MS is full of talented engineers, surrounded by business plans that don't always make technical sense necessarily, and a huge big organization that suffers from all the same problems as every other huge big organization. Just because you're competent, and all of the other people in your group are competent doesn't mean you make a good team, and doesn't mean you did something that will actually make money, nor does it mean anyone responsible for the strategic direction of your company will want to listen to you if it will.
These are also the guys who were doing daily downloads of something like 50 mb of data (redownloading all of your e-mails) on their first iteration of the windows phone app. So it's entirely possible whatever the problem is, is actually a yahoo problem and not particularly an android problem.
proving something exists is the problem at hand. Proving someone posted under the name Tough Love posted on slashdot in english is a different problem than trying to determine age, gender, location etc.
I'm in no way suggesting they know everything there is to know about this particle yet (although the LHC data will provide most of that in the same way it does for other particles so that's not a huge stretch), but at this point it's pretty settled that it exists consistent with predictions.
I was envisioning more of a scenario where the PC market itself disappears into cloud services and tablets sort of thing, where the platform you're running on the device is secondary to the web standards and big kid server stuff on the backend. In that case I suppose I was sloppy in my use of language, it's not so much MS giving up the desktop business as the desktop business bypassing windows entirely, and MS being forced into some other kind of company.
Not as far as I know. I believe they're net positive by over a billion dollars now. Which is, on the microsoft scale of things virtually nothing.
You also have to figure the size of the ecosystem you create. If you lose a billion dollars this year on 10 billion in revenue. And next year lose another billion on 100 billion in revenue your company is worth a crap load more. (Illustrative example not actual numbers). Microsoft is for whatever reason pouring money into their home entertainment products, probably thinking that they will own the living room, but who knows. Again, not sure that's a winner for them, but if it turns out to be a winner they're well positioned to capitalize on it.
Right, but a lot of that android market is competing in a low value market that they don't care about. Microsoft was never bothered by sybian selling 10's of millions of phones even though it could do various office and web browsing task.
The chart I linked is illustrative. Just because people have android phones doesn't mean that's translating into usage share. If people who have linux phones still do 80% of their computing on Windows it's not really going to hurt microsoft any, in the same way that microsoft doesn't care what brand of refrigerator you own, virtually everyone with a computer also has a refrigerator, but they are not overlapping markets. Now, I grant you, I would have expected mobiles to be a much more overlapping market with PC's, but thus far that doesn't seem to be the case.
Also, your opening line
Actually for every 2 new windows 7 machines there is 3 new machines running Linux. Or about 600 thousand windows and 900 thousand Linux (a large part of that is android) every day.
Fails basic maths. There are 900k android activations a day, which is just under 30 million a month. So about the same as windows. Who are up in the 30-35 million a month range. So it's closer to 1:1. But a lot of those droid devices are cheap phones with a browser (not that there's anything wrong with that particularly, but there's nothing there really competing with windows market share).
Possibly the clock won't start until they formally publish. It doesn't start until the wider scientific community gets a good look at the data
uh...
Not sure where to start with this. Other than the fact that we had presentation here, where I am (and I'm a computer scientist in canada) with raw data from the LHC back in January. Anyone who wants the data can get it if you are part of a collaborating institution. Which at this point is basically all the institutions that have high energy particle physicists.
There literally is no wider scientific community at this point except maybe china (and frankly, enough of their scientists are in US and European institutions it would be unrealistic to think they don't has the same information as anyone else). I don't know what 'broader scientific community' you think exists, but between Fermi Lab and the CERN you have basically all of the high energy particle physics researchers in the world. I used to be an optics guy, that's a much bigger field with a lot more people in the private sector, but there's no secret high energy particle accelerator in Japan that they'll just pull out of the air to verify this experiment. Fermi Lab and CERN are it, and they're in agreement with a reproduced result. that's why this is all over the news.
Right, but not even 20 years ago they were a bit player in the office products business, and not a player at all in the game console business.
Times change, companies evolve. Microsoft has the cash to turn itself into a car company if it wants to (I'm not sure why it would want to, but it can do pretty much whatever it wants). Whether or not they will latch on to a successful strategy in the future remains to be seen. Right now they're riding their giant piles of free money from Windows and Office to experiment with other areas (gaming, mobiles, various corporate computing tools etc.), if one of those strategies pans out they may jump headlong into that rather than PC's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems gives a good breakdown. (note that the chart there samples from different places at different points so it can't be used as a value over time measure, but Windows is still somewhere in the 70-85% use range as of april/may of this year). Which is not far off from where it was for the last 10 years with Mac and linux picking up ~10% of the market.
I know it's hard to fathom, but windows is HUGE. The iphone sold about 35 million units each quarter this year. Microsoft moves 35 million units of windows on new PC's in a month. And most of those iphone users have windows.
The other question is whether or not microsoft ever really needs to abandon the PC market. It probably does, but that's not universally true. GM has been making cars for 100 years, and even though there are other car makers and so on they've never really needed to branch out into unrelated businesses, probably they could have had some presence in the aircraft business if they were so inclined (the way GE and rolls royce and SAAB etc. did). It's possible, however unlikey, that the world will keep selling 450 or so million computers a year, and MS will own most of that market indefinitely and everything else will orbit around windows rather than ever meaningfully compete to replace it.
