TV Torrents — When Piracy Is Easier Than Purchase 474
An anonymous reader writes "NBC's recent withdrawal from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Online media stores such as iTunes, Amazon and Walmart have never been able to compete with the pirates on price, or freedom and flexibility — as the content they sell is typically wrapped in restrictive DRM. The one advantage that legal purchase offered was ease of use. CNET looks into the issue, and discovers that with mature open-source media players such as Miro supporting BitTorrent RSS feeds, it is actually trivially easy for users to subscribe to their favorite shows. Want to wake up to the latest episode of The Colbert Report, Top Gear or any of hundreds of TV shows automatically downloaded and waiting for you? CNET offers an easy three step guide."
EZTV + uTorrent + XBMC (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EZTV + uTorrent + XBMC (Score:4, Interesting)
The obvious way for the cable company to battle back against this is A La Carte Cable. All the programs I want to watch are on 4-5 channels, but to get those channels in HD I'd have to pay at least $60/mo with with 70 other channels that I'll never watch. Add affordable A La Carte programming and the Cable providers have essentially eliminated any reason for me to pirate shows.
Now to the question of what's affordable: Right now Time Warner Cable offers A La Carte packages in San Antonio [timewarnercable.com] that work out to be about $0.80 per channel per month. Say more than double that for the ability to choose exactly what channels you want, and my 5 cable channels cost me $10 / mo. Piracy problem solved. I get to watch what I want and the Cable company gets my money.
I'm sure there wouldn't be subsidized DVR's and the like under a system like this, but I'd want a cable card in my PC anyway. Though I suppose a fully functional cable card is another pipe-dream.
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Fox has there shows online with less ad's then on. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fox has there shows online with less ad's then (Score:2)
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Some of us are more worried about illegal boarders but that's another story.
I dunno about Fox being faster than torrents
Re:Fox has there shows online with less ad's then (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Fox has there shows online with less ad's then (Score:5, Interesting)
Tonight at 11 (Score:2, Funny)
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I'll watch the torrent in the morning.
So, are you saying that (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So, are you saying that (Score:4, Funny)
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Find the fifth word on the fourth page of this website:
signup.spywarecrap.com/~9393032/leadidiotshere.htm
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This is Slashdot. We tend to be those sources.
Re:So, are you saying that (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they can stay ahead of the curve if they really need to. However, I don't think they will.
Always. (Score:2)
Bauble du Jour: $49
Time to make $49: 1 hour
________________________
= Stealing more expensive than purchasing
Damnit. Preview... (Score:2)
Time to make $49 < 1 hour
Time to steal > 1 hour
= cheaper to buy than steal
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Umm, you have that wrong... (Score:4, Informative)
Buy:
Money Cost = $49.00
Time Cost = ~ 1-2 hours of working time
Misc Cost = Loss of ability to spend or invest that $49.00 in something else
Benefit = DVD box set or other "digital" item.
Steal:
Money Cost = $0.00
Time Cost = 0 as torrents are automated and can be downloaded while sleeping or at work earning $49.00.
Misc Cost = none
Benefit = DVD box set or other "digital" item, $49.00 saved, no productive time wasted, able to invest or spend that $49.00 on something else.
Result:
Buy Cost > Steal Cost
Sorry, Piracy wins again. YARR!
Re:Umm, you have that wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
a correction on your correction (Score:3, Interesting)
For the 1,000,000,000,000th time, that is copy, thank you. The number of thefts in the history of Napster/gnutella/Azures/etc: zero.
And you forgot something: downloading from p2p is only free if your time is worthless. With p2p, you have to deal with poorly encoded/incomplete/fake files and crappy connections. If you make decent money, it makes far more sense to get a subscription on iTunes: fast, reasonable quality, guaranteed downloads. If you don't make decent money, you are unlikely to buy the
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People who had paid for Half-Life 2 were playing the game a full day before the pirates, which was a landmark in my estimation because usually pirated versions of games are flooding the internet a full week before the discs arrive on store shelves.
