"Accordint to the structuralist theory of language and society, you cannot copy the former without copying the latter...."
Along those lines, it would be easy for the participants to use chimp-like behavior yet still encode Human language, similar to charades where non-verbal actions refer to language concepts.
Q: A lot of people worry that RFID will infringe on their privacy. Is that a valid concern?
A: There's a theoretical risk. But we have safeguards, and more are coming. Our tags have a kill function that will destroy the tag in case of tampering.
Destruction in case of tampering is to protect the retailer, not the customer.
There are ways to simply erase the information on the tag. There are also less high-tech ways to deal with this: When I buy a garment, one of the first things I do when I get it home is cut off the tags. You can cut off RFID tags the same way.
...except when the RFID tag isn't on the tag, or there is more than one RFID tag.
Also, privacy concerns around RFID tags are a little like concerns about supermarket scanners years ago. When the laser scanners were coming out, everybody was saying, retailers are going to collect information about what you buy. And none of that happened. I think the situation with RFID is similar.
Exactly that happened: retailers gather data on customers, made possible by barcodes. RFID is like a barcode which can be scanned as you walk past the scanner, even if it's in a pocket or inside the sole of a shoe:
And for a lot of makers of sports shoes, RFID provides added benefit to customers. The average life of a sports-shoe model is about three months. Say that when your shoes wear out, you want a similar pair. It's incredibly difficult today for the retailer to tell a customer which new model corresponds to the old one. But we could fix that with RFID. That's a great sales tool.
As if current shoes couldn't have their model number printed on the inside. And what was that above about removing the RFID tag? How do you do that when it's embedded in the shoe? What better place to put a unique serial number than in a person's shoes, to be read by floor-based scanners under doorways.
...At the low end, the primary differentiator is price. At the high end, it's more about features, such as security, encryption, protection from evildoers.
...except the evildoers the system trusts, who can use RFID for their activities.
"Who needs the FCC when people decide that words like 'f***ing' needs to be self-censored? If you're going to f***ing quote someone, f***, man, QUOTE THEM. You're caving in against your own f***ing thesis." [profanity censored]
I wonder if the cooling fans themselves could be designed to make more predictable noise, such that noise cancellation could be done without a mic, and synchronized to the fan via the rotation sensors.
"I've always wondered why people sneeze into their hands. I think it's better to sneeze toward the ground and away from other people."
I always pull the front of my shirt collar away from my neck and sneeze into the space between my shirt and torso; anything that gets on my skin will be washed off on the next shower, and won't spread in the mean time. Maybe it looks funny, but it doesn't spread the aerosol everywhere. I hate it when people put their hand over their mouth out of apparent politeness... it's like "Yeah thanks, now you can be sure to spread it all over everything you touch."
"Eventually, their sprung up an occupation around maintaining these devices, and now we have many trained mechanics. That's what computer repair people are becoming."
Most computer components are maintenance-free; when's the last time you oiled your hard drive?
Car maintenance involves changing fluids which get dirty and parts which break down, making physical adjustments due to wear. Plumbing work involves cleaning or replacing old pipes. The justification is that physical things wear out or get dirty; the question is, what portion of computer are due to the realities of physical deterioration, as opposed to avoidable software problems?
Repairs can't be automatically done on physical machines without adding extra machinery, so humans do the repairs; in the software of a computer, why can't repairs be automated? Further, why is damage allowed at all, considering that modern processors allow isolation of various software components?
Similar to thinking of ideas as physical property (they aren't), thinking of software as a machine which must be constantly maintained like a physical machine (it doesn't) results in lost opportunities.
"My first project was to give the frame a wireless connection so I could transfer new pictures without taking it off the wall."
Oh great, then it'll start showing net-based advertisements. And if you add a passive infrared detector you will get double payback when people are in the room while an ad is being shown.
Transformer Refuses To Change Back Into Volkswagen
CYBERTRON -- Following an intense battle with Megatron and his evil Decepticons Monday, former robot-in-disguise Bumblebee refused to revert to his natural state as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. "I hid my existence in this world by taking the form of a vehicle! I revealed my true nature when I was called upon to protect earth!" said Bumblebee, a member of Optimus Prime's heroic Autobots force. "I refuse to change back into a humiliating bubble-shaped compact car!" Bumblebee added that Megatron arrived on earth with one goal: Destruction!
