Warez, the work that doesn't pay

Elfkura

Join Date 03/2001

Warez, the work that doesn't pay

You know, I used to support warez, thinking I can get anything off the internet for free even though it costs money to get the real version. That was cool, or so I thought, until I realized just how much this warez thing affected everyone.

It hurts to walk around some of the more underdeveloped nations, to see the calculators used by market sales people that are the exact name brand of the calculator that my father makes, exact same shape and size... but very much fake in that they don't work really well, but they are dirt cheap, and everyone can afford them.

My father has to work so much harder than everyone else in his position to keep reaping profits while other organizations are loosing loads of money, one of these mighty battles is that very thing... warez. I thought of the food on the table, the roof over my head, and the clothing on my back. These are the very things that my father fights to provide every single day, and there are people out there who are just trying as hard as they can to destroy that... one of them was me... it hurt and I couldn't sleep for nights until I crawled to my laptop and deleted all the warez things I had downloaded, promising myself that I will try as hard as I can to avoid them, unless it is deemed absolutely necessary, like decoding a msg from an SOS sender.

and I'm sure it goes for every single family here. At some point, your products or the ones of your parents/friends will be stolen and sold for a much cheaper price, or be given for free...

It upsets me... and I had given up supporting warez ages ago. I wish people would see that. I wish people would understand. I wish people wouldn't come around just to destroy every effort people make to keep themselves warm on cold days and full on hungry nights.

Warez... they are the work that doesn't pay. It hurts, and it hurts a lot.

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Hey - I admit it. I have a hard drive full of MP3s. I currently have 19 CDs on my computer, in fact.

But - I have each of the CDs upstairs on my rack - this is just more convinient (and let me make another mp3 CD for the car.)

Nyah.

(Whee! And I gave in to peer pressure and uploaded a desktop picture. Yay! Go me.)

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kthxbye, I'm the same way. Where am I going to find Mandarin songs here on the internet?

Definitely easier if I just rip my own CDs and I don't have to mess with the CD wallet

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well, I for one do not have anything that I do not own...

once when I was 12 years old, I used to go up to the local mall and play with the puppies and other pets in the pet dept of the Wollworths, I made friends with the lady who ran the dept and she allowed me to feed and water all the animals and also be the one to take them out of the cages for play time in the back room. I wasn't allowed pets, and wouldn't have had an animal in the house as a pet even if I could. My stepfather was a vicious person and he also happened to breed Sheps and also Dobies for a time and trian them as guard and attack dogs. These were not pets by a long shot.

Anyway, I started to hang out with some kids my age, which was something else that was totally new to me, being a loner all my life up to that specific point, which I soon returned to, I went along to fit in.

So this kid Frank decides while we are at the mall to pick up a skateboard and rid it around in the isles, we left and Frank came out the other doors near the auto dept, he had that skateboard in his hands. It upset me, but wanting to fit *in* I kept my comments to myself and went along with how cool it was.

later that day we went back up to the store and I stopped by and said hello to Jenny and went in and took a pup out of a cage and was petting him when the other guys came down to the doors heading out. I put the pup up and started to leave when the guys came back in the store with a security guard behind them, they pulled their shirts up and each had a water rocket stuffed in their pants their shirts had covered the top part that wouldn't fit into the pants.

So, even though I had no clue what they were goig to do, as I had not been told their goal and had gone to the pet dept, one of them pointed me out as being with them and I was pulled into the mix. Jenny was hurt, mad, and told me to never come back to the store, because she let me off they got off. She thought I had distracted her so they could leae through her dept...

that never left me...

no, I am not a thief, my children are not thiefs, and never will be thiefs, conversly I will give someone my lst dollar if it is what they need, all they have to do is ask, or for me to notice their need, I will do without for the time being.

Honor, personal value in knowing exactly what and who I am ( as much as I can know who I am being DID ) mean more than anyone could being to know. y wife has a good grasp on it though, it is the one thing she said always hit her inthe heart about me, knowing my past, the people I hung with, things I did to survive on the streets for a time, all of it, and yet, I hold people and the good in them as my faith and religion and as with any zelot, I refuse to break my religion which includes, honor, personal value, and never allowing myself to put me in such a position again...

ok, anyway, more info than needed...

