Silly argument often used against piracy

First of all, I want to state that I oppose piracy and I clearly see that it's damaging the industry. It's wrong, plain and simple.

However, I cannot help but find many of the arguments used against piracy very silly, this one in particular (as quoted from an internet forum) :

"it's simply impossible to defend any sort of piracy whatsoever. You wouldn't steal a Ferrari on the pretext "I could never afford one of these". It's as simple as that. If you wouldn't steal a tangible item such as a watch, necklace, car, why steal software? What makes software fundementally different? To anyone with any sort of higher brain function, the answer is nothing."

To this guy, it's obvious that stealing a Ferrari you could never afford is the same as pirating a game you could never afford. In fact, he thinks it's so obvious that anyone with any sort of higher brain function would immediately agree with him.
I think it's the other way around - anyone with "any sort of higher brain function" would see that this is simply not the case.
Now, the reason why is so obvious that I think most people have figured it out themselves by now but I'll state it anyway :

If there is a Ferrari you could never afford and you decide to steal it, that means monetary loss to the owner of the Ferrari (be it a private person or company or whatever). The car is lost, they have lost something.

If you could never afford a game and pirate it, they have lost nothing. They still have the game and you could never pay them in any case. They have lost absolutely no profit.

That's the difference.

To Christian parents

It can be hard to teach your children about the Bible in a way so they understand it. There are many complicated things and it's written in a way that even adults often have trouble fully understanding.
However, I found a wonderful page to teach your kids about the Bible. It's called "The Brick Testament" and basically it is stories from the Bible made with LEGO and with the Bible quotes underneath the pictures.
This way your children can learn many of the Bibles lessons like when to stone your entire family and how long to hang somebody.. something that will surely become valuable later in life.

Here is the link :

The Brick Bible

Edit - fixed a link that didn't work, thanks for notifying me KJ :)

Amiga forever!

My second computer ever was an Amiga 500 (my first was a C64).
And as all of us Amiga owners know, we had the most superior machine by far back in those days. Just imagine - a 32 color, smooth parallax multidirectional scrolling, 22kz 4 channel stereo sound (the module format started on the Amiga, later expanded into XM and other formats with more channels), plug and play and fully multitasking machine released in 1987!
And to top it off, they were CHEAPER than PCs back then by quite a lot too.

It's such a shame that Commodore made such terrible business decisions that they went out of business spelling the doom for our beloved Amiga.

The Amiga wasn't only for games either - far from it. But since Commodore chose to market it as a toy, most people saw it as exactly that and businesses chose to use PCs like they'd always done (Amiga 2000 machines were used to render the CGI in the pilot episode of Babylon 5 though, pretty cool).

I have to admit though that I used my machine almost exclusively for games.. probably because I was about ten years old at the time. But the games back then were really awesome and a lot of them supported two or more players using only one machine and one TV - something almost no games have these days (a least not in the world of computers).

I was dumb enough to sell my Amiga eventually but thank God for emulators! I've been using emulators for years now, mainly the best Amiga emulator available - winUAE.
If you're interested in playing some of these great games yourself or if you're an old Amiga nut and for some reason haven't gotten into emulation, grab the emulator from here :

http://www.winuae.net/

You will also need the Amiga kickstart files in order to boot the Amiga and run the games, these are still sold and you can buy them from here :

http://www.amigaforever.com/


If you want to see if you're as brilliant as me at playing platformer games, try to finish the Amiga game by the name of "Shadow of the Beast 2" without cheating! It's very hard but also incredibly atmospheric and fun. Highly recommended game, it's a good display case for the excellent Amiga graphics too (and it runs on a 7 mhz CPU!).

There are a ton of other classics as well that everyone should play, and this page is a wonderful source of reviews, screenshots, intro animations, game posters and tons of cool stuff :

www.lemonamiga.com


Anyways, that's all for now.. I'm going back to play more Rick Dangerous (and hopefully finish it this time!) :)

Damn!

I've always had a love for old games.. old adventure games in particular but also platformers and stuff like that. Of course this is partly because of nostalgia but I do believe that they managed to give their games more of that magic that makes a game just a little better than the rest back in those old days.

Anyway, I'm currently playing through the Keen series. I have finished some of these games before (Keen 4-6) and now I wanted to finish them all.
Now.. Keen 1&2 are fine but DAMN how incredibly annoying Keen 3 is! It's just bloody unfair and completely random at times. It makes me wonder if the level designers were sponsored by stress reducing drug companies, it's borderline sadistic at times.
I may not be the best platform gamer out there but I've played my share of them and Keen 3 has to be one of the most annoying ones I've ever played (even more so than Shadow of the Beast 2, another frustrating platformer that I finished with less keyboard bashing than this one).

The weird thing though is - Keen 3 is actually really fun. Despite being frustrating to the point of needing psycological help, it's really addictive and keeps you playing.
I'm still a big fan of the Keen series and this isn't a bad game at all but some of the levels could've used some adjustments.