My regard has changed a little bit with the Steam version of Bioshock arriving with Securom (this mystifies me).
The point of this article is? (Score:2)
NBC Offers Their Shows on Their Site (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NBC Offers Their Shows on Their Site (Score:5, Informative)
Because NBC won't stream videos to foreign IP addresses, and running through an open proxy is rarely fast enough for video.
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Please select another clip." -NBC
Also their decent shows are not available at all. They only seem to be posting full episodes of their crap shows. (no Heroes for you!)
They also seem to take longer to get their new episodes online than do the torrenting pirates.
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No kidding. I made it home too late one wednesday night to catch Lost, but I had it ready to watch less than two hours after the show ended.
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You can, don't worry. Would it hurt them too much to offer cheap downloads online. Cut the middleman, get more sales.
Not to mention they limit it all to US audience.
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Unfortunately, when some networks decide to cancel a series, rather than airing the remaining episodes, they sit on them or only show them on the web, like Fox with Driv
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Seriously, how stupid do you have to be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Clue stick to head of NBC: Jobs knows what he's doing. Trust him. Give him your content, tell him to do whatever he wants with it, and go play golf or something.
Why don't NBC's stockholders revolt against the kind of mismanagement that throws away free money and turns content-distribution power over to pirates?
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Re:Seriously, how stupid do you have to be... (Score:4, Interesting)
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NBC's stockholders have other, perhaps more compelling reasons besides this to revolt. NBC's Nielsen ratings have been terrible for at least two years. There have been entire weeks in 2006-2007 where NBC doesn't even have a top-ten show in the ratings - not exactly great for attracting advertisers, which is really what the whole business model is based on
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Don't forget about his ABC holdings (Score:4, Informative)
Not the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Content providers need to make these downloads as cheap and easy as possible, and they will make money. The more painful it is, the more people will turn to free alternatives out of frustration. Most people that are not generally criminals will only break laws if complying with them becomes too onerous.
Right now, the providers seem to be trying to crack down on free providers and make the legitimate versions ever more restrictive. This is counterproductive, and will only push more people away.
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On the other hand, I wouldn't bother stripping out starting/ending commercials either. Of course, I don't promise to pay attention to them, and commercials in the middle of the show would definitely get me moving the slider past them.
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That average comes from several groups. There are some people who watch TV Zero hours a day, some 12 hours, and so on. By and large, the ones who watch most are unemployed or under employed. They aren't much inconvenienced by f
Re:Not the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
A while ago I did some math and realized that for someone to legally acquire 20GB worth of music at $1 / song it would cost over $5,000. What I've realized is that as hard drive space gets bigger and cheaper / GB, as broadband access spreads and gets faster and as more and more means of illegally downloading media which can be trivially copied and reproduced come to be, the price factor eventually dwindles into obvlivion.
What is a tv show worth to the average user ? What is a song ? Today it might be $0.99 but as people get the means to acquire more and more media with the same investment of hard drive space and time that number is going to keep decreasing. People want more and more as their iPods and hard drives can handle more. And no one is going to spend $5,000 on an mp3 collection. Perhaps I shouldn't say "no one". But no one that I know personally would ever consider spending that much on something that can be had easily for free. $1 for a song, sure that's quite reasonable. But oh wait, I've got a 20GB iPod that I need to fill with these things. $5,000 !? Think of what $5,000 means to me. No more credit card debt. No more dying engine in my car. A new bathroom etc.