MS came very late to the game to game consoles, and it took them a while to find their footing, but they've managed to move a lot of 360's and make a lot of money. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage something similar with mobile and tablets. Windows 8 might bomb due to the amount of change. But windows 9... that I wouldn't bet against yet.
Granted Ballmer could go crazy, fling a chair at someone important, land himself in jail and then the place suffers a massive leadership crisis and goes out of business. Stranger things have happened.
Forgive me thinking it's premature to jump to conclusions until the information has been vetted by a larger group of scientists
how much larger a group are you looking for beyond all of the high energy particle physicists in the EU and the US?
You mean like how they waited 6 months since http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1334.short? (title First Solid Signs of the Higgs Boson Could Be Announced Next Week).
They've been looking for stuff at the LHC since dec of 2009, and the whole point of the damn thing was to find the higgs boson. And they have been *very* tentative with every piece of data they've talked about since then.
We'll save the "bittersweet" nonsense until it's confirmed.
As others have pointed out, they have this very accurately as what was predicted. There's not a whole lot more to do to prove it is what they think it is, shy of building another giant supercolider looking for something else, and having it give the same result.
This is significantly different from the 'neutrinos are faster than light' problem, where neutrino's being faster than light didn't fit with any existing theory, and it didn't really seem to make sense as a physical result and was far more likely something else (which is also in many ways the reason they published a paper saying 'anyone have ideas cause something seems seriously wrong here'). In this case they have a particle predicted by theory, that, within the bounds of how good any physical experiment ever can be*, seems like they've found where they expected.
*physics theory is usually very much a single effect sort of thing. They predict a single particle with a particular speed/mass etc. Unfortunately physical experiment is never that good. There's always some inherent detector error, certain inherent randomness in systems, some other very minor effects that normally can be discounted but still do something to your results. The unfortunate part here is that the theory seems to so accurately predict the result that we don't have any clues to anything else that might be going on to chase after. If the result had been close, but not quite what was predicted that would have led the way to even more interesting science. As it is physicists now have to start poking at the problem to figure out if there's anywhere the theory does fall apart.
Second, yes, we can fully expect books to be written by people who have some other job that pays the bills.
And that's a sustainable model how? How about software? That doesn't even make sense for books. Professors write books in their capacity as professors, but most other authors actually need to make money from writing
Copyright actually started much earlier than 1710, it just started in 1710 in the UK using english words.
People make their entire living writing copywritten works, (musicians, authors, journalists, software developers) all of those things are protected by copyright and all of those things came into full force with both the creation of copyright and the proliferation of education so people could you know, read.
Everyone has an inherent right of free speech
Rights are artificial constructs as much as anything else in the legal system.
Copyright was never intended to benefit authors.... copyright is intended to benefit society as a whole
Sure. You're trying to balance the incentive to create work by guaranteeing ownership of the work for an author to create more work with making sure that work can still be spread around. If you don't benefit the content creators you don't benefit society.
For example, I bet you wrote your post here on Slashdot without any concern for whether you would get copyright-related payments from it. Your incentive was that you had something you wanted to say to the world. Thus, you ought not to be granted a copyright on it, since you would've written it anyway.
Interesting, but flawed assertion. The work involved was trivial, but spending any time on it doing so incurred a cost in lost production elsewhere. But the broader benefit of public education in ensuring copyright benefits me, and I'm an paid as an academic partially, so it's my responsibility to discuss these issues in a public context as part of being an academic. If I wasn't an academic - which is explicitly a business model where you are being taxed to pay me to have this discussion I wouldn't be having it. I'd be producing knowledge for someone specifically, as it is I'm supposed to be publishing papers, but this is also part of my academic work in figuring out just what sorts of alternate histories and delusions people have about copyright (and you've brought up at least one I hadn't thought of before).
Books predate copyright by thousands of years. There is clearly some sort of viable incentive there
I specifically addressed books in the 'pre printing press' and 'post printing press' scenario. In the the era of scribes you could sell 1000 copies of a book at 1000 dollars each and take 100 off the top of each one for the author, while 900 went into transcription services. Now you sell 100 000 copies of the book for 2 dollars each with the author getting 1 dollar and the duplication costs being 1 dollar (obviously those figures are made up, but they illustrate the point). In both scenarios the author is skimming something off of the production costs, but in the case of very high duplication costs (e.g. reiterating my house example) the percent they get can be much less, because their contribution to the work is much less man power intensively valuable, and they can physically own the production for some time, where sure, someone else can duplicate a copy of their book but because duplication is expensive you can easily still remunerate yourself.
but begging for donations isn't a viable business model
It is actually; it's called a subscription
No, literally, I meant begging for donations. Not a subscription. Begging for donations. Subscription is paying for small pieces at a time in a defined way. Begging for donations is putting a paypal donate button and hoping people click it.
right, the challenge here is sort of the novelty factor and free press of kickstarter type things.
With books you also have to figure there is actually some value in a paper copy, so the question becomes how much value does a physical copy of a thing add? Printing off your own copy of the book at home is still prohibitively expensive.
