Little Mr Mahatma

In which the middle-aged Peacenik mouths off about War Drones--and all the other things that make him cranky.

Mr Mahatma--who is a Mr in real life--lives in the valleys of Southern California with his wife, a herd of Dears, and an impressive collection of books. Pnorny!
He is reachable at:
littlemrmahatma@yahoo.com

All writings are copyrighted 2003-2008 and trademarked: Little Mr. Mahatma

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Little Mr Mahatma

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Deep Pockets

Family of Activist Killed in Gaza Sues Caterpillar

Fri Mar 18, 3:12 PM ET

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The family of a 23-year-old activist killed two years ago in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli bulldozer accused its maker Caterpillar Inc. of "war crimes" in a federal lawsuit, according to court papers.

The suit was filed earlier this week in U.S. District Court in Seattle by Cynthia and Craig Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie, a college student who died on March 16, 2003, while trying to block the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Rafah refugee camp.

A spokesman for Peoria, Illinois-based Caterpillar declined comment except to say it was reviewing the suit and referenced an earlier statement that said the company has "neither the legal right nor the means to police individual use" of its equipment after it was sold.

Pardon me if I feel that the parents of Rachel Corrie are being stupid, self-serving, and outright greedy with this lawsuit. Stupid for wasting the court's time on an obviously stupid pretense for a lawsuit; Self-serving for using their daughters tragedy for their own gain; Greedy for thinking deep pockets - baby! - as if the tragedy automatically qualifies them for a life of riches.

Person runs over their kid with a tractor - sue the tractor manufacturer!

Person kills someone with a kninfe - sue the knife manufacturer!

I live in Los Angeles - smog central. I plan to sue the car manufacturers for their smog-creating deathmobiles.

Gets stupid, doesn't it? We've become so programmed for victimization, that if anything goes wrong in our lives it's because someone else screwed up and that someone else should pay. But they should pay dearly and if they can't then we look for the next biggest target - the one with deep pockets. Can't sue the driver of the tractor? Sue the company making the tractors.

It's one thing if the tractor ran over the girl because of a mechanical failure, that is, due to no fault of the driver. But this lawsuit is blatantly stupid.

Software Pirates
I was snooping out a warez site for research purposes and noticed that this one site tracked the number of times a particular game was downloaded. In this case a game was downloaded over 97,000 times. Wow! Doing some quick math at $40 / game, that could theoretically mean the game publisher lost nearly four million dollars in sales because of this one site alone. Double wow!! Call the police, the FBI, the NSA - this is a travesty. Those software pirates must die, die, DIE!!!

Wait a second. According to the site the game had been up one day. That means it would have to be downloaded about 300 times concurrently every moment for a day. That's a lot of expensive bandwidth and makes the 97,000 suspicious. Maybe it's the number of attempts to download.

But that got me thinking about WHY a game might get downloaded that much. This game wasn't a major name like a Halo or a Half-Life 2. It was a war game which usually appeal to a niche market. But why the tremendous downloads?

Two thoughts why.

It's "free" - plain and simple. Not that the person downloading will ever play it seriously. They'll likely download it, install it, try it for a minute, realize that it's not their type of game and then delete it. In this case, the game acts as sort of a demo. If the downloader likes the game hopefully they'll buy it. But the real thrill is downloading for free.

To "own" it. I call this the Collector Mentality. The downloader will likely never install it or if they do won't play it for very long. The thrill comes from having it, being able to add it to their collection. It's the software version of a packrat - they got to have it.

In either case the software company is, yes, theoretically losing money but not in reality necessarily losing sales. The freeloader and collector would likely not buy this game - period - but because it's free and it's there they download it.

Does that justify piracy? Hell, no. But there are different types of downloaders. Sure, some downloaders will be people who enjoy the war game genre and will download the game, will play it, and won't ever buy it but I sincerely doubt they make up the bulk of 97,000 downloads.

9:02 AM

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