It's all about the marketing....

It's unlikely this will contribute much at this point (and depth in the thread), but I believe you are misunderstanding the "brony" label, and that this might be why so many people are disagreeing with you even though your base point about a life being disrupted by an obsession is valid.

By and large a brony is just "someone who watches My Little Pony and is not the targeted demographic". It's not just adults -- many teen boys accept the label. It's also not just males, many late-teen and older females also call themselves bronies. You don't see a lot of them going around telling coworkers and strangers and trying to "convert" them, but online or in discussion with friends they'll consider themselves part of that group. That is: "I'm a brony" means "I watch MLP".

The little animation Let's Go and Meet the Bronies from BronyDoc presents this as well (but in a much more colorful fashion).

So yes, while the real obsessive fanatics usually call themselves bronies, they only make up a small part of the brony group. Furries and the "crazy furries" are pretty much a perfect analog.

But in your hypothetical scenario you forgot the $2 billion they spent on advertising and marketing.

I'm not faulting you, but every time criticism of pharmaceuticals comes up everybody raves about high research costs while ignoring that these are not the main expenditure. Apologists also tend to forget about sheer mountain of money "Big Pharma" rakes in each year. There's a line somewhere between "making a profit" and "being a malevolent drain on society", and I think they've crossed well over it.

And this doesn't mention all the potential "negative future revenue" drugs that might have been squashed or hidden away, but that's another topic.

Absolutely not true. I've had many, many times that I've went to find an app for something and only found ad-supported ones with no paid version available. Contacting the developers about it usually results in "we're thinking about it" or "we prefer staying ad-supported only".

Developers need to realize that when you put out an ad-supported program, some of your users are not going to see those ads. It's part of the risk of using that (failed and parasitic, in my opinion) revenue model. Unfortunately everyone seems to think that every app in the store should be free and ignore the rest.

Wow, when you go bullshit you go all the way. Does that mean when I disable cell/wifi network on my Android and run an ad-supported app (and therefore see no ads) I'm also being a "pirate"? At the absolute worst, blocking ads is a breaking of whatever bogus End User License Agreement the app thinks you've agreed to, while "software piracy" is simply copyright infringement. Anyone with half a brain (and not paid by the BSA) knows they aren't even close to similar.

Funnily enough, he just (~3:53 PST) mentioned Jane Fonda as a good example of somebody who dissents and even supports the ideals of the enemy, yet doesn't deserve to be put on some secret drone strike list.

You can watch the filibuster live on C-SPAN's website. Big viewing numbers may show a little (if inconsequential) support for his effort.

I agree whole-heartedly with this sentiment, but it might cause more grief that most would guess.

Over the last year or so I've played around with blocking the referer header from being sent at all, to any websites. 99% handle this just fine, but every now and then I'll come across sites that fail, and in various ways. Sometimes I get a useless error message from CloudFlare, and sometimes the page will simply render blank, like this one (in this case because TypeKit issues a 403 when requesting the CSS if the referer is missing).

I have no idea why some sites rely so heavily upon an HTTP header which is not required to be present at all. I'd love to see a browser start to do what you suggest and exclude the header in 3rd party requests because it would force sites to treat the header as it was intended (advisory only) and would also make it easier for those who want to block sending it entirely.

I like Word Ruggle on Android. It's like Boggle but playing with a bunch of other people at the same time, with each player's scores being ranked and displayed between the 2-3 minute rounds.

What I don't like is how ethanol is damaging for older vehicles. I know I have nothing to back it up, but ever since 10% ethanol started showing up at the pumps I'd swear I've had more trouble with my older car (difficulty starting, power, etc). Reading articles such as this one about the upcoming Ethanol-15 redouble my concerns.

It's the corn lobby and government subsidies that's driving adding ethanol into our gasoline, nothing else. I'm all for alternative-fueled cars designed to run on E85 (or E100 for that matter), but leave the stuff out of the "gas" pump.

I'm trying to figure out what possible reason to have Flash embeddable inside an Office document someone might have. Maybe you could argue that it's worth being able to embed in a PowerPoint slide, but even that is reaching.

I think a better solution is to disable Flash entirely* when run from an Office document and instead display a message that says:

"Flash has been disabled. To enable Flash content, contact your system administrator and he will come back there and hit you on the head with a tack hammer 'cause you are a retard ."

* of course with the obligatory registry-key-bypass for corporate users

It's also a blank page if you use AdBlock+ with EasyList. The rule ||googletagservices.com^$third-party breaks their requirement for Google Tag Services, and they weren't bright enough to handle this failure gracefully. Same with NoScript -- unless you've allowed googletagservices.com (and I've managed to browse the web fine for over a decade without it) then it's blank-screen for you.

Pretty sad.

That's the problem with the widespread use of loaded terms like "piracy". The original word starts getting a vast number of additional meanings (primarily pejoratives pasted on by news and media conglomerates) with the intent to label others who apply the term correctly as malicious. See "hacker" for another good example.

A "pirate" in the electronic sense is someone who violates copyright law. This is somewhat unfortunate, as I think there should be more distinction between those violating copyright for commercial gain versus those only doing so for personal use.

As to your point about not paying for content, I think this is a widespread mistaken belief. I believe the vast majority of noncommercial copyright violators would be eagerly willing to pay for digital media content that can be used under their own terms and on all of their electronic devices. I certainly know I would be.

Paying for Usenet access and/or a seedbox can run you $20/month or more (depends on provider, block accounts, indexer community support, etc). This is in addition to what most people already pay for cable/satellite TV access (say $80/mo). Add those together and you've got at least $100/mo that people are already willing to spend. If I could get high quality DRM-free TV episodes I would probably be willing to spend even more. Toss in perks such as MKVs that include closed-captioned subtitles and 0% chance of audio/video sync issues and you've got something better than most of what's out there now.

Most "pirates" are willing to pay for content. The problem is that it isn't available by any "legal" means.

That might change when you get a handful of copyright violation notices from your ISP. Suddenly the alternatives will look a lot better.

*relaxes*

Thanks for the clarification. I'm feeling a little sheepish now.

Ah! That makes a lot more sense.

Also...I -only- use Chrome, and nothing else. Yet this was supposedly a Safari and FF specific problem?

They DID. My account was compromised. I got an email.