I don't see what all the fuss is. A good craftsman could build a house no matter what hammer he chooses. Don't be such a snob about insisting that hammers must have heads to drive nails, just because all the hammers you've used before happened to have them.
I once watched an ape-man try to use modern tools. He didn't get anything done, because he spent all his time trying to figure out how to use them. Simple people need simple tools. We thus can't complain about the existence of such tools.
You're confused with Java. In PHP it is simple, just counter-intuitive and set up to mislead you. It would look like a rock but turn into a viscous liquid as soon as you try to hit the nail and the nails get stuck in it.
Sounds like a description of a non-newtonian fluid, like maize flour mixed with water (which you can compact in your hand but liquefies when thrown), or quicksand.
Law enforcement, failed hard drive, link outage, whatever...
They are all the same == Downtime.
My point is that if you have a "server" that can be seized, you have not designed a robust system.
Imagine the FBI trying to seize Google or Amazon or Facebook (well, a lot easier in the case of facebook only because they have so few datacenters by comparison.)
Cut the disingenuous crap. The next 3 sentences state that beyond that, they are now, without warning, requiring paying subscribers to upgrade equipment to handle the HDMI encryption. The first sentence was merely contextualization. Further, the context of that sentence (via the link) was how difficult it is to legally pay HBO for the thing they are supposedly selling.
I know. I don't make any bones about this HDCP stuff being bullshit. They are screwing their own, paying customers. That's terrible.
It's just that I really have no time for this entitled attitude that content owners are obligated to sell their wares to us when we want, how we want, at the price point we want.
It's not entitled bullshit, that is a false dilemma and a strawman. It is pointing out hypocrisy. If they make it very hard to give them money, why the fuck should it be valid when they complain about not getting money?
It's like a bum complaining it isn't enough when you give him your spare change.
They aren't obligated. And let me check.... yep! Turns out my computer still can reach the Pirate Bay! So there's your choice, philosophical discussions are worthless.
The frustration isn't that HBO is demanding money for content. Many of us would happily pay for episodes of GoT as they're released, or even signing up for HBO online and paying a monthly fee.
What I won't consider is a cable subscription, and lots of us feel that way. I don't want all those other channels. I just want HBO. Or better yet, just certain shows. I have money, they have content. Let's trade, yes? If not, torrenting episodes as they're aired is an attractive proposition while we're waiting for the season 2 DVDs to go on sale.
Is it an euphemism for "never"?
I guess there is no way I can obtain Game of Thrones, legally, in English, with subtitles, if I live in Russia.
I could order a blu-ray, but then again it would be region protected!
If there is no way for me to pay them the damn money, how can it be if I'm a doing anything wrong by pressing "play" button and conveniently streaming it the same day it was aired? Brought to me by people who actually deliver.
EDIT: Before 1967 or so the copyright laws were built to explicitly combat this problem by NOT protecting foreign content with copyright by default. Then they believed the world went global and now they should. Guess what? In 2012 they failed to figure it out again so we should demand the roll-back to pre-1967 situation.
Serious question, do you feel you have some sort of basic human right to get Game of Thrones, in English, with subtitles, in Russia? Does that extend to all intellectual property ever created, or is it just commercial pop-culture stuff?
I do feel to have a basic human right to do whatever I want to do without harming anyone.
For example, if I want to watch Game of Thrones, I do it, because I can and because there is no act of harming anyone: I'm not witholding any money its makers could possibly get if I didn't because they tell me they don't want my money.
That's morally neutral. It is my basic human right to be morally neutral.
Now, copyright is not a basic human right.
So I'd argue they get no copyright unless they distribute.
And yes, that ought to extend to all intellectual property ever created. Imagine that suddenly anyone in Iran reading, watching or listening to american "intellectual property" becomes morally wrong because somebody in USA decieded to put an "intellectual property" embargo. Doesn't sound right, does it?
Again, serious question, does this exemption apply to things that are just legally unavailable, or also financially unavailable? If game of thrones were legally available in your region but cost $100 or $1000 or $10000, would it still be OK to watch an illegal stream?
I've seen that argument when people pirate expensive software, saying "there's no way I could afford this, so it's morally neutral for me to use it without paying for it"
Are there actual examples of financial unavailability [of tv series, books or music]? If there are, let's discuss on per case basis. If there aren't, let's not.