The problem for MS is that windows is actually a very bad platform for gaming. It's far too big and bloated, with too much stuff running in the background (usually including necessary third party stuff like av and update services etc)... Not to mention hassle with driver conflicts, drm conflicts, incompatible third party software and the gradual slowdown that windows systems suffer from over time.
Uh... not intended to be factual statements?
I make windows games for half of my living. And nothing you said there is true. If you buy a shitty computer, or know nothing about software then yes, your computer will end up being a wreck. But windows is relatively elegant to develop for (given than it supports any arbitrarily crazy set of hardware), it's not particularly 'bloated' and there's nothing secretly sucking up any great amount of processing power. If you let people run media player and wow at the same time well what do you think is going to happen? That's not a problem with windows, that's a problem with how people use windows. Driver problems aren't unique to windows, DRM woudl be the same thing if anyone made non windows games in quantity (think Warden for Blizzard games banning people using linux/WINE), and windows systems if they're competently maintained haven't suffered some sort of gradual slow down over time since windows XP came out.
What decade are you living in?
The difference with writing console games, and I while I'm not working on any console projects at the moment I have recently, is that you know *exactly* how much memory you have, and can specifically address that memory. Windows is a general purpose computer, so your game can't necessarily take the first 500 mb of ram, in order, it has to take whichever 500 it gets allocated, and the GPU-RAM interconnects are different on consoles, (and you have much more power to manage video memory the way you want on a console). With a PS3 or an Xbox or the like you never have any question as to what memory addresses you have or what capabilities each CPU has. You can get much closer to the metal as a programmer and that means you can make a much better experience overall (because you know at every step of the player interaction where and how everything behaves). It's not that windows is somehow worse on the xbox than on the PC, they do both run windows variants after all.
Windows itself doesn't really have overhead. It has services it provides if a user wants them. By default it turns on more services than an Xbox because it's not a game console, it's windows. But as time goes on the game consoles are adding more and more services as there is more and more memory available (wasn't that the point of putting more memory in?). All those stupid avatars on your Xbox profile? Those waste memory. Not necessarily a lot of it, but they waste memory. Like that printer software you have on windows, if you wanted a printer to do anything useful on an Xbox you'd have to waste a chunk of memory for printer management and so on.
If, as a windows developer I could know *exactly* how much memory where it would be managed, what GPU I'd have etc. etc. etc. I could actually do a lot more on windows. But I don't, because there are literally hundreds of different GPU's on the market, dozens of CPU's etc. And trying to deal with all of those is hard.
And again, windows provides you services, it by default provides more services than most people need because it doesn't know what you'll need. An Xbox (or a more tightly managed windows home) could provide a lot less services, or a least a more tightly managed set of services. But the moment you start running google desktop, a calendar app, paint.net, office of some sort, a web browser with 10 tabs open etc. all on the same machine you're trying to game on, you're going to get a different experience than on an xbox where you can't do that.
No, I believe that the MPAA and RIAA are pulling numbers out of their ass to try and persuade governments to do something about it. But that doesn't mean there isn't a kernel of truth to what they're saying. Anyone suggesting there are *no* losses due to piracy would be equally dishonest.
I'm all for remuneration of musicians, but the music industry is not doing it. It never really has, to be honest.
I specifically split apart a number of types of industries including music. Since musicians give their music away for free on the radio already why do they get to charge for it somewhere else? They're using a recording of their song as an ad for their concerts. At least that's one argument. I don't really think it's true, but it's certainly a business model - give something away for free and have a value added service (the concert experience) that would be something else.
Books, TV and Software are different though. Unless we want to go back to arcades. Not all TV channels can be (nor should be) the BBC. If they need to be independently sustaining, and that applies ultimately to any business you need a revenue model, which will be propped up, and restricted by laws. No subliminal advertising, apparently an application of first sale doctrine in the EU etc. An author could use a book as a method to try and collect speaking fees, but if they're speaking they aren't writing books. Software and TV and Movies can't even do that, there's no 'live performance' equivalent, and there's hundreds of people who work on these things they can't all make a living on speaking fees, because frankly, you don't want to hear from the guys who spent 3 years painting all of the rocks in skyrim enough for them to have a decent lifestyle.
I don't know the music business, I know the games business, and I have a fairly good estimate of how much piracy has cost different titles from studios I've worked with, but it's not perfect data. You know past title sales, you know current title sales, and you probably know piracy numbers, but you don't really know why people did or didn't buy your game or why they pirated it. As I say, if your game can't be sold in china and some dude there pirates it well... so what. But when it's someone in the same city as you, well what's their excuse? If you sales from previous titles drop 25 or 30% and piracy doubles it's a good bet a lot of your former customers are now pirates. But there just isn't some magical button you can push to know exactly how many of them would have bought your game if they couldn't. (and at least with one company, they try and track unique IP addresses to give themselves a rough estimate of where people are and so on, and the number of people who go from a pirated copy to a hacked one is well..0. But small data sets, with a less than perfect tracking scheme, when you're talking 40-50k copies being pirated).
Tyranny of the masses is a term I used specifically (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority) - the idea that a majority of people can oppress the minority in a democracy. In the context I used it I mean specifically that the majority of the population could demand free stuff from the existing content creators without paying for it. It can be done, and it's probably legal, parliament is supreme after all, but it's not a way to foster business.
