The irony is because the person doing the stealing is supposedly religious (otherwise why would you bother stealing a Bible?)

Maybe they want to become religious, by finally learning the great truth. (Wouldn't you steal a Necronomicon? I would.) Imagine learning all of Moses' and Jesus' spells, going around parting seas to lay transoceanic cables cheaper, resurrecting to collect from dead deadbeats, summoning The Beast at just the right moment during a Maiden concert. I am so getting one of those bibles some day, even if I have to steal it.

Regardless of the soundness of this particular investment, the SEC has rules, and the rules are alleged to have been violated. Facebook's P/E ratio is irrelevant. The in-your-face obvious idea that an already large and established software company doesn't really need a huge cash infusion in order to suddenly become more profitable (what, Facebook had a great idea for making money but without more cash they couldn't yet afford a programmer to implement that idea?), is irrelevant.

This is about a law. If you don't like the law, repeal it. But please, don't have a law and then not enforce it. That kind of thing screws everyone even worse than dodgy IPOs.

Do you sue the casino and Nevada Gaming Commission when you don't ply well at the slots because the adjust the payouts since the last months payout percentages were posted?

The stock market is a lot like gambling, but it's not exactly the same thing, and especially when you get to how it's regulated, it's totally different, where the only thing that have in common is that a lot of people say it's corrupt.

If there were a law that said the posted payouts must be up-to-date or that VIPs aren't allowed to see more up-to-date payout information than non-VIPs, then yeah, maybe someone would sue casinos over payout postings. Why wouldn't they? You might say it would be a stupid law, but nevertheless if it were on the books then I would expect people to exploit it.

The irony of someone stealing a bible is not lost on me, either.

The irony is lost on me.

If I were designing a religion, I would consider it successful to have people be willing to steal (which comes with risk of punishment), or otherwise make sacrifices out of desire for my literature. That should be a goal of all good religions. If you look at it that way, how could people stealing it even be slightly ironic? That's part of the end state that a religion should work for: people out of their mind with devotion that they will do anything.

You lose a little on initial sales, but bibles should be thought of as ads. (Yes, I realize their actual uses are more complex.) That isn't to say you wouldn't prefer people pay for them, but geez, don't sweat it if people steal. It's ok for them to be loss-leaders. It's after you get people, that you make real money, either directly (e.g. through tithes or courses) or indirectly (e.g. tell followers which politicians to vote for, start holy wars after you buy into weapon contracts, whatever).

At what point does corporate America get the clue that people will actually start leaving over this kind of penurious legal system?

Maybe at the point that people actually start leaving over stuff like this, or even bother to do something less drastic, such as vote against it. We are not at that point, yet. In 2012 we will probably vote for the same people to stay in Congress, who created the silly statutory penalties. America is approximately 100% in favor of the judgement amount, and we will prove it in November when we re-elect those people.

People keep saying it's for sale on iTunes. That's exciting! There's just one little problem...

Putting aside the season 1 vs 2 issue, here is the link Google gave me for Season 1: GoT Season 1. If anyone has a better link, please share it. Let's bend over backward trying to find an alternative to piracy, looking at the publisher's efforts in the very best light, with the assumption that there's no dishonesty and that they are actually willing to sell what people want.

The above link takes me to a page that describes season 1, but is prefaced by an ad for some application software called iTunes (wait, is "iTunes" a store or an application?). Pretty much every link on the page turns out to take me to a page that tells me to get this application, except of course it hasn't actually been ported to anything except two OSes, neither of which is what I use.

How important that is, though, I'm not sure. So far, I have not found a link to a page I fill out some web form to arrange payment and they'll then let me download a file (which I assume would work in mplayer (ideally) or vlc or something). That doesn't mean the web page doesn't exist, merely that google and bing and wikipedia and hbo.com's own pages don't know about this link yet, so I don't know it either. Does anyone have it? Just because I can't find it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe I'm an idiot.

I'll consider the publishing of this link to be HBO's Open For Business sign, even if they are trying to hide it. I know lots of businesses with truly shitty marketing, which are nevertheless intended as for-profit businesses. How an entertainment company could be one of them, I don't know, but that's beside the point. Maybe they just need our help. Anyone got the link?

Has anyone bought the GoT files from Apple without having to use a special client? How did you do it? Got an URL?

Some people have mentioned Amazon, but all I have found over there (so far!) is a shitty Flash streaming service.

This particular defect in Amazon may be totally irrelevant, of course. Amazon does, in fact, sell music in a variety of ways that work excellently and require no bizarre player or client. They sell CDs, every one of which has been compatible with cdparanoia, and they also sell downloadable mp3s (which aren't what I prefer, but are good enough). I just can't find where the sell the video files, though. (And the Blu-Ray discs they sell have DRM, so it's illegal to read them, in addition to being a pain in the ass. So please, let's not talk about Blu-Ray discs until that tech becomes ready.)

Has anyone bought the GoT files from Amazon without having to use a special client? How did you do it? Got an URL?

It all sounds so promising, as though HBO were really open for business. But either they keep failing to close the deal, or I'm too dumb to see where they do it, or somewhere in the middle where we're just not communicating. What's going on?

On thing's for sure, though: the premise where we look at HBO in the best light and assume they are honestly trying to sell the product, does require they are at least up to mid-1990s tech for their store. Somewhere there's gotta be a page where I can give payment info (whether it's credit card info or what .. maybe HBO is too smalltime so they only take paypal, and if so, that's acceptable for now, and maybe they can their little startup out of the garage over the next year) and they will let me download the file. The post I'm replying to comes close to implying this is possible, but stops short of actually saying it, fading into weird terminology ("open iTunes"). Surely someone is about to give me the huge enlightenment+smackdown by posting the mystery URL.

Why isn't there an app for this?

Because it's basically a dumb idea. If you're going to go to the trouble to bother making phones become instantly secure upon command, you might as well just make them secure by default, instead.

General Motors spends around $40 million per year on maintaining a Facebook profile and around a quarter of that goes into paid advertising.

My elite math skills tell me they are spending $30 million dollars per year on Facebook, where none of that $30M can be accounted for by paid ads.

Until I get a clear understanding of that, I have to think that some kind of legendary incompetence is happening at GM, so I don't know if I get much out of their conclusions.

Assuming it costs $50k/year for GM to pay someone to upload pictures of their cars, type status updates ("Looking forward to tomorrow's release of car X!" or "OMFG car X is sooo beautiful and fast, I don't even care what it costs!") I can't help but imagine they're paying 600 people to do that kind of work.

For example, if you had severely limited petroleum and no plant-based alternatives, you might recycle plastic at a loss in order to keep using plastic.

Except that if you recycle the plastic "at a loss," then I get super-sceptical about the petroleum being "severely limited." If petroleum is simultaneously cheap yet also severely limited, my scam detector goes off. I don't know where the error is, just that an error exists.

Your rant has no time dimension! All you have is an impression of stupidity, not of changes. Even when you do mention time, it's just that you sampled people "decades ago" and you imply you haven't done so, since then.

And then you conclude "it has likely gotten worse" but you don't even provide an opinion, much less evidence, for why you think it might have.

20 years ago, people didn't make such lame arguments, therefore, people are getting stu-- no wait, 20 years ago they that too! Read dejanews and you'll see it was just a bad back then.