The website was copied, not stolen. Theft deprives the owner of access to something, while duplication doesn't. Copying someone's website is not cool, but it shouldn't be called theft as a way to make it seem like something it isn't.
theft - The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
steal - To take and carry away, feloniously; to take without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, to steal the personal goods of another.
A game with a varying number of on-screen objects which achieves consistent speed without relying on an external timebase is somewhat difficult to code because the execution time of every routine must be taken into account to determine the proper delay until the next frame. It's unlikely that the overall frame rate of a game would be normally determined by CPU cycles used (it will be when there is too much to process in the usual frame interval). In addition, video hardware on some consoles only allows access between frames (during vertical blanking). Even where it doesn't, if the game's frame rate isn't synchronized with the video frame rate, when updates are made in the middle of the video frame, the next completed video frame will have a split across the middle with the old frame on top and the new frame on the bottom.
Depending on the CPU speed for short self-contained routines which access hardware in a time-critical way is probably more common, and not bad practice, since the older consoles were kept compatible at the hardware level. Keeping hardware the same across board revisions allowed elimination of a cycle-consuming software abstraction layer.
Clemens is very condescending towards Aiden. That should be a tip-off as to what's going on. He can't see beyond his own goals (recognition, money, girls) to other virtues of open-source: virtually zero-cost distribution and the ability for anyone to modify the software easily and share the results. He then goes on to ask how the software can be of any use without money changing hands; Clemens, it's people who drive trucks, manage factories, write software, not money.
"However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are - out of principle - not making any money out of this, because it is open-source and you and your buddies insist that it must be absolutely free. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this project for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on."
It's not about direct personal benefit, Clemens!
"The whole thing about 'free software' is a lie. It's a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software."
Clemens' letter is an obvious attempt to support his means of making money (and age-ism), that's for sure.
...Consider the consequences of writing software for free. "Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again."
Applying this logic to the letter itself, offered for free (the horror!), an interesting conclusion is reached regarding its value.
"Any filtering method does not address this most serious problem, and even if you do not see any spam in your inbox, you're still paying for the bandwidth and system resources these spammers steal."
If the advertisers don't get any responses, they won't use that spammer again. If no spammer can get e-mail through, the spammers go out of business. So, effective filters widely deployed can cause spammers to choose another line of work.
New finding: Mathematics is just electrical curren
on
The Science of Love
·
· Score: 2, Funny
A new finding has been made in the field of mathematics: it's just electrical currents. Scientists studied computers engaging in mathematics and found that if they disabled the electric currents inside, it ceased the behavior. When they re-enabled the electric currents, the behavior resumed. They have done other studies on other species of computers, including small nomadic units and large plant-like machines which couldn't even move, and found the same results. They have concluded that "mathematics is nothing more than electrical currents". They dismissed those who specialize in the field of mathematics as weasel-wording when they described that mathematics is at a different abstraction level than electrical currents. The mathematicians pointed to a similarly-flawed study about human love, but the scientists had already stopped listening.
How I see it, there is an overwhelming mass of unthinking consumers (where unthinking refers to their major choices of whom they buy from, and also that most people have some areas they don't think about). Views on things are injected by whomever catches their attention. In this scenario, those of the consumers who would play a part in the "the customer knows best" are in a significant minority, so their input is swamped by the unthinking majority. For these issues, government control comes in. It seems only necessary because of this unthinking majority. If a company sold private data and consumers were mostly thinking about whom they give their business to, and were united, they would say "I don't think so" and the company would go out of business. Future companies would think twice before doing this. But because most consumers don't really care about their information being sold, they'll support the company either way "hey, if it makes the products cheaper, it's cool man - you win, I win". I suppose one who thoght about this may not care about their personal data being sold. I wonder if they are considering that this is used to target advertising meant to sway the unthinking consumers, in the end to manipulate as usual.
Government is roughly in a loop with the unthinking masses. It's like you squeezed out the thinking and bottled up in government. You can't eliminate just one. You can't fill the hole in the ground without the pile of dirt you dug up. I see government/rigid social order as a "support group", a crutch while humanity gets its act together and figures out how to use its mind. Until then, I see government as a semi-essential element of the transition.