And yes, MPAA, RIAA etc. 'lost sales' figures are wildly misleading estimates. They're trying to write entertaining headlines and they don't really understand. But that doesn't mean it isn't costing them sales, it's a matter of 'not nearly as many as they claim'. Which is exactly my point on saying that if you want perfect data, you're never going to get it, and using that as an excuse to keep pirating is intellectually dishonest. That doesn't make the MPAA and RIAA fabricating numbers any more honest, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that piracy is costing them something, because the whole fucking point of piracy is to not have to pay for things you would otherwise have to have paid for.
Copyright didn't exist for the most part of human history, and a lot of the best artistic production of our species happened in its absence.
Um... wow... how to even start with this one. So first of all, depending on some rich guy for patronage of your business isn't a good business model. It works for a small number of people, with makes extremely rare talent valuable. But it's not an industry.
Copyright has actually been around since the 15th century, and in the english world a bit later than that. The idea of *international* copyright is relatively new, to account for a more interconnected world (and the fact that we all pretend to like each other more). But that time period is when much of the creative artistic work you're thinking of came into being, copyright exist. Copyright as we think of it was a direct result of the printing press. To reiterate my house example. When the primary cost of producing something is in building the first one, and replication is cheap you need one set of rules. Prior to the printing press duplicating a book was enormously expensive, so the whole notion of 'copyright' is very different. You can absorb the cost of 'development' of the book in the cost of paying dozens of people to transcribe copies of it and taking a little off the top for each copy.
And look at the war on drugs to see how effective is to try to force people to do what they strongly don't want to do. Nothing will work on piracy for the exact same motive, but be my guest to think otherwise. If anything piracy has been steadily increasing despite any effort against it and I dare to bet it will continue like so indefinitely until copyright is a long dead concept
I used electrical power as an example for a reason. Failed strategies fail, the drug war and the current approach to piracy have both failed. And yet smoking (regular cigarettes) is way down where I am, because the government has managed to take steps against it. Repeating the same failed strategy over and over is a sign you should be in politics or a mental institution, and that's been the history of the drug war and the much shorter history of piracy. Governments are slowly coming around to realizing that piracy poses a fundamental threat to business models, and will have to do something about it. Since the industry itself hasn't emerged with any solutions they are going to start stepping in (by, for example, trying and failing to block the pirate bay). With the drug war they've never made progress because they keep doing the same thing over and over, and it's not going to work. That doesn't mean an alternate strategy wouldn't work, they just haven't tried.
True Valve is an American corporation and doesn't have to follow EU legislation... unless they want to do business within the EU and well there certainly is a non-trivial number of Valve users within EU.
not true. They can simply do all sales in US dollars. If you're importing it that's your problem.
The problem from Valve's point of view is is that this not a new law but a precedent on an old law and as such all EU citizens have the right to sell games bought since the creation of said law, should Valve refuse them that right they will probably have to refund that game unless they want to get in legal trouble and since they do accept payment in Euro and from EU citizens they are obviously doing business in EU and as such are required to follow EU legislation.
or the EU will do what? They aren't in the EU. They may have servers in the EU, but those can be moved (or turned off). Gamersgate on the other hand....
Valve doesn't need to have a physical presence in the EU. Shy of the EU blocking access to steam (and that's problematic because they also offer a free services) there's really nothing the EU can do. Right now valves EU operations are handled through the UK, so they have to pay VAT, but ask them to change their business model and expect the UK branch to disappear.
Valve is doing a dance of 'operating in europe' etc right now because it's convenient. But they don't have to.
Actually it was more of a rhetorical 'what do you think a steam subscriber is?'. There's no actual term, and I asked precisely because it's important to know what the person who used the phrase thinks it means.
What you said is how I figured they were using the term, but I clarified what the steam service actually is, and how it works from a user perspective to be clear that steam isn't like a magazine subscription.
Yes, but that's why the next gen consoles probably won't play used games, and why most PC developers no longer deal with gamestop. Their time is rapidly coming to an end.
So I want to make it clear here. There are two parties who are interested in consumption data. You have providers and you have consumers. Providers don't care about your consumption habits individually; rather they care about your consumption habits in the context of their peak demand and as a function of trying to stabilize power output while minimizing waste, for outage management, and demand response. These things done at a fine-level by intelligent software powered by smart meters can save ENORMOUS amounts of money and make our grids much more efficient (in terms of less waste and fewer outages caused by a lack of sufficient power). This is what a provider cares about.
Sure, as I said there's a legitimate value to the data. Privacy invasion is more of a misuse of data. Whether or not a regulatory framework would ever exist that could allow such a misuse is important, but only in the narrow case of allowing invasive uses of that data.
They don't care about your usage
They do if they can monetize it. Seriously. That's facebooks entire business model. I specifically references the phone companies because they could do something equally if not more sinister than power companies. But they aren't allowed to do it. There are reasonable privacy protections in place, because god knows, if one of them could have sold your calling habits to someone they would have. And there is a legitimate (and legal) privacy invasion exclusion explicitly for the benefit of law enforcement in the form of wiretapping.
