Your analogy is close, but in the case of P2P, most of their use is for illegal things.
So it's more like suing Ford over a car they sold which included features like secret compartments (that criminals use to hide drugs), a giant bull bar (which they advertise as being able to run over a person with no damage to the car), and is advertised as being completely bulletproof, with holes for you to shoot out of.
Sure, it could still be end with them being ruled in favour, but it's not quite as clear cut as you make it out with your example.
Or the fact that games like Counter Strike 1.6 or Starcraft: Brood War still have some of the biggest professional leagues in history despite sequels being out.
I know someone who works in Enterprise Architecture/IT strategy and has done consulting work for both private and public sectors.
He said that when he worked for an Australia government organisation, the general work culture all the way from the bottom IT workers to the senior management was one of mediocrity and barely any emphasis placed on performance. As long as workers fill their most basic contract requirements, everyone is happy - even if they're incompetent.
Apparently the CIO himself admitted that some of his senior management staff were useless and incompetent but didn't want to replace them simply because they had worked in the organisation for years.
You wouldn't see that in the private sector at all. And I guess the argument here would be that external IT contractors would have a similar work ethic. I'd argue it'd be more of management itself that needs to be replaced, as opposed to the lower level contractors.
Considering that Facebook probably has a market share Redhat can even dream of - and not just the 'damn teeny boppers' as you said, but just about every demographic there is - I'd say people do give a fuck.
If Apple disappeared a lot of people would lose their jobs, dropping retail spending, investment, and increasing expenditure on social services. The result would make the GFC look like a small market correction. It would also cause hurt future speculation into tech companies and probably slow the growth of IT and technology industries by 5-10 years *after* the recession has finished. Kind of like what happened in the dot com crash.
It's not really a fair comparison since well, if Apple never existed, it's market would probably belong to another company. And maybe smartphones would only be starting to move into the hands of people (instead of being the standard). And if Exxon never existed, it's wells would be owned by another company. If you're saying say, Apple goes bankrupt - as you said, other competitors would take over. Same thing would happen with Exxon - their wells would be sold to other companies.
Exxon may be providing a more critical service, but they're not indispensable.
God, I don't think I've ever been so damned annoyed at Slashdot as I was reading these comments.
Everyone who is going on about how HFT traders are evil, and not benefiting anyone, or not benefiting society - I really think you should shut the fuck up.
How many of you are working for the pure purposes of 'bettering humanity' and 'feeding the poor'. I imagine very few. You're working to make money.
HFTers doesn't hurt the market as much as people seem to be claiming. I imagine it barely affects any of *you* either. If you're investing long term, then the stock will move based on fundamentals. HFT only really affect stuff in short-medium term.
So one HFT company wants to make money, they develop an algorithm to be better than the other HFT company. They're competing with *each other*.
So all your retards who are saying "HFTers should be shot" - well, I wonder what your programming skills are being used for? Maybe a volunteer project for charity? If so, good on you. But I'd be willing to bet most of you hypocrites are programming for your companies to make them more money.
That's what the government is for. They're meant to step in and stop corporations from doing immoral things.
The job of the corporations and the people that run them is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.
Supposedly with the two groups doing their job, things will go well. Unfortunately, one group is doing their job too well and the other, barely at all.
I guess it's the difference between two people doing the same degree, and one of them loves reading up more on wikipedia and whatnot, while the other just concentrates on studying. The person who loves to be there to learn, and the person who is learning to get a good job.
The interesting thing is, the marks don't always reflect who is the more 'intellectual' person.
A friend of mine had an issue with FedEx. He was ordering tires from TireRack in the US and getting them shipped to Australia.
However, all the drivers they use here locally are all private couriers - not directly employed with FedEx.
When the package changed its status to 'delivered', but with a completely different address in a completely different suburb, my mate got a bit worried and called up FedEx, who told them that they didn't have the contact details for the driver. Rather, he contacted *them* and they had to wait for him to come to pick up his next batch of deliveries.
Luckily ends up it was a mistake - he delivered it to the wrong place, and they called up FedEx to return it.
But still, I mean when you ship by a big company like FedEx you kinda assume they'd be using their own, well trained drivers with a bunch of good procedures in place to immediately work out what went wrong. Not private couriers they don't even have a contact number for.
That's the problem. It should be a reasonable expectations to expect any large company like that to have adequate security measured protecting customer data. The fact that they haven't should be a big issue with them specifically. I dunno how you can say people are blind for trusting them - or any other major company - in the first place though.
