. It's important to note that some people will value your software at or very close to zero and will therefore never pay for it no matter what you do, so some of these people might as well be considered lost sales no matter what. Your job is to try to maximize sales to all categories and this is accomplished in a number of ways. In the case of categories 1 and 2 (don't know and not interested respectively) advertising and demos (either full or partial) go a long way towards shifting these two into groups 3 and 4. Group 4 is essentially sold already, all you need to do with them is keep shipping a quality product that works well and doesn't hassle the paying customer. Group 3 is the problem group. Your options to win them over are to lower your prices, or convince them that your product has more value in it (demos, and various incentives are a great way to do this as the demo gets them actually interacting with your product and able to more fully evaluate it, and the incentives are effectively added to the value of the base product).
Do two things. First, just use a simple key system (don't require online authentication, that's just a pain, just validate that it's a potentially valid key), and don't worry about people installing their friends copy, they'd do it anyway if they're so inclined and nothing you can do that wouldn't also cost you paying customers is going to change that. Second require them to register on your website with the provided key in order to receive support by way of updates, patches, forums, and maybe some sort of incentive they can download that's fun to have but not strictly necessary (like say maybe a new interface skin or something). This maintains balance by not requiring anything of the paying customers, but also provides incentive in the way of eliminating hassles and providing minor bonuses for those that do actually pay.
Not sure what the GP is talking about, but I was under the impression this sort of technology has been around for a very long time (based on description in summary and article). I only see two really new bits of design here, one being the conductive element changing conductivity based on pressure (this to a certain extent has been used before, but it sounds like this material offers finer sensitivity than previous approaches), and more crucially the software used to process the signal coming from this thing. For all intents and purposes the hardware side of this thing sounds decidedly ho-hum, but the software that's doing the interpolation from the resistance data seems like the magic that actually makes it worth anything.
They also bring up an excellent point towards the end of the article where they point out one of the biggest challenges is going to be integrating this thing into a display. On the plus side I imagine it should be fairly straightforward to layer it over a piece of glass, but I'd be worried about scratching and such as any damage to the top grid would ruin the pressure sensitivity around that area and who knows what the software driving the thing would interpret that as.
You assume that there's some inherit difference between the lobster feeling a "pain" signal and it's instinctual reaction, and a human feeling a "pain" signal and reacting. It's merely one of degrees of development, in the human it's a much more complicated reaction, but essentially it's identical to the lobster. It's funny watching people try to come to grips with the fact that people are animals just like any other animal, merely one with a more advanced neural capacity. In the end, it all boils down to stimulus and reactions, people are no different than lobsters in that respect.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a vegetarian or anything, I eat and enjoy a steak as much as the next person, but that doesn't mean I want the animal that steak came from to suffer unnecessarily.
if they feel pain? Cattle defiantly do, we still eat them.. As, I'm sure, a wide variety of other food stuffs feels pain as well..
I think the point is more that it's traditional to kill most crustaceans in a decidedly nasty manner. In the case of crabs (and sometimes lobsters) they're boiled alive, and in the case of lobsters they're often ripped in half (tail end is twisted off while it's still alive). The issue here would be that if they can be demonstrated to feel pain (sort of assumed they do myself, most all animals do) then there would be a demand for them to be "humanely" killed prior to being cooked.
- No Windows support (apparently a Linux-only VM in the plans)
The article says it's going to be based on LLVM which most definitely is cross-platform (and being touted as the logical successor to GCC). Unless they go out of their way to use some Linux only calls while implementing their Python VM on top of LLVM it should be trivially easy to get it running in Windows.
Essentially your point boils down to "the law is broken, so lets make an example out of people being charged under it unfairly so hopefully it gets changed". Much as I agree with part of your sentiment I can't honestly condone ruining the life of innocent children in the hope that it encourages the laws to be changed.
Are you a complete moron? WTF did the parents do? I assure you, at that age if all the kids are doing is sending nude pictures to their boyfriends they're practically saints. Also the only reason the kids would be "messed up now" is all this BS "think of the children" legal posturing. People need to wake up to the fact that once a child hits puberty they're going to start experimenting with sexual things, it's damn near the definition of "puberty".
They all need each other which is why this whole thing is so bloody stupid and only serves to highlight the flaws with the patent system. I can't imagine what any of these companies are thinking, once you start pulling the patents out none of them are left with a single marketable product they can legally manufacture (ironically NVIDIA is probably in the best overall shape in terms of patent encumbrance).
The only thing I can figure is that all the manufacturers will agree to continue business as usual while all this plays out in the courts otherwise this whole thing is going to bring computer manufacturing and development to a grinding halt (at least on the dominate 80x86 platform, the niche players like PowerPC, Motorolla, and the various embedded chipsets will be fine).
In a tit-for-tat battle NVIDIA loses, because Intel has more money.
Maybe, but don't forget that Intel is fighting a battle on two fronts, they've also got AMD to contend with (which is a much stickier situation).