The police already look at power consumption data to find marijuana grow ops around here. That's probably a legitimate exercise in public safety, but the issue at hand isn't whether any particular allowed use is reasonable, it's whether or not the data itself could be used in unreasonable ways. Smart power meters probably could be misused, but I would think most lawmakers will recognize those problems eventually. In the simplest case, could a power company employee check any persons power consumption to see if they are home, or should they need a specific reason? Are they trying to find out if a cheating spouse is at home, or if someone is not home so they can go rob the place etc.? It's not like these aren't solvable and avoidable problems.
When you're 20 years old and have a business idea that isn't going to pan out does not mean you should keep hammering away at that idea. That's the sort of stupidity I'd expect from an MBA.
When I was 20 I made web pages (and this is when finding anyone who could write anything in HTML was a small miracle) and tried to sell computers with colourful cases. I also realized that I didn't have the CS background to write code properly, and wasn't about to hire someone to do it for me when that was the only thing that business did.
The colourful cases thing was a disaster. Not a particularly serious financial disaster, but when Dell started to kick into serious gear they undercut the entire low end of the business, and I could never source the high end parts for serious gaming PC's. So my market dried up. Your wife might want a computer that matches the drapes, but for 200 or 300 bucks she'll let you buy the cheaper one. If you want a high end PC that looks awesome you need to be able to source parts. Which is not something any bank will lend money to a 20 year old kid for (nor by the way would that have been a good idea).
Better to cut my losses there and so something else than keep wasting time on business ventures going no where. With a degree in CS I can actually make significantly better webpages, but that's not nearly as lucrative as other things I can do, and today I wouldn't go near the hardware business without a couple of hundred million dollars and supply contracts in China. I *consult* on hardware people should buy, and my past failed adventure taught me a lot about trying to get people to be honest about their requirements, and how to properly assess business value in various hardware/software(which depends a lot on what the business does). But trying to sell shitty computers in colourful cases as really their only selling point was not going to make me rich.
As long as you learn when you fail there's nothing wrong with some level of failure. But it's also important to realize when the market has changed and it's time to move on. A degree doesn't necessarily get you much, but it can give you credibility with a bank when you need a business loan, or it can get you into a job where you work 9-5 and don't have to worry about a business if you have other shit you want to do with your life.
Remember that quitting a degree makes you look like you can't stick to a plan for 4 years, and, unless you're dropping out of harvard, it looks like you can't even get a degree.
certainly not enough to justify the witch hunting US and its aligned countries have been practicing against end users.
So there are a couple of problems with what you said. First, there's no data to perfectly prove a relationship between downloads and selling losses because we can't test this in a vacuum, with two perfectly equally desirably products where one can be pirated and the other can't. So you're always basing stuff on estimates, which means any argument will eventually boil down to you saying "you can't prove that was a lost sale" and the other guy saying "the effect is statistically significant, we're just sure exactly how much, but that makes a bad sound bite so I simplified it", Secondly of course is that there's a lot of piracy from places you can't sell to, or don't try and sell in (think china). I was working with an indie game dev and they figured half of their piracy was from china etc. type places where they can't sell the game anyway, so that's clearly not a loss.
Where you run into problem is that you're assuming that the 'witch hunting' isn't in the end a necessary evil. All laws ultimately limit freedoms and privacy to try and investigate crime, and all laws can, indirectly, destroy someones life even when it's not dangerously criminal (think doping in sports, or sports gambling by athletes). Software piracy undermines the industry of people creating software to try and sell. Making a copy of a book costs next to nothing compared to the cost of writing the first copy, but we still want there to be authors, and you can't expect book to be published solely by people who have some other job that pays the bills. I think most reasonable people agree there should be laws to prevent theft for example, but of course 'piracy' isn't exactly theft, and nor is counter fitting, so then we're trying to find the sweet spot between letting people own the work they did long enough to get paid enough to justify the time they spent making it versus letting everyone benefit from knowledge and hoping that some socialist utopia will come along that will pay people for whatever they do somehow. In the digital era when a 'counter fit' copy can be a perfect copy of the original you run headlong into an extreme example of a problem we've had for as long as we've been making things, who gets credit for making the first pointy stick so to speak?
All in all apparently the great majority of people do not think piracy is wrong, and considering we are living in Democratic countries last time I checked
That's a dangerous statement. Tyranny of the masses and all that. I'm sure Bill Gates house is nicer than yours, but you can't just move into it for the fun of it. You might actually be able to make a copy though, because the act of making the copy is the primary value of the house.
The value of the production of knowledge is what keeps the entertainment industry going, and basically all of academia. But they have completely different business models. In academia the government pays for information to be mostly free and mostly public (or thereabouts), and it gets the money for this by taxing people like you, to pay people like me. In the entertainment business they try and find some way to sell you an experience (live performance, theatre, the content itself on a disk or on paper), and that justifies the creation of new content. Without some financial incentive to create content no one can do so. The pirate argument with music is that the radio etc. are actually just ads for live performances, ok fair enough, I'm not sure it's true, but that's a valid business model. There isn't any obvious business model for Books or TV/Movies or Video games other than ads, and those create their own slew of problems. Your mileage may vary, but I'd rather the business model involve paying for content and not have to have it filled with ads than the reverse (and I will point out that in the reverse scenario rather than trying to find ways to du
Slashdot Mirror
MS is full of talented engineers, surrounded by business plans that don't always make technical sense necessarily, and a huge big organization that suffers from all the same problems as every other huge big organization. Just because you're competent, and all of the other people in your group are competent doesn't mean you make a good team, and doesn't mean you did something that will actually make money, nor does it mean anyone responsible for the strategic direction of your company will want to listen to you if it will.
