Hmm, wonder if that's because people are suddenly *not* dying of cholera, tuberculosus, or the plague?
Yup, that's exactly it.
Cancer rates correlate with life expectancy.
Grandparent poster doesn't need to look at any "historical records." You can do comparisons right across socioeconomic lines today. Anything that increases the average lifespan -- medicine, sanitation, stability, whatnot -- results in a related increase in cancer rates.
Not trying to be sarcastic, but I have seen tons of "math theorems" and I guess I am not geeky enough to understand the point.
There's no need to have a point because the assumption is that someone will eventually find a use for it. In mathematics, physics, and all sorts of other disciplines, you don't look at your discovery and say "This would be great for X!" You publish it, forget about it, and then someone else years later has a problem to solve and does a literature search.
In the mid-1800s some poor sod went and developed a whole branch of mathematics called tensor calculus. It was an absolute mess and no one used it for anything.
Until fifty years later, Einstein is having trouble formalizing relativity and talks to his mathematician friend, who replies, "Oh, you know, I think I heard of something once..."
most people can't distinguish 440Hz from 441Hz, 9dB from 10dB, 120BPM from 121BPM, C# from D, violin from a viola, or the beatles from the monkeys
Actually, your last example is quite correct. Prior knowledge of both the Beatles and the Monkees is required to tell them apart. The same goes for cheeses, coffees, timbres, and pitches. In fact, the ability to comprehend normal speech implies pitch sensitivity that's finer than the half-step between C# and D. The main problem is that people don't know what a C# is and how it differs from a D.
Of course, some people may find that age prevents them from learning certain such skills, but that's altogether a different thing.
Yes. Without a doubt supporting pirates is far better than supporting Disney. Disney is guilty of undermining the constitution by extending copyright past any reasonable level.
Most of what you say about Disney is not in doubt.
Unfortunately, you seem to have this fuzzy, romantic notion of what "pirate" means in this context.
We're not talking about civil disobedience, claiming our rightful public domain. We're not even talking about small-time petty thieves hawking DVD-Rs on eBay.
No, when you buy a slick, nicely packaged Hong Kong bootleg, you are supporting organized crime. You are supporting everything from extortion to murder to slavery. Many a young student has paid their life savings to be smuggled out of China, only to discover a hell of "indentured" labor -- packaging pirated software and movies for $0.25 an hour until his debt is worked off. If he's lucky, that is. Let's not talk about what happens if you're... not male.
If one is going to be rude enough to steal an artist's work, don't compound the insult by paying some criminal for it.
That, sir, would be John Lasseter. A personal friend of Hayao Miyazaki and an animation pioneer in his own right -- in both the technical and artistic aspects of the trade.
He is the creative direction beind Pixar's incredibly successful films, and so he pulls considerable weight at Disney. His influence is the only reason the Ghibli films have not been butchered far, far more than they already have been.
Hm. Getting offtopic here, but I rather dislike it when people blame the tool they can't use.
Here's what Paul Graham (yes, of Bayesian filtering fame) has to say about functional programming. There is an amusingly appropriate quote: In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand.
Alright, stretching to get back on topic, I'll assert this: To a programmer, knowing functional programming is about as useful as reading literature, analyzing politics, studying science, or traveling abroad.
As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.
You may have lost countless excellent graduates as a result of that mentality. I once heard a hiring manager insist in the strongest possible terms, over countless objections, that they had never heard of Carnegie-Mellon and therefore the CS program couldn't possibly be any good. I would never accuse you of being that ignorant. But it is still fair to ask: how many schools have you heard of, and how familiar are you with their programs?
Ask anyone on the street to list every college they've ever "heard of" and you'll rarely find anyone who can name a couple of dozen (not counting "University of [STATE]"). With 3400 colleges in this country, a couple of dozen is less than 1%. I usually follow up by showing them a list of the top 10% of US colleges -- 340 schools, mind you -- and watch as they realize how little they really know. And why should they? Who besides college counselors can recognize 340 schools?
It might be interesting to go through your own company's roster and see where people went as an undergraduate. You may well find the prestige schools are quite underrepresented, and rightly so: as with many things, college reputations are pure popularity contests and have relatively little to do with merit.
Fuji is made by Taiyo Yuden.... TY is also making some Memorex
Both Fuji and Memorex have TY and non-TY discs. But you can, as you say, check the packaging for the country of origin. As far as 50- and 100-spindles go, every "Made in Japan" I've bought from these two brands has been TY, as reported by CDR Identifier.
