+1
Last year in Belgium a large storm hit Pukkelpop festival (large tents collapsed, some people died). Phone lines were all overloaded (both outgoing and incoming phones) but people could still tweet/fb they were ok.

they probably read in the stars they weren't going to win :)

> Even if your boss is a jerk, you still have control of your own life.

That's the whole point - people with a strong external locus will think they do not have control of their own life, and whatever they do or happens to them is 'karma' or 'destiny' and they can't change it, no matter what they do. They expect the next job they'll have will be again for another jerk boss (and because they act with that attitude it may very well become a self fulfilling prophecy).

And all of this is also influenced by a lot of factors, like religion, language, ..
Most people don't think about it and take what we know/how we think now for granted, without realizing a lot of factors are involved.

I recently read a book about the history of statistics, and how religion/language/writing was also a factor.
Romans and Greeks were very intelligent people, used a lot of advanced math and calculations, and (iirc) never got the notion of chance.
One of the reasons was that their way of writing numbers (fractions) wasn't optimal for it (having 1 in 10 or 2/13 chance of an event is easier to read/calculate with than I/V or II/XIII).
Religion was also important - they just believed everything happened for a reason, because one of their gods decided it, .. They had dice and games with dice, but never tried to calculate how it worked - because they did not think that chance/luck existed. So there was no reason to start making formulas for something they believed did not exist..

So yes I believe the original study will have some merit - although we now live in a global world where everything is connected (and we speak/know of many languages), culture of certain countries is still passed trough many generations.
If your language does not allow you to talk well about present/future, it will in some way shape how you think and how you act.

Continued - but still Rovios point is correct, it's better to treat (potential) customers as fans and try to win them for you so they'll eventually buy your product, than act like the music industry and be arrogant and sue everyone, as this will only cause your customers to abandon you even more..

True.
And their business model isn't a perfect analogy with the music industry, so their comparison doesn't hold true.
Btw I know I'm playing devils advocate here.

But the music industry are in fact middlemen between consumers and the artists themselves, and their product (revenue) comes from the music itself (songs, on cd, downloaded, ..) but not tshirts, posters, concerts, .. as usually the artist benefits most of that.

Rovio can be compared to the artists (who also sell themselves). Their main product are downloads of their games. Anything else that is copied (tshirts, posters, toy dolls, ..) can indeed be seen as free publicity, which will help make their brand stronger, which in the end results in more sales of their core product: downloads of their games.
And those producers that pay for a license to make related products, are seen as additional income streams, but licensing the Angry Birds brand is not their core business.
If enough illegal dowloads of their full games become available, or other people will make clones of their games (think angry owls/bad birds/..) and this causes a significant drop in sales of their own games, they'll also have to react (by legal means) to survive as a company, as their main income stream is treatened.

If you want to compare to the music industry, then compare them to artists. Most (small) bands don't earn a lot from cd sales, getting known is better for them, even if it's by illegal downloads, as this will mean they'll become more popular, do more and bigger concerts, sells related things (posters, tshirts, ..) and so on, and these are things that increase their income.

Also my opinion.. probably a discussion will end being around technicalities (legal catching radiowaves or not)..

Marketing/branding research already investigated shop layouts and paths shoppers make since many years. This is nothing new.
The only difference is that in the past it was small scale. It started somewhere in the 1960ies/70ies, you had actual people in a shop and observing how shoppers walked around (seems most enter a shop, turn to the right and go around in a big circle).
Later security cameras were used to do this, just record everything and have someone watch the tapes later and draw out the path.
Probably now some automatic computer tracking is added to it, so you don't need a person watching all the tapes and tracking individual paths..

Only big difference now with cellphones is that it's done on a much larger scale, they can track everyone around the shopping centre and even know when people come back..

If you're interested in this, read the book Buyology by Martin Lindstrom. HE did tests how effective marketing/commercials/.. are for decision making using brain scans/eeg/...
Seems most decisions are made instant by our unconscious, and only (milliseconds) later our conscious mind tries to 'explain' why we made a specific decision.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Another interesting book is Buyology by Martin Lindstrom.
He's in advertising and researched the influence of ads whilst taking brainscans of people..
Very interesting book. Seems most of the time our decision to buy/not buy/do/.. and all our actions are made almost intantly, but only later our conscious has to 'explain' it to ourselves..

True but that espionage is to help their own industry.
I don't think most fake parts found are espionage/sabotage attempts (except for a few military-specific components).

Fake parts are just a huge problem in the electronics industry - for everyone.

I repair old pinball machines, some people I know also do and always look for sources of obsolete ics.
It's amazing how many times you find a 'stock' of obsolete parts that's available.. sometimes the scam is clear (datemarks that are too recent) but sometimes it's not so obvious and only after testing you see that the parts you received are fakes..

I'm only interested in the results of this mission when they find samples of leather godesses :-)

Yes, it's ancient technology. Eproms were used in pinball machines starting from 1977 up to a few years ago (now usb-sticks are used to update them).

Also my opinion.. I loved the Amiga.. about 20 to 15 years ago. It's part of my youth. Whilst cleaning up my basement yesterday even still found a box full of Amiga Format magazines - still don't want to throw them away, reading back some gamereviews brought back good memories.. I even still have the last AF issue upstairs between my collection of books.

But the Amiga nowadays as a system ? It's nostalgia, but not something I would invest/waste time on anymore.

http://ki4u.com/
here's the website. After reading the title I was also going to suggest this. Buy one for your keychain, an dmaybe some of the new dosimeter decals they have now, stick them on your car or house window..

What you often hear is wrong..
If performance is really important for your product, you have to thikn about it from the beginning and in every step.

Very true - half of the stupid proposals are just because mp's want to get their name out in the press and say 'look I did something this year'..
Sometimes they either hardly know anything about the technology, or they are just so narrow minded that they don't consider it can apply to much more than they think of.

The law was good for dealers in arcade machines/pinball machines who could suddenly get some good deals in Greece.. (you still can btw, just got a mail with someone from Greece offering me pinball machines for sale :-)