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Nah, just more identification that will be applied to the name you use

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I think what I'm getting at is that when it's your property that's been ripped off it's a real big deal and it's easy to vilify the culprits! But it seems so easy for those very people to rip and burn movies and music like it is their right of birth! Go to almost any college campus and check out what is on most students hard drives.

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Like I said, it hurts a lot more when the things that are wrong hits too close to home.

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harddrives? on them? Pornography, lots of it.

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Rotfl! Most likely lol

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You hit it right on the head, Elfkura! Music and videos? Nah - most college guys I've known have had porn collections that took up so much space it made the amount of MP3s I currently have on my system (about 1 1/2 gigs,) seem small!

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DavidK

Join Date 03/2001

DavidK wishes he could get Mandarin mp3's somewhere...

I rip my own CDs too. I tried downloading some stuff from Napster when it first showed up but I hated it, most of the songs were missing the ending or had terrible quality. Anytime I found something I liked I would go buy the CD anyway.

It's interesting that when Napster was going strong, so was the music industry, CD sales were way up. Now, a couple years after Napster was shut down CD sales are way down.

I'm not trying to support file sharing, I don't do it at all anymore. The brief experience I had with Napster was pretty naive, and was just at the beginning of the trend. I stopped doing it long before the controversy just because I didn't like how it worked. But I did think it was a great idea and provided benefits for everyone, including the music industry.

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"DavidK wishes he could get Mandarin mp3's somewhere... "

Chinese websites? ^_~

Actually - I do admit, I every now and then I get an mp3 or two from a few friends of mine over in europe - that's actually how I've bought most of my CDs though.

They know what I like, and so sometimes I check my email to find a mp3 from a band I've never heard of, or one from a band I know, but from a CD I didn't know they have out.

Then of course - there's the free mp3s bands sometimes offer too.

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OH well they have a neat new wrapper for online purchased MP3's for people, the have a tracking wrapper and there is a security consulting company in Atlanta that is tracking every single one and sending the information of who is uploading, downloading, and searching for and finding those suckers. Music industry is going to have a field day in the future....

Internet Weekly, Internet Mag, eWeek, Linux World, and a few others I get here have run stories about it.. so PTP is going to end up being costly for some I am thinking... shouldn't be long before the tech hits downloaded applications. that should be interesting...

though for every issue faced, found out and blocked, 5 - 10 more will be found to counter it I am sure.

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Nature of the beast. Soon as a wrapper or something like that goes into full effect, something will be out there to counter it and render it useless. Betcha anything it only gets used on current new releases - 'pop' releases and the like.

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Jafo

Join Date 03/2001

+1845

I could have laid good money on someone mentioning exactly what Roy Munson brought up in his first comment.
A bigger certainty than night following day.

EVERYTIME 'warez' is mentioned, someone will question the hypocrisy of the MP3/Napster 'thing'...how 'EVERYONE' has MP3s stolen from a website/ftp/whatever.

Wrong. 'Many' people may use the quaint argument that the record labels charge too much or some-such.
They can/will charge exactly as much or as little as the market can bear.....and good luck to them, too. It's called 'free enterprise', and entirely within the law.
Napster/Kazaa et al are not. Their sole purpose is to facilitate copyright theft [piracy], though again, as sure as eggs, someone will spit and moan and claim they 'only' use file sharing for legitimate uses....yes, like every man and his dog wants to swap some home-grown proggy, like the renowned 'Babya System', not Photoshop or Maya, etc. [sure....beware porcine aviators, too]...

I personally was glad when Napster went under...and tend to smile when someone gets all upset that Kazaa has spyware, etc. The annoying part is that Kazaa 'should' be the progeny of a social scum under-belly, and not 'Australian'....

Still...at least we can play Cricket well....

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Though Jafo - it /does/ say something when I can order a CD from europe and get it for cheaper than I can get one up at my local BestBuy...

(No - i'm not condoning anything - just pointing out something only vaguely related

)

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DavidK

Join Date 03/2001

Technological advances are often met with industry supported resistance. What is unfair is when legislators and corporate leaders make laws to supress technology that could benefit society in secret meetings where the interest of the corporation is the only one considered.

