The difference is with fast-forward you still see snippets of the ads, and sometimes people will stop fast-forwarding to go back and look at an add that caught their interest. My former roommate did this way too often.

I can see why Fox is doing this, and they're right about it destroying their TV ecosystem. But I don't care, and I hope they lose.

Doesn't matter. If you're doing entertaiment primarily for the money, you're in the wrong career - especially if you're failing at it. You should only do entertaiment if you're doing it because you love it. Everyone has hobbies. Most don't expect to get paid for them. If you are able to make money doing your hobby, well, that's just a bonus. People make money doing what I like to do as a hobby. I don't. Nor do I expect to. Why? Because the demand isn't there.

That's the approach to take with entertaining and art.

THIS. This should be modded up much higher than 5. I've been trying to communicate this for a while now.

The other person who responded to you is absolutely correct. And due to that, even the mac addresses that ship on hardware aren't 100% unique. They've had to start reusing them already.

Because they still want Photoshop over Gimp, because they like it a little better. And since Gimp is free, how can Photoshop possibly be worth $700? Clearly, it's vastly overpriced. They feel a lot better robbing "about $20" from the "Big Greedy Corporation" than they do about letting the "Big Greedy Corporation" rob them of "about $680". The "Big Greedy Corporation" won't miss that $20 anyway. And besides, there's no way they could have afforded it at $700 anyhow, so the BGC is out nothing. Right?

I believe that's the subconscious thought process, though most don't realize it.

Pretty much this. A program sells for $700 when a reasonable facsimile is available for free, legitimately. Same is true for almost every other piece of software that sells for hundreds of bucks. People realize the stuff really just isn't worth that much.

It doesn't even matter if the alternative isn't identical or not as good. It's free. By normal human rationale, that means the other similar one can't possibly warrant a price that high. Sure, it may be a little better, but not $700 vs $0 better. And that's how I believe most people rationalize piracy.

These companies would probably be ahead giving away the core software for free to home users and collecting some here and there on microtransactions.

His account is obviously to troll the real kdawson, whose UID is 3715.

To continue getting funding? To get funding for the next project? I don't work in research, but I don't see why such funding would be handed out all in one lump sum.

It's not at all about copyright. It's all about software licensing. Psystar wasn't copying anything. They were purchasing copies directly from Apple.

And it doesn't matter what courts upheld it or refused to appeal it. A bad ruling is still bad.

Doesn't matter. Software licenses should only have the right to restrict what would impact potential sales for that software. This includes things like whether it can be used only for personal use or also for commercial use, how many concurrent copies of it can be run, etc. A software license should never impact what hardware you can run it on, as long as the use and profitability of the software itself is not affected. If anything, Psystar's use of the software increases the potential profitability of it, because it can be used on more devices. If they're using the software as a loss-leader, well, that's their problem. That's the same thing as selling console hardware at a loss, then complaining when the users use it for something other than buying your overpriced games - exactly what the previously mentioned Atari case was about.

This is truly a horrible outcome.

That's now. It still pales in comparison to the forests that have already been cleared in the US for frarmland. Most of the midwest used to be covered by forest.

The biggest cause of forests being killed is people clearing them for farmland. That's by far humanity's biggest impact on the environment.

Additionally, it sounds like they're cutting out the DVD functionality to save the royalty costs, AND that they plan to pass those savings on to customers. Whether that will actually be the case in reality remains to be seen. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but if that is what they end up doing, I have to give them kudos for that.

For myself, I won't miss DVD playback. My home PCs don't even have optical drives installed. I have a USB DVD drive, which I've used probably less than 5 times in the past year, and only once or twice for DVDs.

But besides all that, as you pointed out, there's plenty of free software players out there now. I prefer VLC over Media Center anyway.

The problem isn't so much that they decided to make everything accessible to casual players, it's the way they did it, and the way their endgame in general was structured. But given the structure of their endgame, yes, some of the content should not have been accessible to casual players.

You're definitely exaggerating, but I guess I can see your point. It wasn't really an issue for me though. The reason I quit GW had nothing to do with the game itself, and everything to do with the complete lack of account security at the time.

I wish modern MMOs took a page from the GW playbook and used storyline for progression instead of gear. To keep players replaying the same content, you use cool items and/or fluff items as incentives. It's amazing what players will do to get that awesome sword just because it looks awesome, even if it isn't a damn bit better than the plain-jane one they've had for the last 5 months.