Mod the parent up! He's hit on oen of the seldom-admitted pieces of the puzzle. The insurance companies are using the doctors as a hedge against their bad investments.
A second piece is the fact that a relatively small number of doctors has an inordinately high number of suits. If they were stopped the risks of suits (and thus rates) would be lower in a perfect world of pure competition.
La! The heavens open. Milton Friedman and Adam Smith descend bearing bearer bonds and supply-demand graphs:-)
Of course, when the markets are back up the rates will drop back to their earlier, lower levels. Not.
How much of the experimental agent do you have? These things are often expensive, rare and certainly not covered by insurance
You have to pick your subjects carefully if you want to get useful results. The point of a study is to study.
There are compassionate exemptions. Later posts by "The Tyro" go into these in great detail.
Liability. How do you guard against lawsuits if the treatment has unforseen side effects? Waivers can be fought.
By the time a person is terminal he or she is often not a good candidate for a haircut much less an experimental drug or procedure. Getting back to the limited supplies and "do no harm" principles someone has to decide whether the experimental substance is better given to someone who has a better chance of survival.
Speaking personally, I just underwent surgery and am awaiting radiation for a tumor. I would have much prefer to have gotten an injection, a severe cold, no tumor, and the continued use of an important body part. But I was not selected for such a study and couldn't have paid for the drug anyway. Such is life. I am just glad that my prognosis is good and hope that the virus will be approved as soon as is scientifically appropriate.
In the field of IPM (Integrated Pest Management) it is sometimes called "The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" syndrome. The cane toad was brought into Australia to control the cane borer beetle. The mongoose was introduced into Hawaii to control rats.
The toads eat or poison just about everything but the beetle and are taking an eraser to Australia's ecology. The mongeese (diurnal) share burrows with the rats (nocturnal) and eat lots of rare native species.
I take it you've never actually read Atkins' books
on
Hackers On Atkins
·
· Score: 1
If you had you would have noticed a few salient points:
1) Vegetables, lots and lots of them, are an important part of the diet. Just not the high-sugar ones like carrots, most tomatoes, and a lot of the dried beans
2) Fruits are not absent. Again, low-sugar ones like raspberries are preferred to, say, apples.
3) He prescribes lots of water. Repeatedly.
4) Regular exercise is, and I quote "non-negotiable".
You didn't read the book, did you? You didn't even read the review.
The cover of the book shows two bright blue weevils making little weevils. This should clue you in.
This is not a book about how a man can have a good time bumping nasties with a woman. It's a book about how rotifers, hyenas, stick insects and bee-eaters do the deed with other rotifers, hyenas, stick insects and bee-eaters. It's evolutionary biology case studies styled like an advice column so that people will enjoy reading it.
I know, space is big and dangerous, and we weren't designed to live there. But the whole article is giving me flashblacks to Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" and Bruce Sterling's more recent Shaper/Mechanist stories. Stories well worth reading for the poetry and mind expansion, by the bye.
...what are the police going to do when he winds of face down in a river? Narrowing down a field of a couple hundred million suspects who all have a motive could be a lot of work.
>But the world puts up with it because of the >shitty, Dollar store trinkets that they produce. >They start producing other things that can put a >dent in the economy, then you can bet that there >would be heavy pressure on their government to >stop.
Ignorance of history is comforting in the short term but suicidal in the long term. Let's just call America "The Land of the Lemmings". We heard exactly the same thing a few decades ago about Japan. And Taiwan. And Hong Kong. And Korea. And various countries in Western Europe if you want to go back a century and a half.
China has become the world's workshop. They are developing the infrastructure. They have the educated skilled workers where needed. Their industrial base is large and growing. As opposed to ours which is aging and shrinking. As a side note two guys I volunteer with at Fort Vancouver worked in the skilled metal trades as craftsmen and teachers most of their lives. In their considered opinion we don't have the human resources or physical plant to reindustrialize if (when) we need to. The US is a formerly industrialized country.
>Also, at what point would the people stop being >walked all over? Once China has a huge economy, >capitalist, communist or otherwise, if the wealth >is not spread a bit more than now (which has >gotten better than ten years ago), the people >just might wise up.
It doesn't quite work that way. If anything it's the opposite. People with something want to keep it. It's people who don't have anything who make really strong demands. And the ones who punctuate their requests with gunfire are most often the ones who had something and lost it. Read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer for a nice thumbnail of the eponymous true believer who really gets mass movements started.