The thing is, if they actually put effort at making it available, the offers are usually okayish. The problem arises when they simply don't bother.
Actual example of financial unavailability. One of my wife's favorite kids books, "The 14 bears in summer and winter" was out of print for years. It was a collector classic and was fetching upwards of $300 in the secondary market. We didn't buy a copy, we didn't "pirate" one either.
The publisher saw the high price as proof there was still a demand for the book and produced another printing. We paid full price for it, around 15 bucks, I think. It's a cute book, I'm glad I have it, I wouldn't have wanted to pay $300 for it, though.
One could make the case that if everyone could just "pirate" the book because it was financially unavailable, then the publisher would never bother doing a re-issue.
More broadly, I think that respecting copyright holders (and the rule of law) means that sometimes you don't get exactly what you want exactly when you want it.
Just a like a few people actually wait to buy when it's available.
As has been said before, the "I deserve to have something RIGHT NOW" entitlement mentality is just infantile. If something is worth watching, it will still be worth watching in a few weeks/months.
There is an important social element to watching a show. When a new episode comes out, you can chat about it with friends and coworkers. That isn't true if you have waited weeks or months to watch it.
The problem is, that's your mentality that is infantile.
You're going to tell us how we are infantile, how we feel entitled, how we are morally wrong in doing that we do.
By doing this you implicitly show yourself as being grown-up and morally superior. And how you can go without watching the tv series as it gets released.
And that's lame. That's unhumble. That screams "I want to tell the whole world how right I am". "My values - right. Your values - stupid" (c)
I see your perspective, and I don't want to hold myself up as a morally superior grown up. I was trying to have a serious ethical discussion about something I don't completely understand. I don't think HBO is doing the right thing (from a customer service or business point of view) by restricting their content the way they are, but should it be within their rights to do so?
But I am sorry for my unhumble tone. Using words like "entitled" and "infantile" was counter-productive to a real discussion.
From my perspective, we should not talk ethics because we can talk business.
Our purpose, obviously, is increasing the amount of wealth available to each and every human being on the planet.
For that, we want HBO to exist and produce content.
We want people who consume that content to pay HBO to make sure it exists.
But that to do with people who want to consume the content but HBO behaves as if they didn't exist?
What about letting them watch the content for free? The upside is, they have more wealth, and the downside is, I struggle to figure out any.
The ethical discussion is, to me, more interesting because there is a big gray area. A lot of people are framing something as a dichotomy (get HBO or pirate) when there is (to me) an obvious third option, which is waiting until the content is available.
As far as a business decision goes, HBO is making a choice that may or may not be the right business choice, but it is well within their rights. Maybe they will fail, maybe they will win big. Whatever.
I don't think it's morally wrong but it is at least ambiguous. I find the gray area interesting. Other people don't see it that way and I don't think they are moral degenerates or anything.
they've made their choice to not engage certain markets
They've made the choice not to engage in that market at the moment, but as legal copyright holders, they have the ability to engage that market later. Having that market eroded by people getting the content for free might be counter-productive, as in "we're not going to release in Russia because everybody pirates everything" leads to "I'm going to pirate this because nobody releases anything in Russia".
As I'm telling you, they're sitting on their rights of Maybe releasing, and Maybe profiting.
But I get Real wealth, not a Maybe one, from torrenting their series.
Real wins over Maybe.
Is it acceptable for someone in Region 2 to buy a Region 1 DVD?
Why is it different to buy grey market product (which may well require law breaking to be able to watch) than it is to torrent something and then buy it legally for my region?
Region coding is a really interesting thing to me. As I understand it, a lot of the intent is to be able to set content prices differently in "rich" countries than in "poor" countries, the same way that prescription drugs cost more in the US than in Sub-Saharan Africa.
If you were deliberately getting extra-cheap off-region content, I could see that as maybe a little ethically ambiguous.
As far as buying out-of-region content to get it sooner? I have a hard time seeing any problem with it. Maybe there's an angle I hadn't thought of.
I cannot understand why it is not acceptable to torrent then buy a DVD, but it is acceptable to buy from a different region.
Content providers think that buying from another region is "bad"; that's why they forced region controls onto DVD hardware producers. See ridiculous controls in some OSs restricting users to a certain number of region changes.
