formlesstree4

I agree, the fact that our opinions clash is no reason to close the topic (unless it's requested by Hebi, which he said he doesn't want it closed). Debates can be a release of stress, and I don't think anyone has gotten to the point of yelling and raging at each other... I am also a developer Hebi, and working with a company as well (just co-founded it recently) and I don't view piracy as a threat to the company (probably because most of our things will be free or very low costing).

We are most certainly not done. You reintroduce new data to me which you never said, and made a few....points. I'm wondering if you're labeling anyone who has responded like I have a John/Jane Doe. I do not choose to protect piracy. Never once did I say I did. I do not think you are meaning me in this, but I want to make it clear. A lack of understanding? You never even told me where your sources came from originally. There was only time you mentioned a 2002 survey by the same people. 2002 is quite different from 2009. I also based what I said from you, with you yourself saying you estimated, or should I go back and quote your post?

Did you even read it all? The future is moving to cloud computing technology, and technologies such as DHT will make site removal pointless.

Hey there, welcome! Hope you enjoy yourself here and glad to see a fellow writer on here :)

Counter Argument time (I love doing these). I can see you took a guess at the number. You have friends that have pirated software, so do I. The reason I said most is because there are those out there that do end up buying the stuff they pirated. Your survey is out of date. 8 years have passed, and you of all people should realize that the Internet and people change in that time. If you want to start involving the Military then I can't really say much there. I have no way of even seeing what goes on inside our military nor do I want to. They got their stuff from foreign land, most likely from a physical dealer. We can't do anything about that. This discussion was about Internet based retrieval. Some military personal in foreign countries may not have access to the Internet, and therefore get it through dealers and spread it around. Dealers may or may not get their stuff from the Internet. I'll throw a word back that you used at me. That's your opinion. Some people might not think so, I don't know. I'm not in their heads when they decide to do what they do. Glad to know, you're already fighting a losing battle with software alone..attempting to get into the movie and music piracy business is just shooting yourself in the foot. Think about this: If prices weren't high for some software (say Adobe and Autodesk to name a few, and they are pretty steep), do you think less piracy would occur on them? After all, there are freeware alternatives of each (Paint .NET, GIMP (yuck), Blender) but they lack certain commercial features. Your service would actually provoke piracy to retreat further underground so to speak. Companies way larger than yours have tackled piracy at it's core and won (The Pirate Bay, if anyone knows or cares was considered the Achilles Heel of Torrents and it was taken down) yet it continues today because it has learned to live and evolve without it. I just want to make sure you are very much aware of the task at hand (and it looks like you are), so good luck. Just taking out links on sites won't be good enough. Eventually there won't be sites with links, just search engines browsing through (literally) "clouds of data".

Certainly didn't make it easy did you. That's OK though, looks great! I'll be in contact with ya.

Yes, but templates get you so far. There's a bit of customization that you lose from using templates and preset tools. That's why I love VB. Anyway, I fixed those problems in RMXP Pool, and now am working on the new GUI. Plus my game is released as a beta, yay!

I do enjoy this kind of conversation, but this has strayed far off from the original point of the discussion. I'll throw in my 2 cents. You do know that most pirates out there (I say most, not all) usually download the product, use it once, then either: A) Buy it legally because it's a great product (and the trial sucked, hence getting the cracked/pirated version to test a program out to it's fullest extent.) B) Delete it because they didn't like it. The Music Industry (as Marked pointed out) has had record sales despite these "losses due to Piracy". Ironically, did you hear about several record labels being sued by artists for doing piracy? It was quite a big controversy (and full of irony), because I believe Sony was spotlighted for using music they hadn't licensed for their personal usage, and after removing an artist from their record label refused to return the CD's (which no longer legally belonged to them). Even the Movie Industry is being "destroyed by piracy". The charts say the opposite. They have also had record profits the past year (movies like Avatar, Sherlock Holmes, etc) have had the box office booming into new heights. Funnily enough, some artists (radiohead) are embracing the usage of torrents and piracy to spread their music. The more that people hear their music, the more likely that person becomes a fan, buys a shirt/CD/coffee mug/whatever and adds more profit. I'm not saying Piracy is a good thing because it's not, but I'm also saying that it has helped the Movie/Music Industry reach new profits. Edit: Read this

I would be interested in that.

Hello there!