His first sentence plays to the crowd well. Before he goes off the deep end completely.
These are also the guys who were doing daily downloads of something like 50 mb of data (redownloading all of your e-mails) on their first iteration of the windows phone app. So it's entirely possible whatever the problem is, is actually a yahoo problem and not particularly an android problem.
Which I will point out, they have a strategy for. Did you see smartglass or whatever the hell they called in at E3?
Ya, thats what I get for using a european spell check I suppose.
Way wrong
proving something exists is the problem at hand. Proving someone posted under the name Tough Love posted on slashdot in english is a different problem than trying to determine age, gender, location etc.
I'm in no way suggesting they know everything there is to know about this particle yet (although the LHC data will provide most of that in the same way it does for other particles so that's not a huge stretch), but at this point it's pretty settled that it exists consistent with predictions.
I was envisioning more of a scenario where the PC market itself disappears into cloud services and tablets sort of thing, where the platform you're running on the device is secondary to the web standards and big kid server stuff on the backend. In that case I suppose I was sloppy in my use of language, it's not so much MS giving up the desktop business as the desktop business bypassing windows entirely, and MS being forced into some other kind of company.
Not as far as I know. I believe they're net positive by over a billion dollars now. Which is, on the microsoft scale of things virtually nothing.
You also have to figure the size of the ecosystem you create. If you lose a billion dollars this year on 10 billion in revenue. And next year lose another billion on 100 billion in revenue your company is worth a crap load more. (Illustrative example not actual numbers). Microsoft is for whatever reason pouring money into their home entertainment products, probably thinking that they will own the living room, but who knows. Again, not sure that's a winner for them, but if it turns out to be a winner they're well positioned to capitalize on it.
Right, but a lot of that android market is competing in a low value market that they don't care about. Microsoft was never bothered by sybian selling 10's of millions of phones even though it could do various office and web browsing task.
The chart I linked is illustrative. Just because people have android phones doesn't mean that's translating into usage share. If people who have linux phones still do 80% of their computing on Windows it's not really going to hurt microsoft any, in the same way that microsoft doesn't care what brand of refrigerator you own, virtually everyone with a computer also has a refrigerator, but they are not overlapping markets. Now, I grant you, I would have expected mobiles to be a much more overlapping market with PC's, but thus far that doesn't seem to be the case.
Also, your opening line
Actually for every 2 new windows 7 machines there is 3 new machines running Linux. Or about 600 thousand windows and 900 thousand Linux (a large part of that is android) every day.
Fails basic maths. There are 900k android activations a day, which is just under 30 million a month. So about the same as windows. Who are up in the 30-35 million a month range. So it's closer to 1:1. But a lot of those droid devices are cheap phones with a browser (not that there's anything wrong with that particularly, but there's nothing there really competing with windows market share).
because people won't just build another LHC.
Well, CERN is broadly planning a Super Large Hadron Collider for 2019/2020 or thereabouts. he might have to wait until then.
Possibly the clock won't start until they formally publish. It doesn't start until the wider scientific community gets a good look at the data
uh...
Not sure where to start with this. Other than the fact that we had presentation here, where I am (and I'm a computer scientist in canada) with raw data from the LHC back in January. Anyone who wants the data can get it if you are part of a collaborating institution. Which at this point is basically all the institutions that have high energy particle physicists.
There literally is no wider scientific community at this point except maybe china (and frankly, enough of their scientists are in US and European institutions it would be unrealistic to think they don't has the same information as anyone else). I don't know what 'broader scientific community' you think exists, but between Fermi Lab and the CERN you have basically all of the high energy particle physics researchers in the world. I used to be an optics guy, that's a much bigger field with a lot more people in the private sector, but there's no secret high energy particle accelerator in Japan that they'll just pull out of the air to verify this experiment. Fermi Lab and CERN are it, and they're in agreement with a reproduced result. that's why this is all over the news.
Right, but not even 20 years ago they were a bit player in the office products business, and not a player at all in the game console business.
Times change, companies evolve. Microsoft has the cash to turn itself into a car company if it wants to (I'm not sure why it would want to, but it can do pretty much whatever it wants). Whether or not they will latch on to a successful strategy in the future remains to be seen. Right now they're riding their giant piles of free money from Windows and Office to experiment with other areas (gaming, mobiles, various corporate computing tools etc.), if one of those strategies pans out they may jump headlong into that rather than PC's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems gives a good breakdown. (note that the chart there samples from different places at different points so it can't be used as a value over time measure, but Windows is still somewhere in the 70-85% use range as of april/may of this year). Which is not far off from where it was for the last 10 years with Mac and linux picking up ~10% of the market.
I know it's hard to fathom, but windows is HUGE. The iphone sold about 35 million units each quarter this year. Microsoft moves 35 million units of windows on new PC's in a month. And most of those iphone users have windows.