No, YouTube started with the idea of providing a service that would allow people to post videos they made (whether those videos are rips of copyrighted material, wholly original, or a mashup of copyrighted content that may or may not be legal under fair use is irrelevant). They are a service provider and under no obligation to pre-screen content uploaded to their servers even though they do make an effort to filter obviously objectionable material (that is, contents that violates the terms of use, and even then it's not an immediate thing). There's also a very real difference between analyzing a tune someone whistles to see if it matches the signature of probably a few thousand songs when someone calls a particular number (and probably doesn't receive more than a few calls an hour) and attempting to filter all copyrighted content from the thousands (millions?) of hours of video that gets uploaded to YouTube daily, and that doesn't even consider issues of fair use.
PRS goes to google and says agree to pay us this ongoing blanket fee and you don't need to worry about removing our copyrighted material from your servers, otherwise we'll sue. Google responds by saying fine, you can keep your copyrighted material, we'll just change our terms of use to make it a violation to upload your music, and we'll do you a "favor" and help you track down all those pesky violations (which is of course the complete opposite of what the PRS actually wants). How exactly is Google the bad guy here? They're going out of their way to attempt to prevent the behavior people are objecting to even though strictly speaking they don't need to. PRS is just pissed that instead of signing a big check over to them rather than dealing with the problem google has opted to try to prevent the infringement in the first place.
In the past I feel I've been unfairly modded, both up and down, although generally more down than up, and more often than not my posts receive no moderation at all. Still, even with the odd down mod (oddly enough the ones I disagree with the most tend to be meta-mods, overrated in particular seems to be used quite often), and a few not so odd that I probably did deserve, so far as I've been able to tell my karma has always remained excellent. How much down modding would you need to receive in a day to go from excellent to neutral or bad? Is there a way to see a numeric value for you karma? What's the karma cap?
/. comments as a debate rather than a shouting match where well reasoned thoughts and strongly supported arguments will carry far more weight than any personal attack (even if that isn't always strictly speaking the case).
I like you tend to try to post in as neutral and non-confrontational a way as possible, as I tend to think of
I think in the case of this proposed business model the hardest part is going to be fine tuning the rating system, and cultivating a active, motivated, and beneficial community around the company, with that last part being the most important factor. Often times the difference between a successful open source project and a failure can be traced directly back to the community surrounding it, and I have a feeling introducing monetary incentive into the mix is probably going to be a strong attractor for exactly the wrong kind of crowd you're looking for. I'm going to be watching this experiment as it's an interesting concept even if I'm not particularly optimistic about its chances for success. Who knows, maybe if this one fails we'll learn something that will improve the odds of the next attempt actually working.
P.S. I like your sig.
I can't speak for the OP, but in my case it was to evaluate a movie before paying to go see it (usually 10 minutes watching a shaky low quality cam shot was enough to tell me if it was worth it or not and I wouldn't bother watching the rest), or to watch TV series that weren't available in my country yet. Most of the TV shows I downloaded I later went back and purchased once they became available (approximately 2 years after I originally downloaded them).
Actually you can show someone under 17 an NC-17 movie, it's just that movie theaters have all essentially agreed not to. There's nothing stopping a theater from doing so other than the fact that it would probably lead to massive protests by the nanny-state faction, and quite a few conservatives, plus fallout with the various movie studios and most likely the inability of the theater to ever get movies from the studios again.
As for the movie, yeah it was violent, but I don't think it was unrealistically so, which is kind of the point. Probably the two worst scenes in the entire movie are at the end with the exploded body (not going to say who's cause I don't want to spoil it for anyone), and when that one guy gets his arms cut off, but aside from that it wasn't particularly bad. Personally I feel movies like SAW are much worse in terms of gore and violence. As for the sex and nudity, they did an amazing job of making it realistic which is something that can be said of very few movies out there which is perhaps what so many people are upset over. Everyone seems to want to make sex and nudity out to be some huge deal in one way or another when the reality is much less so, and I think this movie captured that very well.
Even if they assumed that, when they went to order the tickets and saw the R rating that should have made them at least question why the movie was rated R. I'm not much of a fan of the MPAA (for various reasons including that they're a psuedo-official form of censorship), but they at least do give some hint as to what the content of a film is even if they're a bit heavy handed sometimes. Anyone that takes their kids to go see a R rated movie and then bitches about the movie content should have their kids taken away by child services as they're clearly not capable of looking after themselves let alone a small child. To be clear I'm not saying there's anything wrong with taking a child to a R rated movie, that's for the parent to decide, but it has to be the parents decision, and bitching about having your kid at an R rated movie means that you didn't see it yourself or even look into it so you're failing as a parent.
Looked letterbox to me. From where I was sitting the screen look massive, and I only remember seeing bars at the top and bottom, but they didn't seem to be very thick or anything, certainly not very noticeable.
After seeing this movie, anyone who thinks it's a turkey is either a moron or saw a different movie than I did, and if the lines I saw are anything to go by I'm not the only one who feels this way.
Too much graphic sex and foul language.
It's rated R for a reason, and several plot summaries I've read use words like "dystopian" and "gritty" so it boggles the mind how so many people are upset the movie isn't "family friendly", like they somehow expect an R rated movie to have fluffy bunnies farting rainbows or something.