What I find interesting is that complete lack of commentary concerning the lack of males in undergraduate arts courses (English, Sociology, Performing Arts, Women's Studies). Isn't the whole point to have equal representation and exposure? Or is there some other more insidious agenda?
Good. Same thing. I think the purpose of some of these studies is exposing these dynamics that make it hard for someone who *wants* to go into these areas, get into them. Raise awareness of this. Some would just like to point fingers, whine, and they should be taken for what they are. Why should categories be exclusive of other things?
OK, but there's still something Orwellian about "redefining" simple terms like gender and sex to address certain people's sense of victimization. Intersexual people, for example, are distinct minority, and they're best described as "intersexual", or hermaprhoditic. There's no need to define the male and female sex out of existence just because there are a small minority of cases that don't fit. Biologists don't talk about the "gender" of fish, for instance, even though there are some hermaphoridite fish. What's interesting is that the term gender (to mean mind sex) came about precisely to address intersexuals. Isn't it odd that there is a binary gender system even though such a binary doesn't actually exist? The term gender came about to describe a person's "mental" sex, so that their physical signifiers could be medically made to match this, for the purpose of perpetuating the binary gender system. There are several characteristics that make up biological sex/gender. To name a few: external genitalia, chromosomes, internal genitalia, sexual preference, gender identity, brain sex. Some of these don't fit a binary, and they don't always agree with the heterosexual "normal" model.
The geek guys here constantly arguing that they are right about how the situation is for girls, as if their life depends on it being a certain way. Earn your trophy! From outside this competition, it looks so silly, but they won't listen.
Well well well. I downloaded this tool to see how many people were enjoying MY art without MY permission and it seems every Napster user is! My band is called mp3 (well, not really a band - nobody else wanted to join, said I was selfish. Ha!). Oh, my first single is called Control Freak. But I won't let you listen to it because it's mine. Art isn't meant to be shared. Mwa ha ha ha
GrnHrnt wrote: [intro snipped] Have any of you (Metallica) ever copied a tape, record, 8-track, CD, etc. from a friend? This is an infringement of copyright isn't it? I don't mean to make you seem evil, but is it simply the scale of Napster/mp3's that is of concern?
Lars' response: Yeah, I mean I think we answered that before. Of course we have, ok? And of course it's a valid point. The bottom line is the size of it. The size of it and the quality of it. When we go in, and check Napster out, we come up with 1.4 million copyright infringements in 48 hours, this is a different thing than trading cassette tapes with your buddy at school. I mean, 48 hours! So it's the quality, the quality and the scale.
Here I think two different kinds of data are being compared. It's like saying "you know, a person only has a few kids on average, but here there are millions of kids being born in a 48 hour period!" Well, yeah. This is a union of all those people having a few kids.
A more useful comparison would be to some central real-time updated database of all the tape copies occurring. But even that doesn't go far enough, because people have gotten over the novelty of tape recorders, and there are more attractive options to copying now. Go back in time to when consumer tape recorders weren't generally available, somehow distribute millions of these "bugged" tape recorders to consumers in a two-month interval of time, then see how much copying is going on in a 48 hour period. That would be more meaningful. But even then, it wouldn't account for the differences in the digital medium.
What also needs to be accounted for is what this data represents. The dynamics of digital copying are almost fundamentally different than that of physical copying/purchasing. With these digital sources, it's often cheaper (time-wise) to collect a whole bunch of it then sift through it later when it's all right there ready to be listened to immediately (think instruction prefetch in a CPU or a web browser with image loading on, for other examples of this pattern). Doing the same with physical media would be quite costly. One is much less likely to make a physical copy or purchase they are fairly sure they want the material, due to the general inability to recover the cost of acquisition, if the material turns out to be undesirable. So this data point of 1.4 million copies is just that, 1.4 million transfers of the songs. The number of people keeping and *listening* to these songs, i.e. those who actually collected one of them for keeps, may be drastically less.
Overall, I think this answer is very shallow. It builds up a seemingly-rational argument that provides emotional energy ("I mean, 48 hours!") to support the position.
Slashdot Mirror
"It would certainly piss me off if some guy was speeding ahead of me and caused the light ahead of us to turn red, stopping both of us."
Is it a bad sign that the first thing I thought of when reading the summary of this story was "denial-of-service attack"?