The rankings are based on a number of objective measures also, such as yield (number attending versus number admitted), faculty salaries, etc. But it makes no difference, because they fudgethe rankings every year to sell more magazines.
Colleges don't change fast enough for USNews to sell a new issue every year unless they shake up the list themselves.
None of the factors they include have much to do with a quality undergraduate education anyway. There is an insipid tendency to judge colleges by who they admit rather than who they produce. When it comes to assessing performance after school, graduates of small liberal arts colleges outperform graduates of large, impersonal universities in almost all fields including science and engineering.
I do not condone using a single metric to judge a school's quality, but simply as an illustration here are the schools that produce the greatest number of PhDs, relative to their population size:
(Note, these are not the schools that granted the PhD, but where the PhD went as an undergraduate.) The rest of the list can be found in Loren Pope's excellent Looking Beyond the Ivy League. Points of interest from that complete list of 50 schools:
- Princeton, the most undergraduate-focused of the Ivies, is the first Ivy to make this list at #20. The next is Harvard at #37. - Three of the Ivies plus Stanford don't even make the list. - Only 10 out of the 50 schools have more than 2500 students (approximate; quoting from memory here). - Many of these schools are much less selective than the Ivies, yet produce better graduates.
These results are largely the same when you look at other data: MCAT scores, med/law school admission rates, NSF grants, Nobel prizes...
Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. A university is optimized for graduate study and research. A college has no graduate school and is optimized for undergraduate education. Different tools for different jobs. This is a generalization, of course, but I hope it worries you enough to ditch US News and do some real investigation.
Your complaints are understandable but there is a lot of misinformation on this point.
Sure, if your parents are working near minimum wage jobs AND you meet their academic criteria (a rare group), then the system will normally cover all your expenses
The financial aid calculation, although far from ideal, is meant to scale with need. That means even those who have quite modest incomes will have some part to pay. You need to go very low before you get a free ride.
The median household income of financial aid recipients, as of a few years ago, was $100,000.
This is particularly ironic since there's a persistent myth that $100,000 is a magic threshold that disqualifies you for financial aid. I've seen dozens of families throw away thousands of dollars in aid because they simply assumed it wasn't worth applying.
My friend couldn't ask her parents to sell. The end result was that she was forced to attend a state school.
My condolences to your friend, but this is not an uncommon situation and many schools are open and willing to work through the problem. However, it is critical to apply to 10-12 schools, not the usual 5-6, in order to get a fair spread of aid packages. There are schools that are bad with aid, but they can be weeded out if you've done your research. There is luck involved as well, and timeliness is also vitally important.
some of the top schools are even charging more than they need to (but keep it high to keep their prestige and admissions in check)
Please give references. I'd honestly be very interested to know. My understanding is that many elite private colleges spend more per student than they charge in tuition, often thousands more. The loss is offset by drawing on the endowment.
Have you considered putting another hard disk in the computer and using RAID?
No! RAID is not a substitute for backups! The only thing RAID protects against is disk failure. Even assuming that RAID works perfectly, which it doesn't, how many other ways are there to lose data?
- Accidental deletion. Ever needed to get a file off backup because of your mistake? - Accidental overwrite. "Crap, I lost my original!" - Malicious attack. Better hope your antivirus is up to date. - Catastrophe. Fire, flood, power surge... or just shoving the machine off the desk onto the floor. - Corruption. Your RAM goes flaky and munges your file, which you blissfully save to disk. Thanks to RAID, you have reliable access to your bad data.
Backups go to removable media. Period. And for anything even remotely important, like financial records, you keep one offsite.
If i'm actually going to spend money on a product, i damn well want the profit going to the people who deserve it, not some criminals somewhere.
It's worth mentioning that the "criminals" are well-known: they are the mafia. The vast majority of professional piracy (video, music, and software) is run by organized crime. These aren't small-time copy shops.
And before anyone trots out a "Good, screw the MPAA!" joke, keep in mind that at least some of these outfits utilize "indentured" slave labor. That bootleg DVD on eBay may very well have been packaged by a college student who thought he was paying a nice man to smuggle him out of China.
Hong Kong is the greater culprit, incidentally. There isn't really anyone in Taiwan producing Engrish-subtitled bootleg DVDs.
You can take issue with the copyright aspect if you want but that's not the point of the FAQ.
The intent is to allow people who are looking for authentic goods to identify them.