With an attitude like that, I assume you don't buy much stuff online.
At this stage, we should be able to trust internet security for major corporations to protect our data. What happens if PayPal gets hacked? "When will people stop trusting the intertubes security implicitly"?
I think its a rather reasonable expectations to expect a company like Sony to protect its user information.
I think one major thing is not to do it in anger. If you smack a kid in anger, it makes the kid think violence is an acceptable outlet for anger and frustration.
My parents never hit me when they were angry. Only when they were very calm, very logical and very rational. So it become more of a "This is a rule, you've broken it, so you suffer the punishment" as opposed to "I'm angry, so you're getting hit" - which could be what you were referring to in the 'imparting violent tendencies'.
I think it ties into the rest of raising. It's not an isolated thing - "Use wooden spoon, and who cares about the rest."
I do think the wooden spoon is only useful at a very young age. After that, you can generally be reasoned with, or punished in different ways.
My parents raised me with a strong sense of values, a logical way of thinking, wooden spoon and yet, many positive benefits too. Despite the fact that using the wooden spoon is ruling through 'fear', I think the other aspect is creating respect, and a want to please. So yeah, I was scared of my parents, but I also loved and respected them, I wanted their approval and I thought that all their values made sense, and wanted to adopt them.
I'm not impulsive or violent at all, and I learnt the values my parents wanted to teach me. My values do differ a tad (since they're Christian, and I'm now atheist) but on a whole, I adopted a large number of it.
When you're less than 6 years old, you don't have enough reasoning to be able to really accurately argue with your parents. At that age, kids need to know that parents are God, and to go against God is a near death sentence. Otherwise you end up with the screaming, yelling brats you see at supermarkets every day. I mean, Christ, if a parent says "No I'm not buying you chocolate" you don't run around the shop throwing products on the floor and screaming for 15 minutes (happened a few days ago).
When I was that young, I'd never have dared to do that. I think it comes down to modern families being so scared of disciplining their kids. I always got the wooden spoon when I threw a tantrum or did something wrong, kids these days get a Mars bar to shut them up.
I think there does get to an age when, assuming the parents have raised the kids properly, when you start understanding common sense and logic. And nothing is worse for a kid than to look at their parents and say "They aren't making logical sense" - because as soon as that happens, you lose respect for those parents.
In retrospect, I understand my parents often were seeing the 'bigger picture', stuff I didn't understand at that age, but understood as I got older. But in their frustration, they would often say things that didn't make sense - a mixture of their own emotional annoyance, and trying to make it sound logical at the same time. A mixture of trying to argue with logic they would use with another similar aged person, and logic they'd use with someone younger.
I think arguing with a child is a skill in itself, especially if they're smart. They can understand a lot of logic you'd expect older people to understand, and yet, in some other aspects, they just "don't get it" since it comes with experience, rather than theoretical knowledge. Trying to word that in a way that supports your point can be hard, and I guess it's very easy to fall into your own contradictions then, which they'll ruthlessly pick up.
I'd be very curious to see how this system deals with peak load. Say, for some class a new assignment is given. You often find that all the students will start getting books in that area.
If it takes 5 minutes for every request, could see some big issues starting to pop up. I wonder if other students taking items from the 'bin' will muck things up? Are the bins even sorted by category, or just randomly?
Or even ignoring people trying to get books in the same area, in busy operating conditions, will this slow down to a crawl with 45 minute long waits to get a book?
That's like saying "What's the point of going to the pub where they charge $8 for a pint of shitty tap beer when I can have my favorite beer at home for $3".
Cinema is still a 'going out' experience. You go with friends, or maybe even a date (though on Slashdot, not sure how often that happens) as one of your activities amongst others (maybe hit the pub after, or a restaurant, or a host of other activities). The experience is being their with your friends, *not* just watching the movie.
While I'm not saying the video/sound quality doesn't matter, I'd hardly say a home theatre replaces the experience.
In unrelated news, 2011 marked a considerable drop in productivity and exam results of both secondary and tertiary students. Experts are baffled at the sudden drop.
To some extent, that's because the US exists and to a large extent the rest of the Western world looks to America to fight their battles for them. In Australia, we have a miniscule defense budget compared to America. But just imagine we didn't have a heap of strategic alliances with the US. Just imagine USA had a policy of non-intervention in any external affairs.