The other question is whether or not microsoft ever really needs to abandon the PC market. It probably does, but that's not universally true. GM has been making cars for 100 years, and even though there are other car makers and so on they've never really needed to branch out into unrelated businesses, probably they could have had some presence in the aircraft business if they were so inclined (the way GE and rolls royce and SAAB etc. did). It's possible, however unlikey, that the world will keep selling 450 or so million computers a year, and MS will own most of that market indefinitely and everything else will orbit around windows rather than ever meaningfully compete to replace it.
MS came very late to the game to game consoles, and it took them a while to find their footing, but they've managed to move a lot of 360's and make a lot of money. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage something similar with mobile and tablets. Windows 8 might bomb due to the amount of change. But windows 9... that I wouldn't bet against yet.
Granted Ballmer could go crazy, fling a chair at someone important, land himself in jail and then the place suffers a massive leadership crisis and goes out of business. Stranger things have happened.
Forgive me thinking it's premature to jump to conclusions until the information has been vetted by a larger group of scientists
how much larger a group are you looking for beyond all of the high energy particle physicists in the EU and the US?
You mean like how they waited 6 months since http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1334.short? (title First Solid Signs of the Higgs Boson Could Be Announced Next Week).
They've been looking for stuff at the LHC since dec of 2009, and the whole point of the damn thing was to find the higgs boson. And they have been *very* tentative with every piece of data they've talked about since then.
We'll save the "bittersweet" nonsense until it's confirmed.
As others have pointed out, they have this very accurately as what was predicted. There's not a whole lot more to do to prove it is what they think it is, shy of building another giant supercolider looking for something else, and having it give the same result.
This is significantly different from the 'neutrinos are faster than light' problem, where neutrino's being faster than light didn't fit with any existing theory, and it didn't really seem to make sense as a physical result and was far more likely something else (which is also in many ways the reason they published a paper saying 'anyone have ideas cause something seems seriously wrong here'). In this case they have a particle predicted by theory, that, within the bounds of how good any physical experiment ever can be*, seems like they've found where they expected.
*physics theory is usually very much a single effect sort of thing. They predict a single particle with a particular speed/mass etc. Unfortunately physical experiment is never that good. There's always some inherent detector error, certain inherent randomness in systems, some other very minor effects that normally can be discounted but still do something to your results. The unfortunate part here is that the theory seems to so accurately predict the result that we don't have any clues to anything else that might be going on to chase after. If the result had been close, but not quite what was predicted that would have led the way to even more interesting science. As it is physicists now have to start poking at the problem to figure out if there's anywhere the theory does fall apart.
Second, yes, we can fully expect books to be written by people who have some other job that pays the bills.
And that's a sustainable model how? How about software? That doesn't even make sense for books. Professors write books in their capacity as professors, but most other authors actually need to make money from writing
Copyright actually started much earlier than 1710, it just started in 1710 in the UK using english words.
People make their entire living writing copywritten works, (musicians, authors, journalists, software developers) all of those things are protected by copyright and all of those things came into full force with both the creation of copyright and the proliferation of education so people could you know, read.
Everyone has an inherent right of free speech
Rights are artificial constructs as much as anything else in the legal system.
Copyright was never intended to benefit authors.... copyright is intended to benefit society as a whole
Sure. You're trying to balance the incentive to create work by guaranteeing ownership of the work for an author to create more work with making sure that work can still be spread around. If you don't benefit the content creators you don't benefit society.
For example, I bet you wrote your post here on Slashdot without any concern for whether you would get copyright-related payments from it. Your incentive was that you had something you wanted to say to the world. Thus, you ought not to be granted a copyright on it, since you would've written it anyway.
Interesting, but flawed assertion. The work involved was trivial, but spending any time on it doing so incurred a cost in lost production elsewhere. But the broader benefit of public education in ensuring copyright benefits me, and I'm an paid as an academic partially, so it's my responsibility to discuss these issues in a public context as part of being an academic. If I wasn't an academic - which is explicitly a business model where you are being taxed to pay me to have this discussion I wouldn't be having it. I'd be producing knowledge for someone specifically, as it is I'm supposed to be publishing papers, but this is also part of my academic work in figuring out just what sorts of alternate histories and delusions people have about copyright (and you've brought up at least one I hadn't thought of before).
Books predate copyright by thousands of years. There is clearly some sort of viable incentive there
I specifically addressed books in the 'pre printing press' and 'post printing press' scenario. In the the era of scribes you could sell 1000 copies of a book at 1000 dollars each and take 100 off the top of each one for the author, while 900 went into transcription services. Now you sell 100 000 copies of the book for 2 dollars each with the author getting 1 dollar and the duplication costs being 1 dollar (obviously those figures are made up, but they illustrate the point). In both scenarios the author is skimming something off of the production costs, but in the case of very high duplication costs (e.g. reiterating my house example) the percent they get can be much less, because their contribution to the work is much less man power intensively valuable, and they can physically own the production for some time, where sure, someone else can duplicate a copy of their book but because duplication is expensive you can easily still remunerate yourself.
but begging for donations isn't a viable business model
It is actually; it's called a subscription
No, literally, I meant begging for donations. Not a subscription. Begging for donations. Subscription is paying for small pieces at a time in a defined way. Begging for donations is putting a paypal donate button and hoping people click it.