When I first began to buy anime goods, I assumed everything I saw was legitimate. I was lucky to stumble onto this FAQ by accident before I wasted too much money on inferior products. But I did waste some -- and having replaced those bootleg items with originals, I can attest to the serious difference in quality.
Now, the FAQ does strike the correct tone in condemning piracy (resulting in all the usual Slashdot kneejerking) but that's incidental; it would be nonsensical for a bootleg FAQ to condone any other position.
Most groups are very concerned with the Anime business in general and stop fansubbing as soon as they find out a company has licensed the Anime for distribution in North America.
This used to be mostly true. Now it's at best partly true. VHS fansubbing has a significant startup cost, which kept out anyone who wasn't really serious -- pirates looking to save a few bucks on anime aren't going to spend $3000 on a subtitling rig.
Digisubbing has zero barrier to entry. While there are lots of excellent and ethical digisubbing groups, there are just as many who chase the glory of being first with their "releases." It's exactly analagous to the moronic idea of "0-day warez," except in this case you don't even have to be competent.
There was a well-publicized flap with AnimeJunkies just a few months ago. When Urban Vision politely notified them to stop subtitling Ninja Scroll, they responded with obscenities and other brainless retorts like, "How dare you license a series we're working on?" (Bonus irony: Urban Vision didn't merely license the series; they funded it. They owned it.)
I dont think this person describes most of the people who regularly read slashdot, the scientists, engineers and people who like to solve problems and learn technical things.
You're right, he's not describing average Slashdot readers... he's educating them.
"The way this person writes," as you say, tells me he has a profound understanding that technical knowledge is only a part of what's needed to get a career going. Notice how most of his "bad tech" stories are not fundamentally about technical incompetence. The article doesn't just espouse freelancing, it firmly encourages techs to develop skills such as taking initiative, good communication, good judgment, cultivating relationships, perseverance, adaptability, planning, teaching, learning...
No, these are not just empty PHB buzzwords! They are all skills that can be learned. And there is no reason not to. Many intelligent people get by without them -- but this is exactly the same, and exactly as stupid, as doing a technical task using the wrong tools.
Even the skill of learning is deceptively uncommon. You speak of "people who like to... learn technical things." Indeed, we geeks like to think we're fast learners -- but really, how true is this outside of technology? The really successful people are the ones who are fast general learners, who can rapidly digest things that don't come naturally to them.
And even that is just a skill to be learned. I was a CS major, but the best classes I took were things like poetry and art history that lie far outside my comfort zone; these classes literally improved my brain. This never happened with CS classes because I was already good at that. As a result, I'm now a well-paid kernel developer while my friends who attended engineering schools are unemployed Javaheads.
The themes in both these articles are applicable to any field, not just tech support.
Theft of service typically involves a breach of contract, right?
Not that I know of, no. That's why it's theft. Let's take these you replied to:
You go to the doctor and sign a contract: Never done that. I could walk out of the office without paying a thing.
You go to your lawyer and sign a contract: Never done that. I could walk out of the office without paying a thing.
In both these cases, the service provider has no recourse against me but to take me to court. And then it's my word against theirs unless they can prove I was there. I've personally been ripped off by tenants this way, to the tune of thousands of dollars (that wouldn't be theft of service; only an illustration that there's no easy recourse).
You go to work and sign a contract: My contract is with my employer and it says that I get paid; I have no contract with my friend saying I won't steal his ideas for my own credit.
Let's add some more:
You get on the subway: Without paying, of course. I signed no contract.
Your house is on fire: Thanks, local fire department, for risking your lives to save my family. I don't pay taxes though, sucks for you.
On the other hand, I sometimes copy works which the copyright owner has indicated no desire to exploit in the present or foreseeable future. If we take the copyright owner's refusal to sell copies as an admission that the work's value is within epsilon of zero, my copying may be fair
Actually, I agree with this to a large extent: if I have no access to a work, it's pretty hard to buy it. And Slashdotters should all be familiar with Eldred and the fact that 98% of copyrighted works are commercially defunct.
This is why I never talk about legal vs. illegal when it comes to piracy, since copyright law itself has been roundly abused. As far as I'm concerned, this is strictly an ethical question.
He spent a tangible amount of time (=money) working on you. He is very aware of the existence of that time and sees it gone.
Very good! You identified the theme. When you steal services, you are stealing someone's time. Now, note that time is not equal to money. Metaphor, y'know. Time is worth money. And time can be stolen. Yet time is not property. This is an interesting conundrum for the worn-out "It's not stealing if it's not property" argument.