So I think we are WELL past the threshold of 'worth paying for'. The minute someone pirates their first song they have just crossed that invisible line where they become someone who "pirates" media. And once you do it once it becomes so easy to do it again. I'm making it sound like a drug, lol. But it's true. If you download a song for free why would you ever go and pay for one ? The only reason I can think to pay for something that you can get very easily for free is if there's a lot of added value for paying for it. And in cases like that people become very selective about what they pay for and what they download for free
If media companies ever hope to sell what they produce directly to the consumer eventually a single copy of a song or a tv show are going to have to cost fractions of a cent and they're going to have to be very innovative in terms of how they offer it to the consumer. It's going to have to be easier than downloading each song/show/whatever independently and it's going to have to have a lot of other added value.
I'm thinking maybe with regards to tv shows, companies should be experimenting (assuming they're not already, and I'm sure many are) with traditional tv broadcast models that are "upgraded" for the Internet. Meaning broadcast shows over the Internet and make money via ads. As for music, artists should probably look to selling to distributors who distribute their music in huge packages. Then offer their music for free to download to their casual fans while also selling cds/dvds with added value to their loyal fans who will gladly shell out a few bucks to support them directly etc. There's lots of ways to be creative and make money off of media still
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Re:Not the issue (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you spend $12,000 - $13,000 on your 50GB collection ? Wait you already answered that.
10 years ago, would you have even conceived that you'd have a 50GB mp3 collection ?
I mean, I remember when 4GB - 8GB drives were "freakin' massive!" and that was well into the "Napster era".
Granted, people buy larger storage devices because they don't have much of a choice (I can't count the number of times I only *needed* a small drive but ended up getting something way overkill because it was the smallest drive I could find), but people still find ways to use them. Also, storage capacity and price / GB has improved far faster than bandwidth and other technology. So we are hitting that point where people have more hard drive space then they intend to use. That doesn't mean people will never find a way to use it. Remember 640k is enough memory for anyone and all that jazz...
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media per unit is ever going to *increase* ? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more. And people consume more as technology progresses. Bigger hard drives, faster burning devices, more bandwidth, streaming flash videos etc. have all given people access to more material. And whether or not they were ever going to pay for that media and whether or not media companies are losing money because of it is irrelevant. The point is that the value to the consumer keep decreasing and it will continue to do so for the forseeable future. The Internet is a content delivery platform and with that comes media delivery. The more media someone is exposed to the less value each individual "unit of media" has.
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1. TV in the US is traditionally "free" if you get it over the air. Why pay for it.
2. DRM and ease of use. I want to put the shows on my media player no matter what it is. I want to store them on my HD or Burn them to a DVD. Just like I can do with any show I capture with my VCR, DVD-R or capture card on my PC.
Frankly the producers of the TV shows must have mixed feelings. They would probably love to cut out the networks, local stations, and cable companies. They could have all the lovely ad mo
$5/episode (Score:3, Interesting)
"Flexible pricing" would be more appropriate as offering some combination of episodes and movies as a bundle, at a discount compared to everything bought separately.
Since when was purchase easier than piracy? (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Get out your credit card and enter in all those pesky details
2) Enter your address and phone number and then wait for it to verify
3) Download it and watch it in the DRM-rich environment.
Illegitimate media download:
1) Search for what you want on your favorite torrent site
2) Download the torrent
3) ?????????????
4) Profit!! (by not having to pay)
Re:Since when was purchase easier than piracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Since when was purchase easier than piracy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Legitimate media download:
1) Get out your credit card and enter in all those pesky details
2) Enter your address and phone number and then wait for it to verify
3) Card Declined. "Bill Address Does not Match". Call Bank.
4) Bank says "You forgot to change your billing address when you had it delivered here."
5) Change Billing Address, Hang up from Bank. Try again.
6) Card "Accepted". Take Screenshot. Media does not download. Call Bank.
7) Bank says, "The charge is on hold, waiting for the vendor to verify".
8) Tell Bank "Let's do a 3-way call". Bank says "We cannot start it."
9) Call NBC. "Let's do a 3-way call". NBC: "It's not our policy to do that."