If you found out that there were alternatives to fossil fuels available for 30 years but the oil and power lobbyists have managed to supress the technology to maintain a fossil fuel economy (and thus their own profits) would you think that was ethical? or a good thing for society?

The world tries to change and the guys with all the gold try to prevent it. Reason being, they would have to give up some of their control and change with the flow of technology. The entertainment industry is a great example. When the home video recorder was announced the movie industry (which represents a handfull of corporations) sought legislation to ban the technology. When their lobbyists failed (rare) they brought a case before the Supreme Court to prevent the technology from being offered to the public. The Supreme Court ruled that VCR's offered a beneficial technology to the public and they should be allowed to be sold.

That was the last time the "industry" had to resort to the courts. They got better at bribing government officials (even became gov't officials) and they now pass laws to supress any technology that would cut into their profits, no matter what the benefit to society might be. DAT, MINI DISC and who knows how many other great ideas have been legislated into irrelevant, crippled recording mediums purely to protect the profits of a small number of companies.

The bigger problem that comes from the same mindset and practice of corrupt government involves agencies that are supposed to be looking out for the public's health and welfare being co-opted by big business. A plague of toxins in your food, water and air becomes a certainty when the only "concern" worth considering is the profits of big business.

Another great example, George Bush refusing to sign a treaty banning the production of biological weapons (May, 2001) which had been signed by every Nation at the UN and had been Ratified by 137 Countries. His reason as stated before the world conference "I can't sign this treaty because it would have a negative impact on the bottom line on several American companies, and I can't do that."

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Elfkura just got blown away by that last post...

Thank you for putting all that I have ever said into nothing more than just childish phrases, DavidK

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DavidK

Join Date 03/2001

The fact is, the entertainment industry was forced to accept the introduction of new technology with the VCR and then was further pressed to grow up by the courts in the "First Sale Doctrine" decision which made it possible to rent movies. In both cases, the industry was proven to be short-sighted and stupid as their share of these new profits was enormous and a new distribution channel for their product emerged.

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Thank you for putting all that I have ever said into nothing more than just childish phrases, DavidK
--- Elfkura

I didn't write that right, so David thought his post was childish...

No, his two posts made all of mine look childish

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"If you found out that there were alternatives to fossil fuels available for 30 years "

Again, only marginally related - but if you research the early, history of the automobile - you also find that electricity was the preferred type of power-source for cars by the masses. ^.^

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DavidK

Join Date 03/2001

...but they couldn't make the cords long enough

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actually for electric cells being so far in the future before being a viable source of power, Mitsubishi has a electric car that does 70 mph for 250 miles before a recharge is needed and it only take 15 minutes from a dead cell to a full rechanrge... sounds more than viable to me, and a solid runner up to replace fossil fueled cars on the streets...

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that was released in a tech news blurb (go figure) on Discovery Science about 9 months ago....

for someone who claims they are researching and funding research into alternatives, seems to me someone isn't looking very hard or far....

all it would take is funding to push it into full production and exportation, hell they could even fund it on the promise it would be built in the US and actually BUILD JOBS for a change instead of allowing them to run to other lands with the jobs while all the time claiming they are building jobs...

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DavidK

Join Date 03/2001

That's a great post IPlural, makes you wonder what the priorities are...

There are hydrogen fuel-cell generators that run on "water" and the only emission is "water" and oxygen. The space program has been using hydrogen fuel to generate electricity for decades.

A generator the size of your refrigerator could run your entire house, on "water". When the oil industry decides it's okay to roll out this new stuff (when the oil's all gone I guess) you can be assurred that the hydrogen will NOT be produced in the generator by water but will be sold to you at great expense by the Exxon Hydrogen Co.

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yup... heck, look at the nuke power source that is bread box sized they have had since the mid to late 50's designed to power sattalites and deep space probes. I think it was first put under heavy research back in 1954 and was actually in production before the mid 60's...

I am not saying they should put a bunch of potential dirty bombs on the streets, but if they could do that, what happened to fusion for instance, hydro-generators, etc?

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