Suddenly sitting geographically under a superpower is looking a tad more scary. You can bet we'd up our military budget, and start looking at declaring war on unstable proxy nations supported by China in the area.
The fact that USA does stick their noses in everyone's business does mean a lot of other countries can focus a lot more on welfare, and take a non-aggressive military policy. I wonder if Norway could still be ranked highest by HDI in the world if it didn't have any ties to the rest of the European countries in the area.
So maybe US declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq made the world worse off, or maybe it made it better. But either way I don't think you can compare the US to other countries. The other question that should be asked is if the US Government's only responsibility is to its own people, or whether it has international responsibility as well.
I think the other thing is stress. Starcraft is a very stressful game to play - unlike many FPS, RPG, etc. I know a mate of mine in Diamond League, who's pretty decent, but these days barely plays any 1v1s at all, instead preferring to either play team games, watch professional matches on GomTV, or even just watch his friends play each other. He says its just way too stressful.
Honestly, I just don't see how you'd stop it without massively inconveniencing your customers to the point that the pirated game is better than the retail version.
See there seems to be this big thing about the 'pirated' versions of games being better than the originals, due to all the anti-pirated features interrupting the quality of the game. But I think this is more just pirates trying to justify their actions - "We're doing it because it's better, not because we're stingy!"
Sure, there are some horrible implementations of anti pirated stuff that gets in the way. But really...how many people don't have an internet connection? How many people are actually 'inconvenienced' by being "forced" to play with an internet connection? Not many, despite what everyone would like you to think.
Multiplayer aside, i was quite happy to play the single player campaign for SC2 with my internet connection live. I didn't even notice since like most people, I'm always connected to the internet. And well, I'd argue its very successful. I don't know a single person with a pirated version of SC2, and yet, I don't know a single person with a legal version of Crysis.
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy is close, but in the case of P2P, most of their use is for illegal things.
So it's more like suing Ford over a car they sold which included features like secret compartments (that criminals use to hide drugs), a giant bull bar (which they advertise as being able to run over a person with no damage to the car), and is advertised as being completely bulletproof, with holes for you to shoot out of.
Sure, it could still be end with them being ruled in favour, but it's not quite as clear cut as you make it out with your example.
Or the fact that games like Counter Strike 1.6 or Starcraft: Brood War still have some of the biggest professional leagues in history despite sequels being out.
Money is still being poured into those leagues.
I know someone who works in Enterprise Architecture/IT strategy and has done consulting work for both private and public sectors.
He said that when he worked for an Australia government organisation, the general work culture all the way from the bottom IT workers to the senior management was one of mediocrity and barely any emphasis placed on performance. As long as workers fill their most basic contract requirements, everyone is happy - even if they're incompetent.
Apparently the CIO himself admitted that some of his senior management staff were useless and incompetent but didn't want to replace them simply because they had worked in the organisation for years.
You wouldn't see that in the private sector at all. And I guess the argument here would be that external IT contractors would have a similar work ethic. I'd argue it'd be more of management itself that needs to be replaced, as opposed to the lower level contractors.
Some people get scared when they see this plastered all over the news and they stop.
Then over the next year, they watch as their mates continue to download with no reprisals, and eventually start doing it again.
Considering that Facebook probably has a market share Redhat can even dream of - and not just the 'damn teeny boppers' as you said, but just about every demographic there is - I'd say people do give a fuck.
If Apple disappeared a lot of people would lose their jobs, dropping retail spending, investment, and increasing expenditure on social services. The result would make the GFC look like a small market correction. It would also cause hurt future speculation into tech companies and probably slow the growth of IT and technology industries by 5-10 years *after* the recession has finished. Kind of like what happened in the dot com crash.
It's not really a fair comparison since well, if Apple never existed, it's market would probably belong to another company. And maybe smartphones would only be starting to move into the hands of people (instead of being the standard). And if Exxon never existed, it's wells would be owned by another company. If you're saying say, Apple goes bankrupt - as you said, other competitors would take over. Same thing would happen with Exxon - their wells would be sold to other companies.
Exxon may be providing a more critical service, but they're not indispensable.
God, I don't think I've ever been so damned annoyed at Slashdot as I was reading these comments.
Everyone who is going on about how HFT traders are evil, and not benefiting anyone, or not benefiting society - I really think you should shut the fuck up.
How many of you are working for the pure purposes of 'bettering humanity' and 'feeding the poor'. I imagine very few. You're working to make money.