Upon thinking about this a little more, it seems that the possible ethical problem with torrenting now and buying DVD later makes me think of exclusive availability windows. When a big movie comes out in theatres, there's a delay before you can get it on DVD. For good or for bad, this is a time-tested way to squeeze extra money out of people who don't want to wait until they can get it on DVD.
It seems that HBO wants to squeeze the extra money out of impatient GoT fans by requiring that they buy the whole bundle if they want to watch anything without waiting a few months. There is extra value in getting it now, as other people have pointed out, because you can take part in discussions now while it's still part of the cultural zeitgeist.
Is it OK for HBO to require that you pay a premium for that extra value? My instinct says "yes", but I concede that it's a gray area. I also have a hard time calling fans "pirates" or "thieves" for torrenting ahead of making legitimate purchases.
thanks for not ranting
The world needs fewer rants. Thanks for not ranting back.
"I deserve" may be infantile, but I don't believe "I can watch it right now, and it hurts nobody to do so, so I will" is infantile. It's just reasonable.
How dare the executives lose shareholder's money by refusing to allow new customers to pay for the content and so make profit.
Preferring instead to stick to cozy little cartels where they sell content only to the same cable stations that they used to work for, and will go back to when their bonuses clear.
Remember it's not 'their' company - the company belongs to my pension fund - 'they' are supposed to be working for me.
Interesting angle, I've never seen someone come at it from the POV of the shareholder. If you're unhappy as a shareholder with HBO's strategy, I can understand that. Do whatever shareholders do in that scenario, I guess. (Vote? Sell?)
From the consumer side though, HBO has no obligation to do what a bunch of people on the internet who think they understand HBO's business better than HBO does think they should do.
> HBO has no obligation to do what a bunch of people on the internet who think they understand HBO's business better than HBO does think they should do.
They have no legal obligation. Currently, anyhow.
But you forget who makes the laws, and how the content gets delivered, and what people make this content out of.
Copyright is a temporary and limited monopoly granted by the people to encourage the production of intellectual property. The laws we have are an artifact of the economics and politics of their time. Information technology has radically changed both the economics and society's views. The laws will likely change as well.
HBO didn't invent dragons or kings or sex. They didn't create the Internet. They don't own the public airwaves or the public land over which the cables run. They don't own the fans. They didn't make the social media sites and bar tables where they get their word-of-mouth publicity.
HBO and all involved should be fairly compensated for their hard work and creativity. But the property rights you treat as absolutes are just convenient fictions we created together. People shouldn't feel entitled to the Game of Thrones. But neither should Time Warner executives feel entitled to use the public courts and police to ruin people's lives for sharing things they like.
We're living in the greatest revolution in information production and distribution since Gutenberg. Things will change.
>HBO has no obligation to do what a bunch of people on the internet
True - but any company that refuses to listen to existing and potential customers has to raise concerns.
unless you are Apple of course and then you can do what you want ;-)
I don't know if I am a shareholder. But most shares are held by pension funds so when the boss of a company like RIM/Nokia/Sony do something stupid it's not the CEO that suffers.
I think Andy is missing the point of the Oatmeal comic. It's not that people want the content right then and there. That's a minor part in the larger picture: acquiring content illegally is a better experience than acquiring it legally.
Let's say I purchased season one on bluray, and just as I was coming home from the store my friend gave me a thumb drive with the torrented files on it. I wouldn't even open the shrink wrap. If the bluray disc gets scratched, I no longer have access to my content; I can back up the files on the thumb drive though. If I want to watch an episode, I have to sit through commercials on the bluray that I purchased; I can watch them immediately off the thumb drive though. If I want to project using a vga cable, I may run into content protection issues; the files on the thumb drive will work just fine though.
It's not a matter of cost or wait time. It's that torrent networks provide a better, faster, easier, more portable, and simpler experience than the legal way.
People get too hung up on small points in this discussion -- "it'll be out in 3 weeks, that's not very long" or whatever -- and miss the larger picture. The larger picture is that there are a lot of unnecessary barriers between consumers and content they're willing to pay for.
Torrents are straightforward, they work right the first time, and they continue to work. Whereas some providers/distributors seem intent on processes that are slow, convoluted, annoying, frustrating, and that might eventually not even deliver the desired content (say, in the language of choice.)