When you copy my software, you are stealing my time. This is still true even if I didn't perform the service for you personally. You can adjust all of my examples if you like: fund manager for an investment bank; single court case with multiple plaintiffs; entire department takes credit for one person's work. There is a word for all this: freeloading. And freeloading is theft of service.
Freeloading is in fact one of the most basic and obvious forms of stealing service.
If you disagree with that, then stop paying taxes, and don't complain when the underfunded fire department can't save your burning house. Stop paying subway fares, and don't complain when timeliness and security go out the window.
What percentage of freeloading should be tolerated before it's considered detrimental to a service? The only rational answer is zero.
Freeloading is always going to happen. I don't much care, even if it affects my bottom line. But defending it is just petulant.
Flippancy aside, your position basically boils down to this: creative works are Platonic ideas so making copies cannot be wrong.
This is true only in the strictest sense. If you recast authors as discoverers rather than creators, you are still paying for the service of excavation. Nothing changes. If authors didn't perform this service, these "free ideas" would never see the light of day.
This is a contract of compensation. You're not paying for the idea, you're paying the author for the service they perform -- whether you call that creation or discovery. That's why copyrights expire. (Except they don't, and I do think that's both illegal and immoral; but this is orthogonal to the present argument.)
Perhaps you'd like to return to the bad old days, when the only people who produced creative works were either miserably poor or independently wealthy. I hope I don't have to mention how much more creative work has been produced thanks to copyright principles. Mozart might have survived to write more music if the opera houses across Europe that played to packed audiences for months at a time... ever gave him a single penny.
Since I wouldn't have purchased the game anyway, I'm not depriving the company of anything, right? So is this theft?
The only case in which you're not a thief is when you have ripped off a game that you would never want to play. This is the only justifiable use of "try before you buy." There is no such thing as "try and see if it's worth buying but keep playing anyway." If the game is worth playing at all then it has some kind of value to you. Perhaps you don't think it has $50 worth of value. But clearly you think it's worth a 30-minute download and a $0.50 CDR. So how much time, effort, attention, and materials are you willing to pay?
But here's a better question: if copying games were completely impossible -- such as during that brief span in history when a CD-ROM was bigger than anyone's hard drive -- then how much would you pay? I claim that your criteria for "definitely would not have purchased" is inseparable from your ability to get that software without purchasing it. Which means using that as justification is pure circular reasoning.
If you had to buy games, you might continue to claim they're not normal goods, but you would undoubtedly treat them that way when deciding what you're willing to buy. It's about time to put this tired old argument to rest.
You "steal" money that they don't have? But you don't end up with money yourself...makes no sense. There is hypotetical money being magically stolen, money that never was in the pockets of those who it is "stolen" from and does not en up in the pockets of the "thieves"
Clearly, this is because money is the only thing in this world that has value, right? So the next time you go to the doctor, don't pay. The next time you ride the subway, don't pay. The next time you take guitar lessons, don't pay. This "magical money" was never theirs, so you're obviously not stealing anything.
Let's take a different example. You write a book. Random House offers you a $200,000 deal plus royalties. But a day before you sign the contract, I release the book onto the web so Random House cancels the deal. Now look me in the eye while I laugh at your misery, and tell me that you have not been deprived. Tell me the people downloading your book owe you nothing.
This is the kind of double talk only an economist or lawyer can follow.
Right, because once again "money" refers only to cash, and never investments, potential earnings, opportunity costs, interest, or capital. Yes, this is economist vocabulary, but I'm not an economist. I'm an average joe who understands that ignoring how the world actually works is a good way to be penniless and bitter when I retire.
Do you think the $10 trillion US economy is based on goods? 80% of it is based on services -- things you claim cannot be stolen because they do not represent money.
and you wonder why people don't see it?
Because the majority of people believe that deliberate ignorance is the same as intelligent understanding? If you want to live in a goods-based economy where you don't have to think about such difficult concepts, move to Angola or some other country where war has regressed the economy to 19th-century standards. (Most other "third world" nations won't fit the bill. They're all services-based too.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, wonder if that's because people are suddenly *not* dying of cholera, tuberculosus, or the plague?
Yup, that's exactly it.
Cancer rates correlate with life expectancy.
Grandparent poster doesn't need to look at any "historical records." You can do comparisons right across socioeconomic lines today. Anything that increases the average lifespan -- medicine, sanitation, stability, whatnot -- results in a related increase in cancer rates.
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Dum de dum.
