You... misunderstand... That was... only to hide... bad writing... and terrible acting... in the quest for ... milking a dry cow...

He'll probably just buy twitter if he wants that.

Yeah, piracy didn't exist in the 90s. Do we get the don't copy that floppy guy back too?

6. User then posts the link to a forum, and happily describes them as "All nintendo roms evarrrrr"
7. Google indexes said forum
8. Joe Average gets his free roms
9. Lawyer time

So much for that plan

It is space saying mourning the honorable half-god Kim Jong Il's departure. Spontaneous radio broadcasts from space are known to happen when the heavens weep.

It's quite common to attribute the existing attitude about copyright enfringement to Napster, but in reality the attitude already existed way before Napster existed. Before Napster it was CD-burners, and before that it was copying floppies and tapes. The biggest shift was the fact that content could be copied easily and without a significant loss of quality. Napster (or rather peer 2 peer networks) were just the next logical step in an increasingly networked world.

The content industry has been preaching that message long before Napster, but the difference is that due to successful lobbying they've been far more successful with the legislative branch than in the era before that. The message in general has always fallen on deaf ears with the public, after all those mixtapes didn't make themselves.

I would argue that copyright infringement in most cases hasn't changed over those years in essence: people still buy music, video games and movies, and people still share. What has changed is how visible it has become thanks to the Internet. Sure, you'll have a few people who won't buy anything and simply copy everything, but it's safe to say that those type people existed way before the internet existed and did the exact same thing.

What has more significantly changed over the years is that consumption has taken on a new form. People are much more interested in digital downloads than owning a physical copy. Convenience has become more of a priority than it used to, and this is something where some parts of the content industry have learned their lesson (most notably video games). Take a look at the success of Steam, despite it being a form of DRM, Steam is wildly popular because it's extremely convenient. They rely on impulse shopping for the most part, and the customers they don't get with impulse shopping they'll get with bargain deals. Despite some people on slashdot being vehemently opposed to Steam, it's very popular and most people find this form of DRM very acceptable. (I myself am not arguing for or against DRM here, that is beside the issue of this post)

I've noticed an exciting trend in the past year or so, and it has probably been growing for a while longer. More and more beginning artists are embracing the internet on their own, and skipping the traditional content industry all together. I've noticed that a lot of DJs have begun setting up streams to promote themselves, bands are using social media and networks to promote themselves, and a lot of people are actively making their own "TV shows". Examples of this are for instance eSports events like Starcraft 2 broadcasts (tournaments such as MLG, casters on youtube, or even in depth analysis such as Day[9]) and even fighting game tournaments (such as the teamsp00ky streams). The technological barrier of entry to do so has become so small that practically anyone with an average non-technical understanding of how internet works can setup their own platform for promoting themselves or others. Having an average of 5000 to 15000 live viewers for an amateur show in what's likely to be a very niche market is a lot.

I've also noticed that so called "netlabels" are becoming more popular (especially in Japan), where artists release their works on the web partly for free for promotion and release a few commercial tracks on sites such as beatport, etc. It's all very amateurish compared to the big established content industry, but it's certainly a powerful tool for promotion as more and more people are becoming aware of these things.

While I'm not going to argue that the traditional content industry is finished, or predict the death of the music and movie industry in the next 10 years, this shift shows that more and more people are embracing a (relatively) new form of media. Despite my own dislike of social networking, I can clearly see how new artists are fully embracing these tools to promote themselves and interacting with their fanbase. It's my personal hope that this sort of thing grows and becomes more popular over the next decade. I think that this sort of thing sends a stronger message to the traditional content industry than the public's disregard for copyright ever will.

*click* DAMN! Missed my window. Oh well, I'll try again in 9 hours.

Thus only punishing customers who paid, not the people downloading the game illegally and applying a crack.

Makes perfect sense

If you make a mistake the world will say you broke Stephen Hawking.

And here I was wondering what he was up to lately...

It got lost in our solar system and phoned home for directions... What gender do you think it has?

I'd make a joke about reading maps, but I'd feel old, so I'll skip that... Damn kids and their GPS shinies...

Remember when we had arguments about X being better than Y? I miss those days...

I'm actually writing an application that makes Unity hate posts on slashdot. It works in Linux.

Someone replaced the sugar for your coffee with salt this morning, right? I hate it when that happens.

Really? You don't say. I thought I was the only one who knew about Star Trek. I'll need to find a new thing... Maybe I'll go watch that Star Wars thing I read about. That death star thing should prove to be quite the hilarious joke.

Are you new here?

By all means, write a better article. I BEG of you, write a better article. I couldn't agree more with you that lousy science articles need to go. But how many scientists are willing to write an article that a layman can understand? There's no time, writing articles doesn't bring back any funding, the public doesn't care, and your peers care even less since they read the paper. Thus you get pseudo-science articles. Hi Reality, nice to meet you. FYI, most people here won't even read the article, and it's been that way for a long time.

Have you been sleeping for the past 20 years or so? Science needs to be deliver immediate results to be cool these days. The only people who care about the nature of the universe these days are theologists and to a lesser extent theoretical physicists. Sad, but true.

Slashdot was never the meeting grounds of the intellectuals its readers so gladly say it is. It's always been what it is : a news aggregator with geeks and their terrible terrible jokes. Sure, you've got a few people that are (studying) in this field, and they'll post a meaningful comment every now and then, but most of it is bored geeks with laser jokes. Anything you might think it was in the past is overly optimistic nostalgia.

OMG! Fake nerds. Quick, someone grab the Monty Python tapes. We'll weed 'm out by seeing who falls asleep after we watch quest for the holy grail umpteen times!

Leave now before you post yourself into a heart attack. That's the best advice I'm going to give you. Go read the paper, do something interesting, and spend the time you'd spend here arguing doing something that you feel is productive. You'll probably end up feeling much better that way.

The ploy here is that we claim it's all in the name of science, but the truth is we're pretty tired of having our credit rating lowered all the time. Next time Standard&Poors has something to say, we'll have our answer ready for them.

The electricity bill is going to be a pain though, but we'll worry about that later.