Singaporean and Japanese society exercised iron control over the behavior of their populations when times were good. This has slipped a little as things got worse. People were willing to accept control in exchange for wealth. Parallels can be drawn to the political upheavals in Britain around industrialization, the French Revolution and the recent war against the West waged largely by discontented Wahabite f**sticks.
The movie didn't suck. If it sucked it would have been good for something.
I believe the correspondent was talking about the book. Heinlein's book "Starship Troopers" had some very interesting ideas about the rights vs. duties aspects of citizenship and civic responsibility.
1) "It's not a patch on the old..." People like what is familiar. If you grew up loving Heinlein and Brunner "Red Spider White Web" will be alien.
2) The book publishing industry is in a serious, possibly permanent slump. Publishers have to find what wins and stick with it. There is less room for experimentation. In the past 30 years we've seen the end of the mid-line author - the writer who would come out with the occaisional book.
3) Social control. Back in the late 40s through early 60s it was not acceptable to deal with a lot of social issues or criticisms of the fairly repressive state of society in regular literature. Science fiction was all blasters and bug eyed monsters. You could deal with dangerous themes safely if it was kid-fluff about aliens or the far far future. A lot of this drive and fire has been directed into other fields of late. Or completely snuffed out in our era of hard Right Republican political orthodoxy. But that's another discussion...
4) We won. Things that would have been science fiction a decade or two ago are now common literary tropes. Dan Brown writes about anti-matter bombs. Jurassic Park achieves breakout success with cloning and dinosaurs. The distinction between the sci-fi ghetto and literary uptown has become kind of blurred. Authors who want greater recognition and money can use the material without the label.
That's certainly part of it. We are still at the stage where people expect us to go "ooh" and "aah" at the Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz and to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
This hope may not be justified. A generation ago the first three Star Wars movies did spectacularly well on the strength of the special effects and CGI. It certainly wasn't the acting (which was barely adequate), the story (which was trite and hackneyed) or anything else of the sort. It was that George Lucas could put his personal vision on the screen exactly as he imagined it.
Close to thirty years later he is still doing that. But the movies aren't making the same kind of money because people are used to the pretty lights. Once they see past them it is apparent that Lucas really isn't a very good story teller.
I use him merely as an object lesson. Jurassic Park 2-3, Godzilla, and any number of other computer generated turkeys would do just as well.
CGI has been the death of special effects wizardry. If you can imagine it, you can put it on the screen by throwing enough computers at it. In earlier times you had to think about how to do the special effects. And audiences could still be surprised and amazed when a particularly clever effect or dramatic stunt worked.
I am reminded of an earlier technical revolution - the movie camera. Acting in front of an audience is a completely different skill than doing it in front of a camera. In live theater there is a conversation of sorts between the cast and the audience. The actors gain or lose energy from this interaction, and the performances are never exactly the same twice except for long-running statistical outliers like "The King and I". In movies everything is done and redone until it is exactly how the director wants it. The audience is, quite literally, out of the picture.
The ability to sustain acting skills and character is less important these days than "star quality". In fact, being too good an actor is a detriment because people will forget that they are seeing fill in name of starlet or c**t-throb of the moment and believe they are seeing the actual character.
Shadow of the Vampire had a couple really good lines along this line. The lead actress tells how she gains life and vitality from an audience but "this [the camera] sucks the life from me".
CGIfying everything simply continues the process of removing life and acting from, well, acting
about $131 million in earnings, on a production budget of $120 million. That's $11 million in profits, or about 9% return. Compared to a lot of successful movies, a 9% return is not all that great. By comparison, I think the stock market's annual return is something like 8%
You have to consider another thing here, the Hollywood accounting system. Back when Art Buchwald sued over the theft of his writings in "Coming to America" (and won) the studios were terrified that he might subpoena their accounting records and shed light on the whole sordid mess.
He did, and it was awful. They used accounting and bookkeeping tricks to turn everything into costs, even profits (and I don't mean in an Econ 101 sense). Movies that yield huge wads of cash for the investors and backers, like Forrest Gump, are turned into money losers on paper so that people who have been promised a percentage of the net can be screwed out of everything (the writer in the case of FG).