Not trying to be sarcastic, but I have seen tons of "math theorems" and I guess I am not geeky enough to understand the point.
There's no need to have a point because the assumption is that someone will eventually find a use for it. In mathematics, physics, and all sorts of other disciplines, you don't look at your discovery and say "This would be great for X!" You publish it, forget about it, and then someone else years later has a problem to solve and does a literature search.
In the mid-1800s some poor sod went and developed a whole branch of mathematics called tensor calculus. It was an absolute mess and no one used it for anything.
Until fifty years later, Einstein is having trouble formalizing relativity and talks to his mathematician friend, who replies, "Oh, you know, I think I heard of something once..."
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Dum de dum.
most people can't distinguish 440Hz from 441Hz, 9dB from 10dB, 120BPM from 121BPM, C# from D, violin from a viola, or the beatles from the monkeys
Actually, your last example is quite correct. Prior knowledge of both the Beatles and the Monkees is required to tell them apart. The same goes for cheeses, coffees, timbres, and pitches. In fact, the ability to comprehend normal speech implies pitch sensitivity that's finer than the half-step between C# and D. The main problem is that people don't know what a C# is and how it differs from a D.
Of course, some people may find that age prevents them from learning certain such skills, but that's altogether a different thing.
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Dum de dum.
Too bad itamium isnt a miserable failure, but the fastest CPU on the planet.
Of course it is, if you believe HP has declared that "...no Alpha benchmark will be released until the Itanium platform(s) is/are faster."
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Dum de dum.
Yes. Without a doubt supporting pirates is far better than supporting Disney. Disney is guilty of undermining the constitution by extending copyright past any reasonable level.
Most of what you say about Disney is not in doubt.
Unfortunately, you seem to have this fuzzy, romantic notion of what "pirate" means in this context.
We're not talking about civil disobedience, claiming our rightful public domain. We're not even talking about small-time petty thieves hawking DVD-Rs on eBay.
No, when you buy a slick, nicely packaged Hong Kong bootleg, you are supporting organized crime. You are supporting everything from extortion to murder to slavery. Many a young student has paid their life savings to be smuggled out of China, only to discover a hell of "indentured" labor -- packaging pirated software and movies for $0.25 an hour until his debt is worked off. If he's lucky, that is. Let's not talk about what happens if you're... not male.
If one is going to be rude enough to steal an artist's work, don't compound the insult by paying some criminal for it.
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that dumbass from Pixar
That, sir, would be John Lasseter. A personal friend of Hayao Miyazaki and an animation pioneer in his own right -- in both the technical and artistic aspects of the trade.
He is the creative direction beind Pixar's incredibly successful films, and so he pulls considerable weight at Disney. His influence is the only reason the Ghibli films have not been butchered far, far more than they already have been.
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Aside from their "quality" tools (the fixing of which I can thank for giving me a reason to learn Tcl)
You too, huh?
I guess every VxWorks shop gets to have this lovely learning experience.
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Hm. Getting offtopic here, but I rather dislike it when people blame the tool they can't use.
Here's what Paul Graham (yes, of Bayesian filtering fame) has to say about functional programming. There is an amusingly appropriate quote: In business, there is nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand.
Alright, stretching to get back on topic, I'll assert this: To a programmer, knowing functional programming is about as useful as reading literature, analyzing politics, studying science, or traveling abroad.
Take that as you will.
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Dum de dum.
As a hiring manager, unless you go to a school I've heard of, in an English-speaking country, I'm probably not going to think very highly of your degree.
You may have lost countless excellent graduates as a result of that mentality. I once heard a hiring manager insist in the strongest possible terms, over countless objections, that they had never heard of Carnegie-Mellon and therefore the CS program couldn't possibly be any good. I would never accuse you of being that ignorant. But it is still fair to ask: how many schools have you heard of, and how familiar are you with their programs?
Ask anyone on the street to list every college they've ever "heard of" and you'll rarely find anyone who can name a couple of dozen (not counting "University of [STATE]"). With 3400 colleges in this country, a couple of dozen is less than 1%. I usually follow up by showing them a list of the top 10% of US colleges -- 340 schools, mind you -- and watch as they realize how little they really know. And why should they? Who besides college counselors can recognize 340 schools?
It might be interesting to go through your own company's roster and see where people went as an undergraduate. You may well find the prestige schools are quite underrepresented, and rightly so: as with many things, college reputations are pure popularity contests and have relatively little to do with merit.
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Dum de dum.