10)
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1) Figure out which media company has what media you want
2) Go to their site, figure out where it is
3) Enter your credit card details
4) Download content
5) Install protected media player, drivers, reboot system
6) On reboot, system crashes due to shoddy DRM implementation. Reboot again.
7) Start video, nothing happens. Try to get in touch with tech support.
8) Celebrate birthday and New Years while on hold
9) Get told that you need to reinstall your operating system, as it can't b
Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps it's a protest. "Show content owners how much you value what they have to offer - by finding ways of avoiding compensating them for their endeavors!".
I'm serious. I've downloaded movies in the past. TV shows too. But enough with the ridiculous fucking denial, the self righteous indignation of "they took away our 'right' to see their content". You want to break the law to get it, do so. But let's not pretend it's oh-so-evil-NBC's fault.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
That argument doesn't hold up when looking for obscure 1970s/80s/90s TV shows. While it's copyright infringement in the eyes of the law regardless, I personally find it non-objectionable it if there is no *legal* way to acquire the content I'm looking for. After all, if nobody's providing it, there's no sale being lost and you can't argue I'm "screwing" the content providers out of their cash.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
I want it and I can get it for free easily as long as I am willing to break with my otherwise sterling principles to get it. I know perfectly well I'm "infringing" and I don't care. I want it, I don't want to pay for it, and I can get it. So I do. End of story.
Strangely, I would NEVER consider physically stealing something from the company I work for or anyone else. When I left my last job I even returned the PENS because they weren't mine. Hell, I WROTE their corporate security policy, with an emphasis on corporate IP. So I'm not a thief or a dishonest person by nature. But when it comes to TV, Movie and Music torrents I'm a complete Pirate. Go figure.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
They could seed them in that they would have paid ads in them. Who would set up a anti-nbc BT client just to remove ads? I'd gather that the pirates (arr matey) are too lazy to rip out a few seconds here and there.
NBC would get their ad revenue, and pirates would get high quality goods. Win-Win.
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Someone would do it... just because they can.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
So... If I'm downloading a torrent of a show that is broadcast on standard television... that's infringement, but if I hook up a Tivo or VCR, record it, and then transfer it over to my computer... that's not infringement?
Mind explaining the difference?
Nephilium
Dehydrated grape bricks (Score:5, Funny)
TV Piracy is a godsend... (Score:5, Informative)
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That's why "pirated" content is popular (Score:5, Insightful)
Do I mind paying a sensible price for content? No. Do I mind the restrictions imposed? Yes. Simple as that. Yes, I can afford it. Yes, I do afford it, if the supply matches my demand. Unfortunately, usually it does not. If I cannot store it on my content providing machine and display it on my TV-enabled machine, the content is of no use for me. Simply because I cannot use it. What? Oh, I could store it directly on the machine that connects to the TV? Sure I could. I don't want. You don't provide it the way I want, I don't buy. Simple as that.
What manufacturers (not only in the content business) today fail to see is that you cannot sell things to people that they do not want. At least some people will rather abstain from having something before they are forced into unfavorable contracts or conditions. You provide it the way I want it and I will buy. You don't, I won't.
Free market at its finest.
It's the price as much as the freedom (Score:3, Insightful)
So, for less money I can get a better product (nice box, extra features, physical copies, I can rip it to any format I want.). Why the hell would I
Missing out on an opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
They wouldn't even have to make the torrents particularly high in quality. I suspect that most viewers would be perfectly happy with 352x480 pixel (DVD-lo) quality if it was free and legal. They're not looking for full DVD quality for archival purposes. They just want to see the episodes they missed. And yes, although the commercials could be stripped out, most people simply wouldn't bother.
Sell the higher-quality commercial-free episodes on DVD or iTunes, and everyone is happy. You're no worse off than now, bandwidth requirements would actually go down (TV torrents are invariably HD quality, with corresponding larger file sizes), and advertisers would still reach viewers. The networks could even reseed old torrents with new commercials on a periodic basis.