"Accordint to the structuralist theory of language and society, you cannot copy the former without copying the latter...."
Along those lines, it would be easy for the participants to use chimp-like behavior yet still encode Human language, similar to charades where non-verbal actions refer to language concepts.
Q: A lot of people worry that RFID will infringe on their privacy. Is that a valid concern?
...except when the RFID tag isn't on the tag, or there is more than one RFID tag.
...At the low end, the primary differentiator is price. At the high end, it's more about features, such as security, encryption, protection from evildoers.
...except the evildoers the system trusts, who can use RFID for their activities.
A: There's a theoretical risk. But we have safeguards, and more are coming. Our tags have a kill function that will destroy the tag in case of tampering.
Destruction in case of tampering is to protect the retailer, not the customer.
There are ways to simply erase the information on the tag. There are also less high-tech ways to deal with this: When I buy a garment, one of the first things I do when I get it home is cut off the tags. You can cut off RFID tags the same way.
Also, privacy concerns around RFID tags are a little like concerns about supermarket scanners years ago. When the laser scanners were coming out, everybody was saying, retailers are going to collect information about what you buy. And none of that happened. I think the situation with RFID is similar.
Exactly that happened: retailers gather data on customers, made possible by barcodes. RFID is like a barcode which can be scanned as you walk past the scanner, even if it's in a pocket or inside the sole of a shoe:
And for a lot of makers of sports shoes, RFID provides added benefit to customers. The average life of a sports-shoe model is about three months. Say that when your shoes wear out, you want a similar pair. It's incredibly difficult today for the retailer to tell a customer which new model corresponds to the old one. But we could fix that with RFID. That's a great sales tool.
As if current shoes couldn't have their model number printed on the inside. And what was that above about removing the RFID tag? How do you do that when it's embedded in the shoe? What better place to put a unique serial number than in a person's shoes, to be read by floor-based scanners under doorways.
"Who needs the FCC when people decide that words like 'f***ing' needs to be self-censored? If you're going to f***ing quote someone, f***, man, QUOTE THEM. You're caving in against your own f***ing thesis." [profanity censored]
I totally agree!
...now a printer that puts clothes on pr0n when it's printed out!
I wonder if the cooling fans themselves could be designed to make more predictable noise, such that noise cancellation could be done without a mic, and synchronized to the fan via the rotation sensors.
"...90% of bathroom door handles in public buildings had feces on them.
Makes you wonder how it gets there in the first place."
Hmmm, that's a tough one. Maybe we should get Sherlock Holmes on the case.
"I've always wondered why people sneeze into their hands. I think it's better to sneeze toward the ground and away from other people."
I always pull the front of my shirt collar away from my neck and sneeze into the space between my shirt and torso; anything that gets on my skin will be washed off on the next shower, and won't spread in the mean time. Maybe it looks funny, but it doesn't spread the aerosol everywhere. I hate it when people put their hand over their mouth out of apparent politeness... it's like "Yeah thanks, now you can be sure to spread it all over everything you touch."
"...a product called "Microban" into their keyboards and mice, to create an environment where bacteria cannot survive and grow."
Darn it! I knew there was a use for that old Russian monitor that glowed even when it was unplugged. Curse modern low-emissions monitors!
When Microsoft ports its OS to your toilet, the numbers are sure to even out again.
"Eventually, their sprung up an occupation around maintaining these devices, and now we have many trained mechanics. That's what computer repair people are becoming."
Most computer components are maintenance-free; when's the last time you oiled your hard drive?
Car maintenance involves changing fluids which get dirty and parts which break down, making physical adjustments due to wear. Plumbing work involves cleaning or replacing old pipes. The justification is that physical things wear out or get dirty; the question is, what portion of computer are due to the realities of physical deterioration, as opposed to avoidable software problems?
Repairs can't be automatically done on physical machines without adding extra machinery, so humans do the repairs; in the software of a computer, why can't repairs be automated? Further, why is damage allowed at all, considering that modern processors allow isolation of various software components?
Similar to thinking of ideas as physical property (they aren't), thinking of software as a machine which must be constantly maintained like a physical machine (it doesn't) results in lost opportunities.
"My first project was to give the frame a wireless connection so I could transfer new pictures without taking it off the wall."
Oh great, then it'll start showing net-based advertisements. And if you add a passive infrared detector you will get double payback when people are in the room while an ad is being shown.
