I see what you mean, but I also find it incredible that people should be surprised when torrenting a recently released Oscar-winning film draws down an almightly shitstorm upon their heads.

It's not like the people who made the film are being particularly greedy. Look at the takings for the film, compared to the budget: it doesn't take a genius to guess that if the grosses barely add to the estimated movie budget, the people who made the film are probably still trying to break even. Is it any surprise that they're a bit touchy about piracy of the movie?

Well, yes, to the extent that rightsholders froth at the mouth about how people who subvert region coding or format shift are filthy pirates, fuck that, or them, big time. I too am tired of being called a pirate for playing the content I bought legal copies of, in the privacy of my own home, or own head(phones). It is a particular insult when nobody gives enough of a damn about a movie to release it in this region (4, FWIW), or if the local release is done by clowns who screw the DVD authoring process and get the interlacing wrong. Yes, fuck that.

But, frankly, if people are so impatient to gobble up new shiny things that they torrent brand new movies and music, it is naive of them not to expect some trouble to come out of it sooner or later. A person who draws courage from the fact that they have already torrented a pile of new releases without getting sued is like a person deciding that nobody can catch them shoplifting because they have pulled it off a few times. How are either of them to know whether their efforts have gone unnoticed?

People, if you want to watch the film for little or no money, there is a sure-fire way:

JUST

GODDAM

WAIT.

There is such a flood of new stuff coming out, courtesy of our collective fetish for endless growth, that most games, albums and DVDs get heavily discounted within a year of release. Not only that, but the older a film gets, the more second-hand copies float around, or if you still want to hoist the jolly roger, you could get a cheap bunch of weekly rentals, and then, y'know... [looking around furtively] rip them yourself.

Bear in mind that for most of recorded history, incredibly harsh punishments have been meted to ordinary folk for trivial crimes, just to set an example. None of this trouble is new, or unexpected. For the moment, the laws are what they are; arguing over their justice is almost impossible when there is so much hypocrisy and willful confusion coming from both sides of the debate.

But nobody gets arrested for waiting to see whether a thing they want gets cheaper.

Breaking a business model is not the same as piracy.

Buying a video games device and using it as a paperweight may cost the manufacturer money, *if* their business model depends on selling lots of software per console sold to recoup the cost of the hardware. This was true for the Xbox 360 and PS3, but I doubt that Nintendo is losing money on DS sales. It is a legal use of the console in any case.

Running independently developed (i.e. not using restricted SDKs or devkits) homebrew software on a DS is not piracy. It is the same to Nintendo as if I bought the DS to hold down some paper.

I bought a Nintendo DS. I bought one cartridge: Korg Ds-10. I will probably buy another cartridge: Korg DS-10 Plus. I am not a pirate, even if I don't buy as many cartridges as Nintendo would like me to buy. I also have a DS TT cart, for if I get motivated to write or run homebrew on the DS. Again, not pirating, but not giving Nintendo a whole lot of extra dollars.

Am I stealing from Nintendo simply by not fitting their model of how somebody should use a legally bought DS? What is the difference to them between me buying it to hold down paper, and to run software that they did not license? Is it that I'm having too much fun by running homebrew on my DS instead of using it to hold down paper? How do they know how much happiness a paperweight brings to me?

As for future devices, I look forward to when there is a little more choice of general purpose, open devices in the DS form factor and with similar features. I'll be quite happy to abandon "piracy" and Nintendo's hardware platform altogether to run homebrew on something made by people who don't call me a criminal. But my moving to a different homebrew platform won't make me buy any more DS cartridges. In fact, eventually my DS might well end up (legally) holding down some paper.

I did always wonder if there was somebody inside Sun who thought their incoherent "choose your own adventure" web presence was actually the best that they could manage, or whether it was the product of a fragmented and dysfunctional organisation that didn't actually care.

But once I realised that the Sun management loved Java so much that they insisted on calling everything "Java [mumble]", even their Linux environment which AFAIK contained precious little actual Java, I knew that there was a lot of self delusion going on at that company. I had to reassure a number of people old enough to remember the wretched "Javastations" that there was none of that "Java crap" in the Java Desktop System. It seems that the corporate memory of Sun's failures has been maintained mostly outside the company.