Fuji is made by Taiyo Yuden. ... TY is also making some Memorex
Both Fuji and Memorex have TY and non-TY discs. But you can, as you say, check the packaging for the country of origin. As far as 50- and 100-spindles go, every "Made in Japan" I've bought from these two brands has been TY, as reported by CDR Identifier.
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Dum de dum.
Colleges don't change fast enough for USNews to sell a new issue every year unless they shake up the list themselves.
None of the factors they include have much to do with a quality undergraduate education anyway. There is an insipid tendency to judge colleges by who they admit rather than who they produce. When it comes to assessing performance after school, graduates of small liberal arts colleges outperform graduates of large, impersonal universities in almost all fields including science and engineering.
I do not condone using a single metric to judge a school's quality, but simply as an illustration here are the schools that produce the greatest number of PhDs, relative to their population size:
(Note, these are not the schools that granted the PhD, but where the PhD went as an undergraduate.) The rest of the list can be found in Loren Pope's excellent Looking Beyond the Ivy League. Points of interest from that complete list of 50 schools:
- Princeton, the most undergraduate-focused of the Ivies, is the first Ivy to make this list at #20. The next is Harvard at #37.
- Three of the Ivies plus Stanford don't even make the list.
- Only 10 out of the 50 schools have more than 2500 students (approximate; quoting from memory here).
- Many of these schools are much less selective than the Ivies, yet produce better graduates.
These results are largely the same when you look at other data: MCAT scores, med/law school admission rates, NSF grants, Nobel prizes...
Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. A university is optimized for graduate study and research. A college has no graduate school and is optimized for undergraduate education. Different tools for different jobs. This is a generalization, of course, but I hope it worries you enough to ditch US News and do some real investigation.
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Dum de dum.
Your complaints are understandable but there is a lot of misinformation on this point.
Sure, if your parents are working near minimum wage jobs AND you meet their academic criteria (a rare group), then the system will normally cover all your expenses
The financial aid calculation, although far from ideal, is meant to scale with need. That means even those who have quite modest incomes will have some part to pay. You need to go very low before you get a free ride.
The median household income of financial aid recipients, as of a few years ago, was $100,000.
This is particularly ironic since there's a persistent myth that $100,000 is a magic threshold that disqualifies you for financial aid. I've seen dozens of families throw away thousands of dollars in aid because they simply assumed it wasn't worth applying.
My friend couldn't ask her parents to sell. The end result was that she was forced to attend a state school.
My condolences to your friend, but this is not an uncommon situation and many schools are open and willing to work through the problem. However, it is critical to apply to 10-12 schools, not the usual 5-6, in order to get a fair spread of aid packages. There are schools that are bad with aid, but they can be weeded out if you've done your research. There is luck involved as well, and timeliness is also vitally important.
some of the top schools are even charging more than they need to (but keep it high to keep their prestige and admissions in check)
Please give references. I'd honestly be very interested to know. My understanding is that many elite private colleges spend more per student than they charge in tuition, often thousands more. The loss is offset by drawing on the endowment.
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Dum de dum.
Have you considered putting another hard disk in the computer and using RAID?
No! RAID is not a substitute for backups! The only thing RAID protects against is disk failure. Even assuming that RAID works perfectly, which it doesn't, how many other ways are there to lose data?
- Accidental deletion. Ever needed to get a file off backup because of your mistake?
- Accidental overwrite. "Crap, I lost my original!"
- Malicious attack. Better hope your antivirus is up to date.
- Catastrophe. Fire, flood, power surge... or just shoving the machine off the desk onto the floor.
- Corruption. Your RAM goes flaky and munges your file, which you blissfully save to disk. Thanks to RAID, you have reliable access to your bad data.
Backups go to removable media. Period. And for anything even remotely important, like financial records, you keep one offsite.
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Dum de dum.
If i'm actually going to spend money on a product, i damn well want the profit going to the people who deserve it, not some criminals somewhere.
It's worth mentioning that the "criminals" are well-known: they are the mafia. The vast majority of professional piracy (video, music, and software) is run by organized crime. These aren't small-time copy shops.
And before anyone trots out a "Good, screw the MPAA!" joke, keep in mind that at least some of these outfits utilize "indentured" slave labor. That bootleg DVD on eBay may very well have been packaged by a college student who thought he was paying a nice man to smuggle him out of China.
Hong Kong is the greater culprit, incidentally. There isn't really anyone in Taiwan producing Engrish-subtitled bootleg DVDs.
