Those are certainly areas that are painful given how today's media is distributed.

I guess the real point that I was hoping to make was that comments like being willing to "gladly pay significant sums of money" is normally some manner of rationalization at best (as I thought was the case with the post I was replying to).

I wouldn't have described my post as idealistic nor would I have classified it as nihilistic. My intentions were to point out the (IMO flawed) idealism of the post I was replying to.

I'm unsure how you were able to make the connection that I was suggesting that people should defy the law. Also, I'm pretty surprised that you would suggest I was implying that drug runners could somehow find the time in their busy schedules to also collect on contracts.

And specifically what was your unique and interesting method of viewing which was impossible to achieve even with significant sums of money?

Some people like to have a high horse to ride in on so as to make them appear better in line with their "outspoken enthusiast" ideologies.

Sometimes it is a Prius, sometimes it is a certain wardrobe or vinyl collection. In your case it appears to be Netflix's streaming service.

Simply because you found it to be a good plank in your soap box platform doesn't change the fact that the original post was spot on with regards to folks rationalization regarding their reasons for pirating content.

All that proves is that some people don't value their money as much as others or rather maybe they feel that the righteous entitlement that they are purchasing by remaining within the legal boundaries is worth the money.

Why run? I just cured them of what ailed them...right? ;-)

This isn't a good example.

Modern standard Korean isn't tonal. Yes, there are regional variations in the language just like any language, but difficulties in agreeing on the pronunciation of a word aren't because the language has nothing but tonal differences to tell words apart.

Satan is wildly more plausible though.

Without reading the entire article in depth, seems very similar as an idea to the legion distributed computing grid done in silverlight without the bells and whistles:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/GridComputing.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JonKatz

A past editor/contributor on /. who was basically a blowhard doofus who happened to, well, blow ... hard.

How is storing the length wasteful of memory? 99% of the time I'd guess as much space would be used in storing a null character as would be consumed storing the length of the string itself.

Minor nit for those not familiar with BSTRs: In a BSTR the length technically comes before the start of the string (pBSTR[0] actually points to the first character in the array).

Technically having a BSTR be null terminated wouldn't be required if it wasn't for the fact that the whole purpose of a BSTR was to allow these strings to be passed around to existing functions which only expected simple null terminated WCHAR* strings).

Whatever, did Armgeddon have the ultimate badass!? State of the badass art!? Someone you do NOT wanna fuck with!? Check it out! Did they have a squad of ultimate badasses to protect you!? Check it out! What about independently targeting particle beam phalanx? Vwap! Fry half a city with that puppy. Did they have tactical smart missiles, phase-plasma pulse rifles, RPGs, sonic electronic ball breakers!? Nukes, knives, sharp sticks?!?!?!?

Please, get out of here with your Armageddon crap.

I can find prostitutes in my local newspaper ("escort services") pretty easily. I'm sure there is more than one listing in the classifieds that is stolen property too.

Shall we go after our local newspapers now?