I'm not going to buy "Starcraft II" anyway. I've introduced many people to "Starcraft" , using LAN play and spawn copies, some (but not all) of whom have gone on to purchase the full game.

If it doesn't have LAN play, I won't purchase (or pirate!) it.

Yes, I realize that someone will probably hack a bnetd, or offline LAN play, or whatever. I don't see why I should be paying 40+ USD for a software product that will require (illegitimate) 3rd party modifications to work the way I want.

How sad, but true.

(First off, I disagree with $1.92 million in damages. It's absolutely ridiculous, IMNSHO. I want to explain my point a bit further, though)

well, yes, and that works if and only if copyright infringement is always found out and prosecuted successfully.

Imagine, for a moment, punitive damages were small or nonexistent. I start a DVD pirating company, selling copied DVDs for $5 apiece.

I sell 100,000 each of two particular titles. my $5 is basically pure profit, because of the almost nonexistent cost of copying. If I don't get caught, that's, say, $450,000 per title profit for me. If I do get caught, I have to pay compensatory damages of $1,000,000. ($10/DVD).

The profits from one or two titles (in this example) completely offset the fines from getting caught for one.

So, as long as I only get caught for a third of my titles, I make a rather nice profit. While this example uses made-up numbers, the basic idea stands: Due to the low cost, and high profit potential, of copying copyrighted works, straight-up compensatory damages don't act as an effective deterrent

As a side note about 'only getting caught for 1/3rd". In the Thomas case, do you think she really uploaded only 24 files, ever? She quite likely had uploaded more than that, it's only the 24 songs she's caught for

Say Thomas had uploaded 100 songs, to 100 people, and somehow made $0.10 on each upload. (she didn't) The RIAA can prove 25 songs to 25 people (They can't). Straight compensation would be 25*25*$1, or $125. Her profits would be 100*100*$0.10, or $1000. A contrived example, yes, but it illustrates the idea. The expected value of for-profit piracy is a positive amount, without damages beyond straight compensatory.

THAT SAID, the fundamental disconnect here is that Thomas's infringement WASN'T FOR PROFIT. In this situation, the law doesn't correctly account for reality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Shipping_Co._v._Baker

basically: An Exxon oil tanker grounded, spilling oil and causing TONS of damage. Punitive damages were set at $2.5 billion, but reduced by quite a bit, to $500 million.

The argument presented there was that punitive damages should be at least in the same ballpark as compensatory damages. This is the same argument many people believe apply to the Thomas case, since if her punishment was proportional to actual damages caused, it would be significantly less.

Incidentally, there's a reason that there's such a high cap on punitive damages in infringement cases. If that weren't the case, large companies could attempt for-profit infringement, and even if they did get caught and had to pay damages based on actual damage, those fines would be largely covered by the profit made infringing!

So, without excessive punitive fines to make up for the ease of copying, in theory, willful for-profit copyright fraud would be much more attractive, because of it's positive expected value.

wooooooosh. :)

It's much more... sophisticated!


I Know it's not 3-D!

If I recall correctly, it also had a plaque that stated "Placed by the society of historical sticklers", or something to that effect.

#1 result is the parent comment. Fail.

Additional Claims:

6. A plurality of exclamation marks containing sequences of non-exclamation mark printable characters
7. The method of claim 6, wherein the sequence of characters represent a mathematical function
8. The method of claim 7, wherein the mathematical function evaluates to a number that, when expressed in decimal form, is "1"

What if the puppies know the location of the nukes? Jack Bauer says: "We don't have time for this!"

hmm. for me, If I just scroll down to the bottom of the page, the actual answer is there. I believe this is something of an open secret.

Then again, the given 'expert' answers are often no better than other random forum results.

A minor nitpick, that still is relevant. Privacy also has a second definition, especially historically: the right to seclusion.

In the USA, at least, some 83% self-report as being religious.

Honestly, at that point, I would say the 'organized religion - crime' connection falls under one of Slashdot's favorite lines 'Correlation does not imply Causation'

I'm sure people were killing each other for greed, or idiotic ideological reasons, long before it was written in stone, too.

I'd be most interested if someone did a study comparing crime rates across different religious demographics - including the atheist and agnostic. I propose that it would end up mostly flat

The parent's point, though, is that the halting problem, and the diagonalization argument, are inherently infinite.

If you have a finite amount of memory, say, n bits, then there is a finite number of states the memory can be in (2^n).

No matter what the architecture of the processor, you can generalize it as something which reads the current state of memory, and other inputs, and produces a new state of memory (and possibly output).

Ignoring for a moment the infinite possibilities one gets with peripheral input, we address your example, that of a fractal. Given that this should take place entirely in memory, we can safely ignore input. If you have finite memory, there are only a finite number of states the memory can be in. furthermore, because we are ignoring user input, and are using a deterministic processor, any given state of memory will always lead to a certain next state of memory.

As a process runs, it will either
a) halt
or
b) visit a state it has already visited.

Simple proof: you have a state machine with n possible states. (in a binary computer with finite memory of m bits, 2^m = n). iterate it n+1 times.
If it hasn't halted within this time, it MUST have visited one state more than once (pigeonhole principle).

Cantor's argument is counterintutive, but true, as are the conclusions drawn about computability and the halting problem. The thing to realize, though, is that they apply to infinite sets.

In finite sets, brute force trumps.