Gold may be "accepted" but that doesn't really mean much. Like I said, it has a price based on current market conditions. It can be converted into other currencies, but so can a lot of other things which are subject to exactly the same sort of market forces.
As for lasting 1000 years, well, I suppose it does. But that isn't terribly relevant here. After all, how many people or governments for that matter, last anywhere near that long or plan even 50 years ahead?
The monetary games you speak of are not necessarily bad. Monetary and fiscal policy are as old as government and can be applied wisely or foolishly. Applied well they can be the salvation of a national economy. A reflexive and religious belief that the government can do no right and will almost certainly screw up is not supported by history any more than tha belief that The Market will make the "right" decision.
Gold's chief value is talismanic. It has a magical hold over peoples' imaginations. That superstition, in the most nice and accurate sense of the word, give gold a certain value. But I question how important it is.
I would ask for a refund for that class. In what is possibly the greatest political speech in US History William Jennings Bryan put forward the bimetallic standard as a reaction to gold-backed currency. "We shall not crucify American farmers on a cross of gold." Long before WWII.
The gold standard "fixes" nothing in any real sense. Gold is a commodity like any other. Its value changes over time depending on the degree to which people want it. The quantity also changes. People still dig the stuff out of the ground. This changes the supply and hence the value according to neoclassical economic theory.
But failing that, try to find the principals of the company, the original owners. They owned the assets of the firm. If they don't want it try to get a "whatever, do what you want with it" from them before you try to sell or publish it.
I'm heading back to school and have forgotten way too much math. The best single book I've come across is "All the Mathematics You Missed But Need to Know for Graduate School" [Thomas Garrity, Cambridge University Press 0-521-79285-1].
It's weak in that it lacks practice problems, but it gives good familiarity with the major topics in about 340 pages. No mean feat.
Also good, of course, are "Div, Grad, Curl and all That" and "How to Solve It"
The bandwidth of user-recognized Morse code is just to small compared to reading and typing text or speech. It made sense in the early days of radio and as a weeding-out process later on to separate the serious hobbyists from the casual ones in licensing.
These days I don't know. It's a cute little hack, and it still has limited applications in radio.
I just thought of an interesting possible application - steganography. You can only see a message if you are looking for it. IF you were using, say, a status flag as your signalling device a sharp BOFH might look for ASCII or Unicode. He would be unlikely to look for Morse code. Add in the slop that Morse has - distances between letters, the difference between a dot and a dash or the characters within letters can be pretty variable - and you might have an inefficient but harder to detect method of hiding messages.
The Darwinian poetry can be pretty bad. But it doesn't hold a candle to the Bulwer-Lytton price winners given every year for the most gawdawful first sentence of an as-yet-and-we-hope-forever unwritten novel.
>>If someone comes in and sleeps in my bed >>without permision it ISN'T theft. Tresspassing >>in my house is illegal, but it would be absurd >>to call to call it theft.
True enough. Although we can always fall back on Shakespeare:
"Who steals my purse steals trash; 't is something, nothing; 'T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed"
It sorta works for the special sort of hard core Libertarian or Randite who believes that ONLY theft and assault are crimes.
First, let's get a couple things out of the way. There is no way the data are clean enough to make the kind of claims they are making. I didn't see any confidence levels, standard deviations or any of the normal statistical measures here. So the scientist in me is already uneasy.
The next thing is the convenient number. 40-39. There's a reason gas stations always charge umpty-ump and 9/10 of a cent for their gas. The extra mil makes a psychological difference. Here, changing the most significant digit is a big jump in perception. If it had been 42->41 I would have been a little less skeptical.
What they are measuring is also suspect. As others have pointed out 1 bought and 4 copied copies of Word doesn't necessarily mean 4 lost sales. It may well mean 1 bought copy where there would otherwise have been 5 copies of word perfect or openoffice.
And there is the question of how much stuff is actually used and lost. To take an older example, consider the Steve Jackson Games case. The phone company used a high-pressure compressor to inflate their claims of piracy. According to them the crackers had "stolen" the entire value of the information in the document, the entire labor of the people who wrote it, the entire cost of the network it was written and originally stored on and (if memory serves) the value of every copy that had been sold.
Similar thing going on here. There are plenty of warez that people don't use. They just keep them around like trophies. Or to play with. Stuff that is really critical to the business is more likely to get bought so that people can have things like support, upgrades, and patches. It may be the stuff that isn't so important that is more likely to be copied and passed around.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod the parent up! He's hit on oen of the seldom-admitted pieces of the puzzle. The insurance companies are using the doctors as a hedge against their bad investments.