There were references to a Z80 CP/M cartridge in the C64 Programmer's Reference Manual. Not sure how well it worked or whether it made it to market.

The VIC certainly had a mechanism for attaching multiple expansion cartridges to an external expander, but my memory fails me on whether the C64 had similar. Here in .au, any interesting C64 accessories made in the USA tended to be expensive and hence rare.

Not to mention a PC on which to run that Windows license, and a generator or other plausible power source to run the machine. Maybe a desk and chair, too. Boy, I can see why Microsoft hates the GPL! They already lose money on the Xbox hardware, imagine how much money they would lose if they started selling GPL-licensed software!

But seriously, the parent post is on the money. The GPL was first applied to software that was written for very expensive UNIX boxes, and RMS wrote Emacs before GCC, so the first GPL-licensed program probably required a licensed C compiler to build on most platforms, and back then C compilers costed a lot more than $99...

Indeed, the FSF used to sell tapes of GPL software (source included of course), to which multiple authors had contributed, not just FSF people. If the FSF was _free_ to make money by offering a distribution service, surely these folks are _free_ to charge money for building and distributing XPilot via the Apps Store, just as any of their customers are _free_ to obtain the corresponding sources and do whatever they feel like with them.

I heard that the back-story of strncpy() was that it was originally used for filling in fixed length fields in structures that get written to disk (like, say, utmp) or go out on the wire. For that purpose, the absence of automatic null termination of an overlong string is no problem, because the field length itself provides a delimiter on a string that fills the field. This also explains the puzzling null filling behaviour for strings shorter than the destination string length.

For that matter, I always wondered why strcat did not return a pointer to the trailing null on the destination string... multiple strcat()s on the same string could run in linear time instead of O(n^2), as well as letting you find how long the destination string was without a separate call to strlen(). It wasn't like returning the pointer to the trailing null (wherever that ended up!) could make strcat() less safe... :^)

strlcpy() (if you have it) does return the source string length, which is at least more useful than getting a pointer to the destination string as a return value.

(when it is working)

(when it is working)

(when it is working.)

See my other post in this topic for the details.

Bollocks to your bollocks, matey. If offline mode worked reliably, dare I say even without having to wait a minute to start the game while the Steam client heroically tries to connect via my flakey-as-hell wireless ISP, you might have a valid point.

I have two accounts on this Vista box, one for my son so that he is unable to screw with the machine, and one for me. My son is allowed to play a couple of Steam games (Eets, Geometry Wars), so he runs up the Steam client under his account sometimes, then I come along later and run up Steam under my account; not at the same time, mind you.

1. The stupid Steam client keeps forgetting my login password (yes, I checked the little box saying to remember the password), which means he
can't run Eets without me typing the #^$@* password again.

2. Because of this, offline mode is about as useful as nipples on a shark. If Steam doesn't have your credentials stashed, offline mode won't work. I'm trying to run up the fancy new game I bought off Steam a couple of days back, my machine is happily connected to the 'Net, but fancy that, as I type this, the Steam client says it is "having trouble connecting to the Steam servers". And the Steam support page says:

Help Desk Error
Our help desk is currently disabled. Normal operations will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience.

which is a great comfort.

3. The Steam client regularly tries to update itself; there doesn't seem to be a way to make it wait until you've got a working Net connection; but in any case, once it decides to do this, you *cannot play ANY goddamn Steam game* until it finishes, because the stupid client *will not even start*. [Hey Valve: even freaking Windows Update can download updates in the background and apply them ONCE THEY'VE FINISHED, maybe you guys could give the Steam client this amazing ability to walk and chew gum at the same time?]

To sum up:
1. I've got a nice game that I paid for, that I can't play right now, because offline mode is a flaky piece of crap.
2. The Steam servers are not exactly bulletproof, which combines really nicely with the flaky offline mode.
3. Compared to actual experience, your "bollocks" are lightweight and ineffectual.

Amen!

IMNSHO, excessive compression and limiting in mainstream music releases has raised a generation of music listeners with tin ears, who really aren't fussed by the extra garbage that low bit rate MP3 compression adds.

It's ironic, yet unsurprising that "the kids" see no point in buying the uncompressed source of their MP3s after the record industry did so much to debase the quality of the uncompressed sources.