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Dum de dum.
Sure, protecting copyright is important
You can take issue with the copyright aspect if you want but that's not the point of the FAQ.
The intent is to allow people who are looking for authentic goods to identify them.
When I first began to buy anime goods, I assumed everything I saw was legitimate. I was lucky to stumble onto this FAQ by accident before I wasted too much money on inferior products. But I did waste some -- and having replaced those bootleg items with originals, I can attest to the serious difference in quality.
Now, the FAQ does strike the correct tone in condemning piracy (resulting in all the usual Slashdot kneejerking) but that's incidental; it would be nonsensical for a bootleg FAQ to condone any other position.
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Dum de dum.
Most groups are very concerned with the Anime business in general and stop fansubbing as soon as they find out a company has licensed the Anime for distribution in North America.
This used to be mostly true. Now it's at best partly true. VHS fansubbing has a significant startup cost, which kept out anyone who wasn't really serious -- pirates looking to save a few bucks on anime aren't going to spend $3000 on a subtitling rig.
Digisubbing has zero barrier to entry. While there are lots of excellent and ethical digisubbing groups, there are just as many who chase the glory of being first with their "releases." It's exactly analagous to the moronic idea of "0-day warez," except in this case you don't even have to be competent.
There was a well-publicized flap with AnimeJunkies just a few months ago. When Urban Vision politely notified them to stop subtitling Ninja Scroll, they responded with obscenities and other brainless retorts like, "How dare you license a series we're working on?" (Bonus irony: Urban Vision didn't merely license the series; they funded it. They owned it.)
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I dont think this person describes most of the people who regularly read slashdot, the scientists, engineers and people who like to solve problems and learn technical things.
You're right, he's not describing average Slashdot readers... he's educating them.
"The way this person writes," as you say, tells me he has a profound understanding that technical knowledge is only a part of what's needed to get a career going. Notice how most of his "bad tech" stories are not fundamentally about technical incompetence. The article doesn't just espouse freelancing, it firmly encourages techs to develop skills such as taking initiative, good communication, good judgment, cultivating relationships, perseverance, adaptability, planning, teaching, learning...
No, these are not just empty PHB buzzwords! They are all skills that can be learned. And there is no reason not to. Many intelligent people get by without them -- but this is exactly the same, and exactly as stupid, as doing a technical task using the wrong tools.
Even the skill of learning is deceptively uncommon. You speak of "people who like to... learn technical things." Indeed, we geeks like to think we're fast learners -- but really, how true is this outside of technology? The really successful people are the ones who are fast general learners, who can rapidly digest things that don't come naturally to them.
And even that is just a skill to be learned. I was a CS major, but the best classes I took were things like poetry and art history that lie far outside my comfort zone; these classes literally improved my brain. This never happened with CS classes because I was already good at that. As a result, I'm now a well-paid kernel developer while my friends who attended engineering schools are unemployed Javaheads.
The themes in both these articles are applicable to any field, not just tech support.
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because I want to watch movies on a 35" tv and not a 17" LCD
Actually, I want to watch movies on my 120" LCD digital projector that, incidentally, costs less than a low-end HDTV.
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Not that I know of, no. That's why it's theft. Let's take these you replied to:
In both these cases, the service provider has no recourse against me but to take me to court. And then it's my word against theirs unless they can prove I was there. I've personally been ripped off by tenants this way, to the tune of thousands of dollars (that wouldn't be theft of service; only an illustration that there's no easy recourse).
Let's add some more:
On the other hand, I sometimes copy works which the copyright owner has indicated no desire to exploit in the present or foreseeable future. If we take the copyright owner's refusal to sell copies as an admission that the work's value is within epsilon of zero, my copying may be fair
Actually, I agree with this to a large extent: if I have no access to a work, it's pretty hard to buy it. And Slashdotters should all be familiar with Eldred and the fact that 98% of copyrighted works are commercially defunct.
This is why I never talk about legal vs. illegal when it comes to piracy, since copyright law itself has been roundly abused. As far as I'm concerned, this is strictly an ethical question.
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He spent a tangible amount of time (=money) working on you. He is very aware of the existence of that time and sees it gone.
Very good! You identified the theme. When you steal services, you are stealing someone's time. Now, note that time is not equal to money. Metaphor, y'know. Time is worth money. And time can be stolen. Yet time is not property. This is an interesting conundrum for the worn-out "It's not stealing if it's not property" argument.