Which is a typical way of reversing the argument. The whole point of copyright and the free market is to do exactly that: to have as the end result consumers that can get what they want at an affordable price whilst allowing the original creators to make a living.
Copyright violation is not "sin" like theft, respecting it depends entirely on actually making it work. If copyright is the only thing that actually stands in the way of that, it is being abused.
To paraphrase the author: The world doesn't OWE the copyright owners enforcement at any cost. If you can't distribute it under your 100% terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not publishing it at all.
Basically that just comes back to not wanting to face reality. One can go complain about lame people are that can't wait 3 weeks for the official release on iTunes, complain how lame it is that someone demands the content on their terms, etc.
Reality is still that HBO is simply taking away the incentive to purchase the product. Right or wrong, that's the end result. So do they want to continue complaining, or actually try to make more sales? (And I'm sure HBO is aware of the tradeoffs, and feels like protecting their current model is more important than a few more digital sales. That might be a correct assessment, for now.)
The parent is right that pirating content and not paying for it is not morally defensible if you believe that intellectual property has value.
You are correct that people often do immoral things. A refusal to believe that people often do things which violate their own moral code is a denial of fundamental human nature.
A smart distributor will say, "if we make barriers too high to easily own this content piracy rates will rise" while a smart pirate would say, "my actions are morally wrong but I don't care because it benefits me."
HN comments are IP. If everyone you upvoted asked you to pay $20 for the value they provided, would you?
We all get value for free; life would be impossible if we didn't. So either you're like Andrew Joseph Galambos, who changed his name to not infringe on his father's, and who put a coin in a box every time he used the word "liberty" (to pay its supposed inventor, Thomas Paine), or your position is inconsistent and ad-hoc.
A pirate is no worse for a creator than someone who simply abstains from the content. So in my opinion, either the two are wrong or none of them is.
(Note to everyone else: ad-hominem trolls will be ignored)
The point he's missing is that we're in a global village. If your friends watch it, you'll know what happens because they will talk about it. Maybe you won't care, maybe you will enjoy it a little bit less with no suspense - depends on how social if your typical series watching.
I don't see anything wrong with the approach though. Noone's saying that people won't buy the series on netflix once it's finally available. Although we know how likely that is...
And how terrible a world it was when people mingled and watched TV at their friends houses -- reducing, NO STEALING, profits from the HBO...
I am a giant theif, I take so much revenue from companies all the time, I need someone to sue the shit out of me for the following (to teach me a lesson and put me in my place):
* I loan out my $1000 worth of rototillers to friends all the time, the manufacturers and rental agencies are losing piles of revenue from me.
* I let people use my truck, and/or help them move things regularly. That is dozens of car purchases or rentals
* I help my family and friends with computer issues and build them free websites occasionally -- dirty dirty hippy crap, poor companies are losing service calls all the time.
* I cook meals from my garden, and invite people over to eat with me, grocers and restauranteurs probably should lynch me for denying their revenue.
Stupid sharing and human kindness. Obviously we are just a bad, evil species.
I don't find it to be good for much besides keeping track of podcasts. I never saw the appeal of "syndicated content" (blech), I'd rather read websites. Very few people use it when rolled into the browser, it's better off implemented in extensions and standalone apps.
iOS and Android have a Kindle app, which means every iPhone, iPad, and Android device can also be a Kindle. This fact is conspicuously missing in the analysis.
I read books constantly, and I do own a 2nd generation Kindle, but I think it is buried in a box somewhere from a move I did last fall. I do 99% of my reading these days on either my Android phone, my laptop or my desktop PC. I really think the killer feature that Amazon bring to its Kindle brand is actually "Whisper Sync" more than eInk displays or any other specific device. Being able to pick up my book from where I left off on any internet enabled device is the #1 reason my books purchases are almost exclusively from amazon.
I had a Kindle once. Lost it in a breakup. I still read more books in the Kindle app than dead tree books, and I don't miss not having a Kindle. Thanks to the Kindle app on my iPhone, reading serves as the mortar of my life, filling up all the cracks. I only used my actual Kindle at home for sit-down reading.
Interesting, the trend in calling regular books "dead tree books" and in leaving out the "e" in e-books. I have my own ideas as to why this is happening though I fear they would derail the conversation on the article at hand, thus I'll just leave it as food for thought.