:-)
A second piece is the fact that a relatively small number of doctors has an inordinately high number of suits. If they were stopped the risks of suits (and thus rates) would be lower in a perfect world of pure competition.
La! The heavens open. Milton Friedman and Adam Smith descend bearing bearer bonds and supply-demand graphs
Of course, when the markets are back up the rates will drop back to their earlier, lower levels. Not.
My prayers are with you bro! Good with luck and G-d willing you'll get through it.
Speaking personally, I just underwent surgery and am awaiting radiation for a tumor. I would have much prefer to have gotten an injection, a severe cold, no tumor, and the continued use of an important body part. But I was not selected for such a study and couldn't have paid for the drug anyway. Such is life. I am just glad that my prognosis is good and hope that the virus will be approved as soon as is scientifically appropriate.
In the field of IPM (Integrated Pest Management) it is sometimes called "The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly" syndrome. The cane toad was brought into Australia to control the cane borer beetle. The mongoose was introduced into Hawaii to control rats.
The toads eat or poison just about everything but the beetle and are taking an eraser to Australia's ecology. The mongeese (diurnal) share burrows with the rats (nocturnal) and eat lots of rare native species.
If you had you would have noticed a few salient points:
1) Vegetables, lots and lots of them, are an important part of the diet. Just not the high-sugar ones like carrots, most tomatoes, and a lot of the dried beans
2) Fruits are not absent. Again, low-sugar ones like raspberries are preferred to, say, apples.
3) He prescribes lots of water. Repeatedly.
4) Regular exercise is, and I quote "non-negotiable".
You didn't read the book, did you?
You didn't even read the review.
The cover of the book shows two bright blue weevils making little weevils. This should clue you in.
This is not a book about how a man can have a good time bumping nasties with a woman. It's a book about how rotifers, hyenas, stick insects and bee-eaters do the deed with other rotifers, hyenas, stick insects and bee-eaters. It's evolutionary biology case studies styled like an advice column so that people will enjoy reading it.
I know, space is big and dangerous, and we weren't designed to live there. But the whole article is giving me flashblacks to Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" and Bruce Sterling's more recent Shaper/Mechanist stories. Stories well worth reading for the poetry and mind expansion, by the bye.
...what are the police going to do when he winds of face down in a river? Narrowing down a field of a couple hundred million suspects who all have a motive could be a lot of work.
>But the world puts up with it because of the
>shitty, Dollar store trinkets that they produce.
>They start producing other things that can put a
>dent in the economy, then you can bet that there
>would be heavy pressure on their government to
>stop.
Ignorance of history is comforting in the short term but suicidal in the long term. Let's just call America "The Land of the Lemmings". We heard exactly the same thing a few decades ago about Japan. And Taiwan. And Hong Kong. And Korea. And various countries in Western Europe if you want to go back a century and a half.
China has become the world's workshop. They are developing the infrastructure. They have the educated skilled workers where needed. Their industrial base is large and growing. As opposed to ours which is aging and shrinking. As a side note two guys I volunteer with at Fort Vancouver worked in the skilled metal trades as craftsmen and teachers most of their lives. In their considered opinion we don't have the human resources or physical plant to reindustrialize if (when) we need to. The US is a formerly industrialized country.
>Also, at what point would the people stop being
>walked all over? Once China has a huge economy,
>capitalist, communist or otherwise, if the wealth
>is not spread a bit more than now (which has
>gotten better than ten years ago), the people
>just might wise up.
It doesn't quite work that way. If anything it's the opposite. People with something want to keep it. It's people who don't have anything who make really strong demands. And the ones who punctuate their requests with gunfire are most often the ones who had something and lost it. Read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer for a nice thumbnail of the eponymous true believer who really gets mass movements started.
Singaporean and Japanese society exercised iron control over the behavior of their populations when times were good. This has slipped a little as things got worse. People were willing to accept control in exchange for wealth. Parallels can be drawn to the political upheavals in Britain around industrialization, the French Revolution and the recent war against the West waged largely by discontented Wahabite f**sticks.
The plural of "crux" would be "cruces"
The movie didn't suck. If it sucked it would have been good for something.