Transformer Refuses To Change Back Into Volkswagen
CYBERTRON -- Following an intense battle with Megatron and his evil Decepticons Monday, former robot-in-disguise Bumblebee refused to revert to his natural state as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. "I hid my existence in this world by taking the form of a vehicle! I revealed my true nature when I was called upon to protect earth!" said Bumblebee, a member of Optimus Prime's heroic Autobots force. "I refuse to change back into a humiliating bubble-shaped compact car!" Bumblebee added that Megatron arrived on earth with one goal: Destruction!
(from The Onion)
The website was copied, not stolen. Theft deprives the owner of access to something, while duplication doesn't. Copying someone's website is not cool, but it shouldn't be called theft as a way to make it seem like something it isn't.
theft - The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
steal - To take and carry away, feloniously; to take without right or leave, and with intent to keep wrongfully; as, to steal the personal goods of another.
A game with a varying number of on-screen objects which achieves consistent speed without relying on an external timebase is somewhat difficult to code because the execution time of every routine must be taken into account to determine the proper delay until the next frame. It's unlikely that the overall frame rate of a game would be normally determined by CPU cycles used (it will be when there is too much to process in the usual frame interval). In addition, video hardware on some consoles only allows access between frames (during vertical blanking). Even where it doesn't, if the game's frame rate isn't synchronized with the video frame rate, when updates are made in the middle of the video frame, the next completed video frame will have a split across the middle with the old frame on top and the new frame on the bottom.
Depending on the CPU speed for short self-contained routines which access hardware in a time-critical way is probably more common, and not bad practice, since the older consoles were kept compatible at the hardware level. Keeping hardware the same across board revisions allowed elimination of a cycle-consuming software abstraction layer.
Clemens is very condescending towards Aiden. That should be a tip-off as to what's going on. He can't see beyond his own goals (recognition, money, girls) to other virtues of open-source: virtually zero-cost distribution and the ability for anyone to modify the software easily and share the results. He then goes on to ask how the software can be of any use without money changing hands; Clemens, it's people who drive trucks, manage factories, write software, not money.
"However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are - out of principle - not making any money out of this, because it is open-source and you and your buddies insist that it must be absolutely free. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this project for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on."
It's not about direct personal benefit, Clemens!
"The whole thing about 'free software' is a lie. It's a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software."
Clemens' letter is an obvious attempt to support his means of making money (and age-ism), that's for sure.
...Consider the consequences of writing software for free. "Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again."
Applying this logic to the letter itself, offered for free (the horror!), an interesting conclusion is reached regarding its value.
"Any filtering method does not address this most serious problem, and even if you do not see any spam in your inbox, you're still paying for the bandwidth and system resources these spammers steal."
If the advertisers don't get any responses, they won't use that spammer again. If no spammer can get e-mail through, the spammers go out of business. So, effective filters widely deployed can cause spammers to choose another line of work.
A new finding has been made in the field of mathematics: it's just electrical currents. Scientists studied computers engaging in mathematics and found that if they disabled the electric currents inside, it ceased the behavior. When they re-enabled the electric currents, the behavior resumed. They have done other studies on other species of computers, including small nomadic units and large plant-like machines which couldn't even move, and found the same results. They have concluded that "mathematics is nothing more than electrical currents". They dismissed those who specialize in the field of mathematics as weasel-wording when they described that mathematics is at a different abstraction level than electrical currents. The mathematicians pointed to a similarly-flawed study about human love, but the scientists had already stopped listening.
How I see it, there is an overwhelming mass of unthinking consumers (where unthinking refers to their major choices of whom they buy from, and also that most people have some areas they don't think about). Views on things are injected by whomever catches their attention. In this scenario, those of the consumers who would play a part in the "the customer knows best" are in a significant minority, so their input is swamped by the unthinking majority. For these issues, government control comes in. It seems only necessary because of this unthinking majority. If a company sold private data and consumers were mostly thinking about whom they give their business to, and were united, they would say "I don't think so" and the company would go out of business. Future companies would think twice before doing this. But because most consumers don't really care about their information being sold, they'll support the company either way "hey, if it makes the products cheaper, it's cool man - you win, I win". I suppose one who thoght about this may not care about their personal data being sold. I wonder if they are considering that this is used to target advertising meant to sway the unthinking consumers, in the end to manipulate as usual.