There were these two guys and one girl going back and forth about werewolves and hunters when a mod came in and stopped it. I never :lol: so hard.

Yo man, welcome back.

*constant bleeping due to profanity* That really sucks. I read several places that we might get a hint of something in 2010, and they better have the freaking Portal Gun in too!

It doesn't seem to affect me.

VB6?? You're a legacy developer (or your dad was)!!! VB.net ftw (object oriented yay!) Anyway, welcome and enjoy yourself!

Gahhh!!! Sometimes Visual Basic pisses me off a lot. I make major progress on a downloading queue system and all of a sudden, BAM. Everything goes to h*ll in a hand basket. I have somehow broken half the source to RMXP Pool beta 2 and now I have to redo the entire default GUI (which I had already planned on doing, but not right away). :dragonshock: On top of this, I've been working on some ArkTek products (can't name them here) and my console game decided to go kaboom too. It was working JUST FINE! :dragonshock:. Now I have to backtrack through 1,000+ lines to figure out where the h*ll I messed up (again). Console applications are so f**king temperamental that it's retarded! *rage face* :angry: :angry: :angry: At least my other Xeos creations are doing OK, I haven't broken them yet. They're actually coming along in stability (hear that Tatsu? I'm still working some! :dragonwant: ) And now...to conclude my rage post, my phone decided to get no network the other day (all f**king day), and I couldn't call a single person. I was so pissed. This morning, I turn off the phone & back on. Guess what? It f**king works again. :dragonshock: Life is a b***h sometimes. :dragoninsane:

Arrrrr, gonna get the booty now! Treasure as well.

PSST!!! That's something you don't really advertise :unsure:

There's a reason for that :rolleyes: as not everything they do is....legal <_< But if you ever want some help (which I don't know if you do), I can help out in some ways.

Very nice...I'll have to look into it some more.

MediaDefender, IFPI...I think they do what you do (go hunting for links) and the Internet Sheriff as well...but I could be mistaken.

Just a little note, this also affects blog posts as well.

I do not support the usage, selling, buying, or anything to do with illegal drugs. Structures aren't exactly the easiest thing for someone to get used to. Their concept is really neat, but an example of actually using one is not all that easy to figure out. The main difference between classes and structures is, classes are reference types and structures are value types. In practical terms, structures are used for smaller lightweight objects that do not persist for long and classes are used for larger objects that are expected to exist in memory for long periods. I was helping a friend the other day with creating a game system (the game's called Drug Wars, a clone of the Linux/DOS version), and realized that a method for storing information wouldn't work with just Lists & Array's alone. I realized that I should be creating a Structure. Here's an example of a Class & Structure side by side: See the difference, or lack thereof? As I said earlier, when one creates a Class, VB.net is expecting the class to persist in memory for quite some time (like the lifetime of the program's execution state), while a Structure is temporary. Take the game I was helping out with, there has to be a way to store all the "Drug" information, and keep it nice and clean. I could create a "Drug Class", but why? I don't need an entire Class just to do that. I can create a structure, which is basically like creating another object type (Examples of object types: Strings, Integers, My.Setting variables). The Structure would need 3 major items: Name, Cost, Description. Now I have a structure that I can easily create many instances of at low memory costs. On top of that, I can even store them inside lists: Now I have a fully Object Oriented Structure that I can use (if placed in a publicly available module) anywhere in the program. That being said, what if I created a different structure that required our current one? For example, the Player. The structure would need...what? Name, Money, Inventory List, and a way to add/remove the drugs from his inventory. As you can see, the structure code for the Player is MUCH more in-depth, so let me break this down: There are the regular Properties that you should recognize, such as the ones to Get/Set the Name and Money, but there are some different ones: There's a WriteOnly Property of adding a Drug. Why not use a sub? There's no real reason I couldn't, it's just a preference really. The hard one was the removing of the drug. Basically, you pass in the name of the drug, the structure loops through the Inventory list (Which is the List(Of Drug)), and when it finds a matching name, presto, it deletes it, credits the money back, and you're good to go. As you can see, these two structures are prime examples (Although the usage of them for the game..I don't necessarily agree with) of how structures can be used and how they can interact with each other seamlessly, and call it's own properties within itself. Feedback is greatly appreciated for my blog posts so I can improve them in the future!

I might like your business.....and even do some work for you (let's just say I know places where things would be posted..)

For being so bored in College, you seem to be having fun :rolleyes:.