When you copy my software, you are stealing my time. This is still true even if I didn't perform the service for you personally. You can adjust all of my examples if you like: fund manager for an investment bank; single court case with multiple plaintiffs; entire department takes credit for one person's work. There is a word for all this: freeloading. And freeloading is theft of service.
Freeloading is in fact one of the most basic and obvious forms of stealing service.
If you disagree with that, then stop paying taxes, and don't complain when the underfunded fire department can't save your burning house. Stop paying subway fares, and don't complain when timeliness and security go out the window.
What percentage of freeloading should be tolerated before it's considered detrimental to a service? The only rational answer is zero.
Freeloading is always going to happen. I don't much care, even if it affects my bottom line. But defending it is just petulant.
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Intellectual property is not a service.
So it's goods, then? That means it can be stolen.
Oh, but it's not tangible? Then it's a service.
Flippancy aside, your position basically boils down to this: creative works are Platonic ideas so making copies cannot be wrong.
This is true only in the strictest sense. If you recast authors as discoverers rather than creators, you are still paying for the service of excavation. Nothing changes. If authors didn't perform this service, these "free ideas" would never see the light of day.
This is a contract of compensation. You're not paying for the idea, you're paying the author for the service they perform -- whether you call that creation or discovery. That's why copyrights expire. (Except they don't, and I do think that's both illegal and immoral; but this is orthogonal to the present argument.)
Perhaps you'd like to return to the bad old days, when the only people who produced creative works were either miserably poor or independently wealthy. I hope I don't have to mention how much more creative work has been produced thanks to copyright principles. Mozart might have survived to write more music if the opera houses across Europe that played to packed audiences for months at a time... ever gave him a single penny.
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You are trying to equate:
This is the fallacy in all of your examples...
Sad when merely the notion of a company not making money alone is considered stealing.
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Depriving of profits is not the same as depriving of property. Sorry, man, I see where you're going with this one, but it's just not true.
I can hardly believe I am reading this.
Okay then. If depriving of profits isn't theft, what the hell do you call it?
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Since I wouldn't have purchased the game anyway, I'm not depriving the company of anything, right? So is this theft?
The only case in which you're not a thief is when you have ripped off a game that you would never want to play. This is the only justifiable use of "try before you buy." There is no such thing as "try and see if it's worth buying but keep playing anyway." If the game is worth playing at all then it has some kind of value to you. Perhaps you don't think it has $50 worth of value. But clearly you think it's worth a 30-minute download and a $0.50 CDR. So how much time, effort, attention, and materials are you willing to pay?
But here's a better question: if copying games were completely impossible -- such as during that brief span in history when a CD-ROM was bigger than anyone's hard drive -- then how much would you pay? I claim that your criteria for "definitely would not have purchased" is inseparable from your ability to get that software without purchasing it. Which means using that as justification is pure circular reasoning.
If you had to buy games, you might continue to claim they're not normal goods, but you would undoubtedly treat them that way when deciding what you're willing to buy. It's about time to put this tired old argument to rest.
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You "steal" money that they don't have? But you don't end up with money yourself...makes no sense. There is hypotetical money being magically stolen, money that never was in the pockets of those who it is "stolen" from and does not en up in the pockets of the "thieves"
Clearly, this is because money is the only thing in this world that has value, right? So the next time you go to the doctor, don't pay. The next time you ride the subway, don't pay. The next time you take guitar lessons, don't pay. This "magical money" was never theirs, so you're obviously not stealing anything.
Let's take a different example. You write a book. Random House offers you a $200,000 deal plus royalties. But a day before you sign the contract, I release the book onto the web so Random House cancels the deal. Now look me in the eye while I laugh at your misery, and tell me that you have not been deprived. Tell me the people downloading your book owe you nothing.
This is the kind of double talk only an economist or lawyer can follow.
Right, because once again "money" refers only to cash, and never investments, potential earnings, opportunity costs, interest, or capital. Yes, this is economist vocabulary, but I'm not an economist. I'm an average joe who understands that ignoring how the world actually works is a good way to be penniless and bitter when I retire.
Do you think the $10 trillion US economy is based on goods? 80% of it is based on services -- things you claim cannot be stolen because they do not represent money.
and you wonder why people don't see it?
Because the majority of people believe that deliberate ignorance is the same as intelligent understanding? If you want to live in a goods-based economy where you don't have to think about such difficult concepts, move to Angola or some other country where war has regressed the economy to 19th-century standards. (Most other "third world" nations won't fit the bill. They're all services-based too.
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