If only the studios could hear you (Score:2)
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"Totally Illegal" (Score:4, Interesting)
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
Has this been tested in court?
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Re:"Totally Illegal" (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't need to be tested in court: bittorrent means you also broadcast as you download.
You definitely have no license to broadcast.
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Well, where I live (UK), that's copyright infringement, and technically illegal.Not that you would get prosecuted for it.
In the digital world capture it to file send to friend over bittorrent or email or something. I don't see the difference in the 2 methods?
Under UK law, also illegal.
Also a good point is capturing it in one location and watching it another remotely? If i have a big enough atenna i can watch broadcast
tv feeds (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the problem though. You never know when the new daily show will come out. Sometimes they are released around 9pm (pacific) and sometimes as late as 4am. There are also issues when multiple groups release, or someone does a crappy job with the encoding. Groups also change filenames, making it annoying to maintain a good regex that isnt going to accidentally try to download some new 1.2 TB pack of simpsons rips or something.
I make enough money to pay for a good service, but I have not seen anything (and I am not going to duel boot or something every time I want to watch a tv show). Some sort of DVR style thing would be nice, without having to pay to get a cable line installed. Hell, you could even distribute over bit torrent so the service provider wouldn't need to pay as much to keep the bandwidth up. All that and simultaneous releases with the actual content, and I would be totally sold. I am sure that it will happen eventually, but until then I think my system works fine.
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2. TVs with resolutions comparable to my computer are expensive.
3. I don't have a sound system for a TV.
4. I don't have cable.
5. I don't want to dick around with HDMI and whatever other crap I'd need to get a HD signal to said TV.
6. I'm at work quite often and at odd times. Tivo costs money.
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Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:5, Interesting)
2. nbc.com has their shows available to stream, on-demand
3. enjoy.
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:4, Insightful)
2. nbc.com
3. ????
4. Watch on iPod on train to work.
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only question here is whether your downloads constitute a lost sale (and therefore a loss caused by theft) to the publishers, or not. I believe it could be shown that people would buy at least some of the stuff they download illegaly if the illegal sharing were shut down, so they are indeed thiefs, but one might argue differently.
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then again, if I'm paying for basic cable (or a premium service), and thus authorized to watch these shows in the first place, again, if I torrent them, is it still illegal as I could just as simply recorded it with a VCR, DVR, TV Decoder card, or even just as simply a line-in video feed to a PC...
I thought anything broadcast on TV was covered by personal use rights, as long as it's not rebroadcast for profit or trade of goods. Operating a torrent (if I did) technically would cost me money (in terms of electricty, hardware and time) and I get no goods or money from doing so, thus no profit. It's not a broadcast in that sense and thus not illegal in my interpretation of the laws. Provided the downloaded stream is "as broadcast" unedited, and containing all the appropriate commercials.
Distributing pay-for programming to those who do not have license to receive it would of course be illegal, and distributing illegally pirated or unreleased media would be as well. However, distributing legally broadcast footage to those who could otherwise recieve it already, or the reverse, downloading content you could otherwise get legally, should not be illegal. That stated, it should not be the government (or a companie's) job to make it illegal across the board, but that it should only be punishable if one is proven to be using the technology to illegally receive content. I challenge then the government to do so, prove I have actually downloaded content that I'm not already authorized or paying to recieve.
What NBC is arguing here, as are all other broadcasters who charge for downloads from sites for already broadcast content, is that they loose revenue. Really they're arguing to get more revenue then they would have gotten otherwise. They're arguing for the legal right to bill us for something they already give us for free! Downloading edited versions of these programs (where comercials have been stripped and thus advertisers are losing viewership) is a different arguement as we may actually be talking about misrepresentation of viewership and hence lost ad revenue, but these numbers are based on surveys anyway and are grossly inaccurate as noone can tell for certain what people other than cable TV subscribers watch (there's no feedback from broadcast TV or sattelite systems to pattern viewership or neilson ratings, it's all a guess).