I think it just means that the concept of book has separated from it's transfer medium. So "book" refers more to the content than the physical (or digital) representation. Compare to movie vs dvd.
There's ample precedent for this, as newer improvements become the norm. You won't often hear someone saying "color TV" or "unleaded gasoline" or "touch-tone phone" anymore. They became the standard, and we began to use modifiers to describe the older, rarer products.
I agree "dead tree" is a little bit derogatory, and unjustifiably so. Until e-books are strictly superior, until they are as good as physical books in every important way, we should respect what we've got.
I think my primary motivation for putting down dead tree books is that the e-books I've bought and haven't read are invisible. They don't sit on my bookshelves openly shaming me for not reading them :-O
But anyway, just to clarify, I mention that these apps exist because it could completely throw off the numbers as to how many "Kindles" (or "Nooks") there are in a given city. What if SF has tons of people reading Kindle books on their iPads? These devices can't be considered pure competitors to the Kindle (or the Nook), and their numbers are way, way too big to simply disgregard.
I've never had a problem reading text on my blackberry, or even books on my iPad - but since I got a Kindle I do far, far prefer it to the iPad.
Maybe that's largely a personal opinion or maybe most people would agree with me, but either way my point is - yeah, it's not "too bad", and is perfectly fine, but it doesn't mean it's not significantly worse.
YMMV, but I found reading books on my transformer a lot more comfortable after I switched the kindle app over to white-on-black rather than black-on-white. It was enough that I almost gave up on my actual kindle for a while.
All this pre-retina? I find pre-retina text display blurry to the point of distraction after long periods of reading. Also, how do you hold your iPad? I like the newest and cheapest Kindle's size and weight for holding it an almost any position for long periods of time.
The last 2 books I've read (the hunger games ones) were all bought and read on my 2 android devices (Galaxy Nexus and SIMless HTC Nexus). Cross-sync is awesome. I read on planes and before sleeping (you can invert the colors to have black background) The worst part is that I have an actual Kindle (albeit old)... somewhere. I don't miss it. At all. I love reading the kindle app on the phone anywhere, even buying the next one on the spot.
I have 2 Kindles, an iPhone and an iPad (latest generation) and I use the kindle app on them all. There's no issue with the iPhone and iPad - indeed there are times when I prefer them. The Kindle is also much better (at times) than using the iPad
I've read for hours on end on everything from a Palm IIIxe(Back-lit 160x160 grey-scale) and Palm T|X(320x480 color LCD) to a Kobo(e-Ink) and an iPad2. I've had no problems with any of them.
Oh, stop. I'm tired of hearing about "smug" being the worst thing ever. Too easy to toss this insult around.
Instead, personally my issue with functional programming is the aversion to side effects. It seems to cause a lot of weird contortions, when the whole reason we make software in the first place is for the side effects. Programming in a functional style brings with it a lot of wonderful, powerful ideas. But that one has always struck me as unfortunate.
I find that the aversion to side effects even when working in imperative languages is one of the most useful things I've learned from functional programming.
It is true that, at one level of abstraction, we write programs for their side effects. However, it is also true that having the right side effects is extremely important - so important that a program with the wrong side effects can easily be worse than no program at all. From that perspective, a focus on minimizing, containing and controlling side effects is very valuable. And an aversion to side effects is a good way to sharpen your focus on that.
While it's true that the output/observable behavior is what we want out of a program, whether the internals rely on side effects, strictly speaking, isn't relevant to producing useful things for the users.
I won't deny that sometimes, a lack of side effects results in weird contortions, but there are ways around it and benefits that make up for it. Since side-effect-free functions are way easier to predict, debugging time is much shorter in FP, I find. Monads, while difficult to grok at first, are elegant ways to get around side effects in pure FP languages.
Or, just go with my personal favorite solution, use an FP language that's not pure (e.g., most Lisps). They tend to encourage side-effect-free and/or state-free programs, but do not strictly require it. This gives you the best of both (IMNSHO); 80-90% of your code is side-effect-free and easier to debug, and the side-effect code is relatively contained and straightforward (in an imperative sense).
Banning side-effects like IO does create the need for odd contortions, but having less side-effects and little or no mutable data makes error recovery and debugging so much nicer.