I believe the correspondent was talking about the book. Heinlein's book "Starship Troopers" had some very interesting ideas about the rights vs. duties aspects of citizenship and civic responsibility.
A number of things is at work here.
1) "It's not a patch on the old..." People like what is familiar. If you grew up loving Heinlein and Brunner "Red Spider White Web" will be alien.
2) The book publishing industry is in a serious, possibly permanent slump. Publishers have to find what wins and stick with it. There is less room for experimentation. In the past 30 years we've seen the end of the mid-line author - the writer who would come out with the occaisional book.
3) Social control. Back in the late 40s through early 60s it was not acceptable to deal with a lot of social issues or criticisms of the fairly repressive state of society in regular literature. Science fiction was all blasters and bug eyed monsters. You could deal with dangerous themes safely if it was kid-fluff about aliens or the far far future. A lot of this drive and fire has been directed into other fields of late. Or completely snuffed out in our era of hard Right Republican political orthodoxy. But that's another discussion...
4) We won. Things that would have been science fiction a decade or two ago are now common literary tropes. Dan Brown writes about anti-matter bombs. Jurassic Park achieves breakout success with cloning and dinosaurs. The distinction between the sci-fi ghetto and literary uptown has become kind of blurred. Authors who want greater recognition and money can use the material without the label.
And how long have you been a right wing talk radio host?
That's certainly part of it. We are still at the stage where people expect us to go "ooh" and "aah" at the Great and Terrible Wizard of Oz and to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
This hope may not be justified. A generation ago the first three Star Wars movies did spectacularly well on the strength of the special effects and CGI. It certainly wasn't the acting (which was barely adequate), the story (which was trite and hackneyed) or anything else of the sort. It was that George Lucas could put his personal vision on the screen exactly as he imagined it.
Close to thirty years later he is still doing that. But the movies aren't making the same kind of money because people are used to the pretty lights. Once they see past them it is apparent that Lucas really isn't a very good story teller.
I use him merely as an object lesson. Jurassic Park 2-3, Godzilla, and any number of other computer generated turkeys would do just as well.
CGI has been the death of special effects wizardry. If you can imagine it, you can put it on the screen by throwing enough computers at it. In earlier times you had to think about how to do the special effects. And audiences could still be surprised and amazed when a particularly clever effect or dramatic stunt worked.
I am reminded of an earlier technical revolution - the movie camera. Acting in front of an audience is a completely different skill than doing it in front of a camera. In live theater there is a conversation of sorts between the cast and the audience. The actors gain or lose energy from this interaction, and the performances are never exactly the same twice except for long-running statistical outliers like "The King and I". In movies everything is done and redone until it is exactly how the director wants it. The audience is, quite literally, out of the picture.
The ability to sustain acting skills and character is less important these days than "star quality". In fact, being too good an actor is a detriment because people will forget that they are seeing fill in name of starlet or c**t-throb of the moment and believe they are seeing the actual character.
Shadow of the Vampire had a couple really good lines along this line. The lead actress tells how she gains life and vitality from an audience but "this [the camera] sucks the life from me".
CGIfying everything simply continues the process of removing life and acting from, well, acting
about $131 million in earnings, on a production budget of $120 million. That's $11 million in profits, or about 9% return. Compared to a lot of successful movies, a 9% return is not all that great. By comparison, I think the stock market's annual return is something like 8%
You have to consider another thing here, the Hollywood accounting system. Back when Art Buchwald sued over the theft of his writings in "Coming to America" (and won) the studios were terrified that he might subpoena their accounting records and shed light on the whole sordid mess.
He did, and it was awful. They used accounting and bookkeeping tricks to turn everything into costs, even profits (and I don't mean in an Econ 101 sense). Movies that yield huge wads of cash for the investors and backers, like Forrest Gump, are turned into money losers on paper so that people who have been promised a percentage of the net can be screwed out of everything (the writer in the case of FG).
Gold may be "accepted" but that doesn't really mean much. Like I said, it has a price based on current market conditions. It can be converted into other currencies, but so can a lot of other things which are subject to exactly the same sort of market forces.
As for lasting 1000 years, well, I suppose it does. But that isn't terribly relevant here. After all, how many people or governments for that matter, last anywhere near that long or plan even 50 years ahead?
