It so reminded me of that quote "So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause."
I googled that quote, expecting it came from someone like Solzhenitsyn or Orwell, only to find out you're quoting "Revenge of the Sith"... ugh.
Frankly an 80% piracy rate seems a little difficult to believe given how most iPhone users I know use their phones (most use stock firmware, since they're still on warranty, and people have spent up to £800 and don't want to 'brick' it).
An 80% piracy rate doesn't mean 80% of iPhone users are pirates.
Now my math might be little shakey, but let's say, hypothetically, for every 1000 iPhone users there are only 50 who pirate games. If only 5 out of 1000 buys a game, but 20 out of 50 pirates download the game... you would have an 80% piracy rate even though only less than 5% of users are pirates.
Wouldn't that suck? Spending 8 months in transit to Mars only to find a crowd waiting for you once you land: "yeah, we actually invented this really cool new engine like the week after you guys took off."
In case that sounds familiar, it's similar to the plot of a memorable short story from the 1940s, A.E. van Vogt's ‘Far Centaurus’.
As I vaguely remember it , Astronauts get frozen and go off for hundreds of years and find out that faster than light travel has been invented and the Alpha Centauri system had already been colonized.
What I wonder is why the designers of DNS put the name in reverse?
Berners-Lee regrets that as well, from back in 2000...
I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy. I would like http://www.example.com/foo/bar/baz to be just written http:com/example/foo/bar/baz where the client would figure out that www.example.com existed and was the server to contact. But it is too late now. It turned out the shorthand "//www.example.com/foo/bar/baz" is rarely used and so we could dispense with the "//".
The Internet facilitates easy plagiarism. I assume papers for sale on the 'net generally have good grammar. Is it possible an increase in Internet plagiarism caused the increase in literary quality?
The Internet makes it a lot easier to "detect" plagiarism, all you have to do is quote a few words from an essay and Google it, or use services like Turnitin.
Personally I think plagiarism in schools may be declining, it just appears to be increasing because a higher proportion are getting caught.
Before long children will be asking to transfer to the schools that pay the best.
Or that have the dumbest students (easier competition).
I always thought that they were knock-offs of Iain M Banks' Larry Niven knock-offs...
...of Freeman Dyson. That sounds about right.
And what about the growing issue of ISPs capping bandwidth-per-month usage?
Wouldn't the best solution be to allow ISPs to cache the bulk of game data? I'd imagine it would work like this, you dowload a few megabytes from Steam or whatever and that initiates the download of a multi-gigabyte signed and encrypted file from you ISP. Everyone wins, less bandwidth for the game company, the ISP isn't using bandwidth outside their network, and the enduser gets the fastest download possible.
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