HFTers doesn't hurt the market as much as people seem to be claiming. I imagine it barely affects any of *you* either. If you're investing long term, then the stock will move based on fundamentals. HFT only really affect stuff in short-medium term.
So one HFT company wants to make money, they develop an algorithm to be better than the other HFT company. They're competing with *each other*.
So all your retards who are saying "HFTers should be shot" - well, I wonder what your programming skills are being used for? Maybe a volunteer project for charity? If so, good on you. But I'd be willing to bet most of you hypocrites are programming for your companies to make them more money.
Or they just claim it from their insurance companies?
That's what the government is for. They're meant to step in and stop corporations from doing immoral things.
The job of the corporations and the people that run them is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders.
Supposedly with the two groups doing their job, things will go well. Unfortunately, one group is doing their job too well and the other, barely at all.
How about the company FUND an MBA for an engineer when he moves to a senior position?
I know some companies do this. So he has engineering background, and an MBA for his new role. Best of both worlds?
True.
I guess it's the difference between two people doing the same degree, and one of them loves reading up more on wikipedia and whatnot, while the other just concentrates on studying. The person who loves to be there to learn, and the person who is learning to get a good job.
The interesting thing is, the marks don't always reflect who is the more 'intellectual' person.
I think a lot of people simply call people who are antisocial geeks/nerds.
Obviously, that doesn't make them intellectual. Many of them will sit there raging at people in video games, or troll 4chan all day long.
A friend of mine had an issue with FedEx. He was ordering tires from TireRack in the US and getting them shipped to Australia.
However, all the drivers they use here locally are all private couriers - not directly employed with FedEx.
When the package changed its status to 'delivered', but with a completely different address in a completely different suburb, my mate got a bit worried and called up FedEx, who told them that they didn't have the contact details for the driver. Rather, he contacted *them* and they had to wait for him to come to pick up his next batch of deliveries.
Luckily ends up it was a mistake - he delivered it to the wrong place, and they called up FedEx to return it.
But still, I mean when you ship by a big company like FedEx you kinda assume they'd be using their own, well trained drivers with a bunch of good procedures in place to immediately work out what went wrong. Not private couriers they don't even have a contact number for.
That's the problem. It should be a reasonable expectations to expect any large company like that to have adequate security measured protecting customer data. The fact that they haven't should be a big issue with them specifically. I dunno how you can say people are blind for trusting them - or any other major company - in the first place though.
With an attitude like that, I assume you don't buy much stuff online.
At this stage, we should be able to trust internet security for major corporations to protect our data. What happens if PayPal gets hacked? "When will people stop trusting the intertubes security implicitly"?
I think its a rather reasonable expectations to expect a company like Sony to protect its user information.
Sorry to double post, but I forgot to add.
I think one major thing is not to do it in anger. If you smack a kid in anger, it makes the kid think violence is an acceptable outlet for anger and frustration.
My parents never hit me when they were angry. Only when they were very calm, very logical and very rational. So it become more of a "This is a rule, you've broken it, so you suffer the punishment" as opposed to "I'm angry, so you're getting hit" - which could be what you were referring to in the 'imparting violent tendencies'.
I think it ties into the rest of raising. It's not an isolated thing - "Use wooden spoon, and who cares about the rest."
I do think the wooden spoon is only useful at a very young age. After that, you can generally be reasoned with, or punished in different ways.
My parents raised me with a strong sense of values, a logical way of thinking, wooden spoon and yet, many positive benefits too. Despite the fact that using the wooden spoon is ruling through 'fear', I think the other aspect is creating respect, and a want to please. So yeah, I was scared of my parents, but I also loved and respected them, I wanted their approval and I thought that all their values made sense, and wanted to adopt them.
I'm not impulsive or violent at all, and I learnt the values my parents wanted to teach me. My values do differ a tad (since they're Christian, and I'm now atheist) but on a whole, I adopted a large number of it.
Depends how young.
When you're less than 6 years old, you don't have enough reasoning to be able to really accurately argue with your parents. At that age, kids need to know that parents are God, and to go against God is a near death sentence. Otherwise you end up with the screaming, yelling brats you see at supermarkets every day. I mean, Christ, if a parent says "No I'm not buying you chocolate" you don't run around the shop throwing products on the floor and screaming for 15 minutes (happened a few days ago).