Government is roughly in a loop with the unthinking masses. It's like you squeezed out the thinking and bottled up in government. You can't eliminate just one. You can't fill the hole in the ground without the pile of dirt you dug up. I see government/rigid social order as a "support group", a crutch while humanity gets its act together and figures out how to use its mind. Until then, I see government as a semi-essential element of the transition.
Good. Same thing. I think the purpose of some of these studies is exposing these dynamics that make it hard for someone who *wants* to go into these areas, get into them. Raise awareness of this. Some would just like to point fingers, whine, and they should be taken for what they are. Why should categories be exclusive of other things?
OK, but there's still something Orwellian about "redefining" simple terms like gender and sex to address certain people's sense of victimization. Intersexual people, for example, are distinct minority, and they're best described as "intersexual", or hermaprhoditic. There's no need to define the male and female sex out of existence just because there are a small minority of cases that don't fit. Biologists don't talk about the "gender" of fish, for instance, even though there are some hermaphoridite fish. What's interesting is that the term gender (to mean mind sex) came about precisely to address intersexuals. Isn't it odd that there is a binary gender system even though such a binary doesn't actually exist? The term gender came about to describe a person's "mental" sex, so that their physical signifiers could be medically made to match this, for the purpose of perpetuating the binary gender system. There are several characteristics that make up biological sex/gender. To name a few: external genitalia, chromosomes, internal genitalia, sexual preference, gender identity, brain sex. Some of these don't fit a binary, and they don't always agree with the heterosexual "normal" model.
The geek guys here constantly arguing that they are right about how the situation is for girls, as if their life depends on it being a certain way. Earn your trophy! From outside this competition, it looks so silly, but they won't listen.
Well well well. I downloaded this tool to see how many people were enjoying MY art without MY permission and it seems every Napster user is! My band is called mp3 (well, not really a band - nobody else wanted to join, said I was selfish. Ha!). Oh, my first single is called Control Freak. But I won't let you listen to it because it's mine. Art isn't meant to be shared. Mwa ha ha ha
GrnHrnt wrote: [intro snipped] Have any of you (Metallica) ever copied a tape, record, 8-track, CD, etc. from a friend? This is an infringement of copyright isn't it? I don't mean to make you seem evil, but is it simply the scale of Napster/mp3's that is of concern?
Lars' response: Yeah, I mean I think we answered that before. Of course we have, ok? And of course it's a valid point. The bottom line is the size of it. The size of it and the quality of it. When we go in, and check Napster out, we come up with 1.4 million copyright infringements in 48 hours, this is a different thing than trading cassette tapes with your buddy at school. I mean, 48 hours! So it's the quality, the quality and the scale.
Here I think two different kinds of data are being compared. It's like saying "you know, a person only has a few kids on average, but here there are millions of kids being born in a 48 hour period!" Well, yeah. This is a union of all those people having a few kids.
A more useful comparison would be to some central real-time updated database of all the tape copies occurring. But even that doesn't go far enough, because people have gotten over the novelty of tape recorders, and there are more attractive options to copying now. Go back in time to when consumer tape recorders weren't generally available, somehow distribute millions of these "bugged" tape recorders to consumers in a two-month interval of time, then see how much copying is going on in a 48 hour period. That would be more meaningful. But even then, it wouldn't account for the differences in the digital medium.
What also needs to be accounted for is what this data represents. The dynamics of digital copying are almost fundamentally different than that of physical copying/purchasing. With these digital sources, it's often cheaper (time-wise) to collect a whole bunch of it then sift through it later when it's all right there ready to be listened to immediately (think instruction prefetch in a CPU or a web browser with image loading on, for other examples of this pattern). Doing the same with physical media would be quite costly. One is much less likely to make a physical copy or purchase they are fairly sure they want the material, due to the general inability to recover the cost of acquisition, if the material turns out to be undesirable. So this data point of 1.4 million copies is just that, 1.4 million transfers of the songs. The number of people keeping and *listening* to these songs, i.e. those who actually collected one of them for keeps, may be drastically less.
Overall, I think this answer is very shallow. It builds up a seemingly-rational argument that provides emotional energy ("I mean, 48 hours!") to support the position.