Their argument is that people pay for TV episodes on DVD willingly, and in great numbers. Sure. Many people will not only pay for the convenience, but it's a professionally produced media, saves time, saved disk space, saves bandwidth, and MOST importantly, the commercials have been legally removed. By itself, many will be willing to pay for TV without commercials. Again, not the argument here is not "is it illegal to download,", but is it illegal to download "as broadcast" which is not the same thing.
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Whether I personally record the media, or have a friend record it for me, fair use allows the transfer of that recorded medie from my home to his and back (as long as it either is not considdered a pe
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I find no validity to the argument that a broadcaster has televised a show for free, but then somehow still expects that they're going to be able to retain the right to dictate when and how a person is able to watch.
Now, if someone was making commercial use and selling the intellectual property of the content provider, then I'd say there's a solid case that that person is committing theft of revenue. But downloading a torrent of an episode of Lost from bittorrent because you missed it and wa
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our time is better spent convincing the media execs why making their content available is a Good Idea.
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Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:4, Interesting)
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1. I have no working TV.
TVs are cheap... no excuse not to have at least a standard resolution one. Hit up craigslist.
2. TVs with resolutions comparable to my computer are expensive.
I can agree there, I'm using an old sony 20se which I find perfectly great for personal viewing. You could always go with a PVR, most have firewire these days.
a 1080P is twice the price as 720P, but most people are thinking that buy the cheaper one now, buy the better one later when it's 1/2 the price. Most i've seen sold offer HDMI, DVI, and VGA ports.
3. I don't have a sound system for a TV.
TVs are no more special than PCs as far as sound goes. Th
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I guess ethics is really dead, after all if you won't be put in jail or sued for doing something why shouldn't you do it. Who cares if someone gets hurt or dies, after all you'll get off scott free which is all that matters.
You know, a statement like that, coming from a person that admits that they break the law for their own entertainment, is really frightening.
I wonder how often you break the law and for what reasons.
Re:Zonk (Score:5, Funny)
Ok - I just checked on him, and everything looks fine. His water bowl is full, he's got a fresh copy of Roget's Thesaurus and he's dressed in his "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" pyjamas. Am I missing something?
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Niiiiice attention to detail there.
See kids, that's why you can't set your comment prefs to ignore the ACs. They leave all the best comments.
Re:comma (Score:4, Interesting)
Check your grammar retard. (why aren't you checking?)
Check your grammar retard. (don't look at mine)
Check your grammar retard. (your spelling is okay, but your grammar...)
Check your grammar retard. (god, you're such a bozo)
The punctuation provides some of that stress, and the last sentence above equates to placing the comma between 'gammar' and 'retard.'
Crap. What has my life become, that I write posts like this? (sigh)
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Note, that to have a sentence tree, one needs a sentence, which is necessarily ended by a
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Re:Usenet rules! (Score:5, Funny)
Usenet? What is this Usenet? There is no Usenet. You do not talk about Usenet.
The truth of the matter is, kids, that newsgroups are old-fashioned, slow, full of spam, and incredibly fiddly to use at all. And nobody really does any more because we're all Web 2.0 nowadays. Don't bother with it. Go back to thepiratebay. Nothing for you to see here. Nope. Nothing. Really.
Re:Usenet rules! (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly. The #1 rule of Usenet is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT USENET.
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You can watch it right on your computer. Of course, this assumes that you have a Windows or Mac box to run iTunes on (I'm not sure how much of it will run under WINE, never having tried it), both for purchasing and playback.
(Having done that a couple of times, I began to realize just how blurry my TV is. Playing an iTunes video at full screen on a 17" monitor is consid
RTFS (Score:3, Informative)
System requirements for Amazon's Unbox [amazon.com]:
Microsoft Windows XP or Vista (32-bit versions)
Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher
1.5 GHz processor & 512 MB RAM
Broadband connection