When I was that young, I'd never have dared to do that. I think it comes down to modern families being so scared of disciplining their kids. I always got the wooden spoon when I threw a tantrum or did something wrong, kids these days get a Mars bar to shut them up.
I think there does get to an age when, assuming the parents have raised the kids properly, when you start understanding common sense and logic. And nothing is worse for a kid than to look at their parents and say "They aren't making logical sense" - because as soon as that happens, you lose respect for those parents.
In retrospect, I understand my parents often were seeing the 'bigger picture', stuff I didn't understand at that age, but understood as I got older. But in their frustration, they would often say things that didn't make sense - a mixture of their own emotional annoyance, and trying to make it sound logical at the same time. A mixture of trying to argue with logic they would use with another similar aged person, and logic they'd use with someone younger.
I think arguing with a child is a skill in itself, especially if they're smart. They can understand a lot of logic you'd expect older people to understand, and yet, in some other aspects, they just "don't get it" since it comes with experience, rather than theoretical knowledge. Trying to word that in a way that supports your point can be hard, and I guess it's very easy to fall into your own contradictions then, which they'll ruthlessly pick up.
I'd be very curious to see how this system deals with peak load. Say, for some class a new assignment is given. You often find that all the students will start getting books in that area.
If it takes 5 minutes for every request, could see some big issues starting to pop up. I wonder if other students taking items from the 'bin' will muck things up? Are the bins even sorted by category, or just randomly?
Or even ignoring people trying to get books in the same area, in busy operating conditions, will this slow down to a crawl with 45 minute long waits to get a book?
That's like saying "What's the point of going to the pub where they charge $8 for a pint of shitty tap beer when I can have my favorite beer at home for $3".
Cinema is still a 'going out' experience. You go with friends, or maybe even a date (though on Slashdot, not sure how often that happens) as one of your activities amongst others (maybe hit the pub after, or a restaurant, or a host of other activities). The experience is being their with your friends, *not* just watching the movie.
While I'm not saying the video/sound quality doesn't matter, I'd hardly say a home theatre replaces the experience.
In unrelated news, 2011 marked a considerable drop in productivity and exam results of both secondary and tertiary students. Experts are baffled at the sudden drop.
To some extent, that's because the US exists and to a large extent the rest of the Western world looks to America to fight their battles for them. In Australia, we have a miniscule defense budget compared to America. But just imagine we didn't have a heap of strategic alliances with the US. Just imagine USA had a policy of non-intervention in any external affairs.
Suddenly sitting geographically under a superpower is looking a tad more scary. You can bet we'd up our military budget, and start looking at declaring war on unstable proxy nations supported by China in the area.
The fact that USA does stick their noses in everyone's business does mean a lot of other countries can focus a lot more on welfare, and take a non-aggressive military policy. I wonder if Norway could still be ranked highest by HDI in the world if it didn't have any ties to the rest of the European countries in the area.
So maybe US declaring war on Afghanistan and Iraq made the world worse off, or maybe it made it better. But either way I don't think you can compare the US to other countries. The other question that should be asked is if the US Government's only responsibility is to its own people, or whether it has international responsibility as well.
at what cost? Now we all live in fear. For our jobs. For our privacy, and of each other.
For our jobs? You're really gonna blame lack of job security on the government's response to the war on terror?
I think the other thing is stress. Starcraft is a very stressful game to play - unlike many FPS, RPG, etc. I know a mate of mine in Diamond League, who's pretty decent, but these days barely plays any 1v1s at all, instead preferring to either play team games, watch professional matches on GomTV, or even just watch his friends play each other. He says its just way too stressful.
Honestly, I just don't see how you'd stop it without massively inconveniencing your customers to the point that the pirated game is better than the retail version.
See there seems to be this big thing about the 'pirated' versions of games being better than the originals, due to all the anti-pirated features interrupting the quality of the game. But I think this is more just pirates trying to justify their actions - "We're doing it because it's better, not because we're stingy!"
Sure, there are some horrible implementations of anti pirated stuff that gets in the way. But really...how many people don't have an internet connection? How many people are actually 'inconvenienced' by being "forced" to play with an internet connection? Not many, despite what everyone would like you to think.
Multiplayer aside, i was quite happy to play the single player campaign for SC2 with my internet connection live. I didn't even notice since like most people, I'm always connected to the internet. And well, I'd argue its very successful. I don't know a single person with a pirated version of SC2, and yet, I don't know a single person with a legal version of Crysis.