The monetary games you speak of are not necessarily bad. Monetary and fiscal policy are as old as government and can be applied wisely or foolishly. Applied well they can be the salvation of a national economy. A reflexive and religious belief that the government can do no right and will almost certainly screw up is not supported by history any more than tha belief that The Market will make the "right" decision.
Gold's chief value is talismanic. It has a magical hold over peoples' imaginations. That superstition, in the most nice and accurate sense of the word, give gold a certain value. But I question how important it is.
I would ask for a refund for that class. In what is possibly the greatest political speech in US History William Jennings Bryan put forward the bimetallic standard as a reaction to gold-backed currency. "We shall not crucify American farmers on a cross of gold." Long before WWII.
The gold standard "fixes" nothing in any real sense. Gold is a commodity like any other. Its value changes over time depending on the degree to which people want it. The quantity also changes. People still dig the stuff out of the ground. This changes the supply and hence the value according to neoclassical economic theory.
... "ask a lawyer".
But failing that, try to find the principals of the company, the original owners. They owned the assets of the firm. If they don't want it try to get a "whatever, do what you want with it" from them before you try to sell or publish it.
I'm heading back to school and have forgotten way too much math. The best single book I've come across is "All the Mathematics You Missed But Need to Know for Graduate School" [Thomas Garrity, Cambridge University Press 0-521-79285-1].
It's weak in that it lacks practice problems, but it gives good familiarity with the major topics in about 340 pages. No mean feat.
Also good, of course, are "Div, Grad, Curl and all That" and "How to Solve It"
Actually, I did although it lapsed years ago. My best code speed was ~20wpm.
The bandwidth of user-recognized Morse code is just to small compared to reading and typing text or speech. It made sense in the early days of radio and as a weeding-out process later on to separate the serious hobbyists from the casual ones in licensing.
These days I don't know. It's a cute little hack, and it still has limited applications in radio.
I just thought of an interesting possible application - steganography. You can only see a message if you are looking for it. IF you were using, say, a status flag as your signalling device a sharp BOFH might look for ASCII or Unicode. He would be unlikely to look for Morse code. Add in the slop that Morse has - distances between letters, the difference between a dot and a dash or the characters within letters can be pretty variable - and you might have an inefficient but harder to detect method of hiding messages.
The Darwinian poetry can be pretty bad. But it doesn't hold a candle to the Bulwer-Lytton price winners given every year for the most gawdawful first sentence of an as-yet-and-we-hope-forever unwritten novel.
>>If someone comes in and sleeps in my bed
>>without permision it ISN'T theft. Tresspassing
>>in my house is illegal, but it would be absurd
>>to call to call it theft.
True enough. Although we can always fall back on Shakespeare:
"Who steals my purse steals trash; 't is something, nothing;
'T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed"
It sorta works for the special sort of hard core Libertarian or Randite who believes that ONLY theft and assault are crimes.
It would help if you learned a bit more about
1) Your religion
2) Your country
The "Three religions" are Judaism, Christianity and Islam - the religions of The Book.
The Malaysian govenrment routinely bans movies that show Jews in a positive light. Schindler's List comes to mind.
First, let's get a couple things out of the way. There is no way the data are clean enough to make the kind of claims they are making. I didn't see any confidence levels, standard deviations or any of the normal statistical measures here. So the scientist in me is already uneasy.
The next thing is the convenient number. 40-39. There's a reason gas stations always charge umpty-ump and 9/10 of a cent for their gas. The extra mil makes a psychological difference. Here, changing the most significant digit is a big jump in perception. If it had been 42->41 I would have been a little less skeptical.
What they are measuring is also suspect. As others have pointed out 1 bought and 4 copied copies of Word doesn't necessarily mean 4 lost sales. It may well mean 1 bought copy where there would otherwise have been 5 copies of word perfect or openoffice.
And there is the question of how much stuff is actually used and lost. To take an older example, consider the Steve Jackson Games case. The phone company used a high-pressure compressor to inflate their claims of piracy. According to them the crackers had "stolen" the entire value of the information in the document, the entire labor of the people who wrote it, the entire cost of the network it was written and originally stored on and (if memory serves) the value of every copy that had been sold.
Similar thing going on here. There are plenty of warez that people don't use. They just keep them around like trophies. Or to play with. Stuff that is really critical to the business is more likely to get bought so that people can have things like support, upgrades, and patches. It may be the stuff that isn't so important that is more likely to be copied and passed around.