Many non-psychopaths e.g., CBT therapists, evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists, such as Damasio, view emotions as adaptive tools for guiding/changing behaviour.
And transferred it away? Registrars make it really hard to do that if you're not the actual person. I'm finding it hard to believe someone can do this anonymously.
"worth" can have two meanings in this context. $100 from 1917 can be worth exactly $100 today. Or it can be worth what you can buy with it.
Some folks will see a $100 bill from the era and see an old $100 bill. Some folks will imagine what that $100 took to save back then, and what it bought.
FWIW my brain automatically went with "the goods that can be bought with $100" - such as what I could buy in a grocery store today with $100 would be about what I could buy with $3 back then.
I never considered the other reading until this thread. It was obvious to me the author meant "you can buy 97% less stuff today with the same $100".
I think it's used to convey that the buying power has been reduced. If you have a $100 basket of goods (as measured in 1914 dollars), $100 in 1914 allows you to buy 1 basket of goods. Due to the devaluation, today spending $100 would only give you a $3.05 basket of goods (as measured in 1914 dollars).
It's a bit of an odd comparison since you're using two different units for dollars to compare the basket vs purchasing dollar. The clearer way to say it is that today's $100 basket of goods is equivalent to $3.95 basket of goods of 1914.
I'm pretty uneasy about legal action against the subscribers themselves. If you can prove intent, maybe? But I'd argue many or even most don't realize they're doing anything illegal.
These IPTV companies, in my experience, never advertise that it's illegal. It's just give us money for a lot of TV channels, just like a cable company does.
I'm not familiar with how these IPTV companies market their services, but I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that people don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost.
It's like those folks that sold bootleg DVDs out of their trenchcoats in Manhattan - the defense of "gosh, I never knew buying a just-released-in-theaters Hollywood blockbuster for $5 by some dude on the side of Broadway was illegal" was never going to fly.
> don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost
Possibly, but not always. When Red Pocket and the other cheap mvnos came around, people were skeptical for the same reason - but it was all above board.
Pricing depends on sales channel and price. If you slum the dregs of shady marketplaces, you can get it for like 3 or 4 bucks a month. But in more mainstream settings, resellers often try to charge as much as 20 or 30 (or more) per month which isn't quite as drastic.
In the US, a few people in my mom's friend circle were raving about their 'magic box.' It cost a couple hundred but got TV, so they were happy. AFAICT it's some shady actors buying cheap android boxes and flashing some iptv software with service preconfigured. These people don't even know they're using iptv.
They’re literally calling dodgy boxes here by both the consumers and sellers. Look, make the case in court if you want, you might get off with a slap, and nobody’s rooting for the big bad corporation here either, but nobody is under any illusions that these are legal
> It's like those folks that sold bootleg DVDs out of their trenchcoats in Manhattan - the defense of "gosh, I never knew buying a just-released-in-theaters Hollywood blockbuster for $5 by some dude on the side of Broadway was illegal" was never going to fly.
Is buying bootleg DVDs actually illegal? Isn’t the thing protected by copyright distribution? The seller is doing the distribution, I’m only buying it so it’s fine, no?
It’s a little different because it’s easy for these IPTV pirates to whip up slick branding. Something more like if a guy in a nice looking uniform for a DVD company you hadn’t heard of offered to sell you movies. Especially for folks who aren’t very internet savvy, it can be easy to miss the subtle tells that an offering isn’t legit (even more so when the service works just fine)
A few decades ago our family got a 'proper' company with a shop front to install a satellite dish for us. We were then able to watch the Sky Tv from the UK even though we were not based in the UK (we still paid for a subscription but it was billed to a proxy address). This was the 'gray' part of what the company was selling.
What they also sold was sattv boxes with integrated decryption that would allow you to watch pretty much any European Pay TV (albeit not Sky, as they used a more robust encryption scheme) for free. They never mentioned the legality of it but they definitely advertised it as something they openly sold (in shop and in their ads).
>but I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that people don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost.
Why? There's lots of cases where there's much-cheaper alternatives. I have a mobile phone plan that costs a small fraction of what most of my coworkers pay, because I didn't get a full-service unlimited plan with a subsidized new-every-2-years phone, for instance. Is my phone company hacking into the other company's system to give me service? Who knows, but I trust the government regulators and judicial system enough to assume this isn't happening, or else the company they're riding on the back of would have the service stopped. In reality, low-cost mobile services like this contract with the big carriers to use their spare capacity, and the service is basically 2nd-class too.
It's not a consumer's job to know how businesses operate internally or if they're doing something illegal.
> but I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that people don't realize they're buying something illegal when they're paying a small percentage of what the services themselves would cost.
And honestly many of these websites look really professional and even legal services have various very cheap promotions, so good luck proving they knew they were paying for illegal service. It's exact same reason why in EU uploading copyrighted movie is illegal, but downloading it is legal, since you can't know whether the source is legal or not unless they would advertise with big letters THIS IS ILLEGAL DOWNLOAD FOR YOU.
Yeah, I think when people are getting hundreds, or thousands of channels cheaper from some off-brand name, or from a referral from a bloke down the pub, they know what's what.
It's like buying something from the local market, those Adidas trackies are either a knock-off copy, or knocked-off stolen, but if they're 1/4 the price then they're still going to sell to someone.
The only thing I'd point out is that a security researcher found that a significant number of those grey market pirate boxes they tested had malware on them. So using them can open you up to a whole lot of risk. After all, there's no accountability for those pirates!
I'm not sure they are. I watch stuff on youtube and some probably violates someone's copyright which is an issue for the people posting it but I'm not sure I've broken the law by watching it? Obviously laws vary by which legal system you are involved with.
Fraunhofer has a ton of top of the line innovations. I'm glad it exists. If the only way to exist is for them to collect on patents they've produced, I don't see the issue.
I'd gladly take every Fraunhofer "innovation" 5 years later if it meant Fraunhofer didn't exist. Compression patent extortionists are the scum of the earth.
I can promise you that Fraudhofer has NEVER made an algorithmic innovation which would not have been "discovered" within 5 years. Of the things they have patented which are coherent enough to even qualify as an innovation, they're more likely to have been actually discovered 20 years ago by someone else.
And they're pretty much worst in class, there's no practical way they're better than other algorithm patent extortionists.
By the way, algorithms should not be patentable, and legally aren't patentable, but some presumably corrupt bureaucrats decided they for all practical purposes are patentable anyway.
This makes sense to me as a strategy for most users.
I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.
I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'
It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.
Only psychopaths think of emotion as nothing but a means to changing behavior. The scary thing is that LLMs by nature would exhibit the same behavior.
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