Nowadays we appear to call it Kickstar
right, the challenge here is sort of the novelty factor and free press of kickstarter type things.
With books you also have to figure there is actually some value in a paper copy, so the question becomes how much value does a physical copy of a thing add? Printing off your own copy of the book at home is still prohibitively expensive.
The problem for MS is that windows is actually a very bad platform for gaming. It's far too big and bloated, with too much stuff running in the background (usually including necessary third party stuff like av and update services etc)... Not to mention hassle with driver conflicts, drm conflicts, incompatible third party software and the gradual slowdown that windows systems suffer from over time.
Uh... not intended to be factual statements?
I make windows games for half of my living. And nothing you said there is true. If you buy a shitty computer, or know nothing about software then yes, your computer will end up being a wreck. But windows is relatively elegant to develop for (given than it supports any arbitrarily crazy set of hardware), it's not particularly 'bloated' and there's nothing secretly sucking up any great amount of processing power. If you let people run media player and wow at the same time well what do you think is going to happen? That's not a problem with windows, that's a problem with how people use windows. Driver problems aren't unique to windows, DRM woudl be the same thing if anyone made non windows games in quantity (think Warden for Blizzard games banning people using linux/WINE), and windows systems if they're competently maintained haven't suffered some sort of gradual slow down over time since windows XP came out.
What decade are you living in?
The difference with writing console games, and I while I'm not working on any console projects at the moment I have recently, is that you know *exactly* how much memory you have, and can specifically address that memory. Windows is a general purpose computer, so your game can't necessarily take the first 500 mb of ram, in order, it has to take whichever 500 it gets allocated, and the GPU-RAM interconnects are different on consoles, (and you have much more power to manage video memory the way you want on a console). With a PS3 or an Xbox or the like you never have any question as to what memory addresses you have or what capabilities each CPU has. You can get much closer to the metal as a programmer and that means you can make a much better experience overall (because you know at every step of the player interaction where and how everything behaves). It's not that windows is somehow worse on the xbox than on the PC, they do both run windows variants after all.
Windows itself doesn't really have overhead. It has services it provides if a user wants them. By default it turns on more services than an Xbox because it's not a game console, it's windows. But as time goes on the game consoles are adding more and more services as there is more and more memory available (wasn't that the point of putting more memory in?). All those stupid avatars on your Xbox profile? Those waste memory. Not necessarily a lot of it, but they waste memory. Like that printer software you have on windows, if you wanted a printer to do anything useful on an Xbox you'd have to waste a chunk of memory for printer management and so on.
If, as a windows developer I could know *exactly* how much memory where it would be managed, what GPU I'd have etc. etc. etc. I could actually do a lot more on windows. But I don't, because there are literally hundreds of different GPU's on the market, dozens of CPU's etc. And trying to deal with all of those is hard.
And again, windows provides you services, it by default provides more services than most people need because it doesn't know what you'll need. An Xbox (or a more tightly managed windows home) could provide a lot less services, or a least a more tightly managed set of services. But the moment you start running google desktop, a calendar app, paint.net, office of some sort, a web browser with 10 tabs open etc. all on the same machine you're trying to game on, you're going to get a different experience than on an xbox where you can't do that.
You seriously believe this
No, I believe that the MPAA and RIAA are pulling numbers out of their ass to try and persuade governments to do something about it. But that doesn't mean there isn't a kernel of truth to what they're saying. Anyone suggesting there are *no* losses due to piracy would be equally dishonest.
I'm all for remuneration of musicians, but the music industry is not doing it. It never really has, to be honest.
I specifically split apart a number of types of industries including music. Since musicians give their music away for free on the radio already why do they get to charge for it somewhere else? They're using a recording of their song as an ad for their concerts. At least that's one argument. I don't really think it's true, but it's certainly a business model - give something away for free and have a value added service (the concert experience) that would be something else.
Books, TV and Software are different though. Unless we want to go back to arcades. Not all TV channels can be (nor should be) the BBC. If they need to be independently sustaining, and that applies ultimately to any business you need a revenue model, which will be propped up, and restricted by laws. No subliminal advertising, apparently an application of first sale doctrine in the EU etc. An author could use a book as a method to try and collect speaking fees, but if they're speaking they aren't writing books. Software and TV and Movies can't even do that, there's no 'live performance' equivalent, and there's hundreds of people who work on these things they can't all make a living on speaking fees, because frankly, you don't want to hear from the guys who spent 3 years painting all of the rocks in skyrim enough for them to have a decent lifestyle.
I don't know the music business, I know the games business, and I have a fairly good estimate of how much piracy has cost different titles from studios I've worked with, but it's not perfect data. You know past title sales, you know current title sales, and you probably know piracy numbers, but you don't really know why people did or didn't buy your game or why they pirated it. As I say, if your game can't be sold in china and some dude there pirates it well... so what. But when it's someone in the same city as you, well what's their excuse? If you sales from previous titles drop 25 or 30% and piracy doubles it's a good bet a lot of your former customers are now pirates. But there just isn't some magical button you can push to know exactly how many of them would have bought your game if they couldn't. (and at least with one company, they try and track unique IP addresses to give themselves a rough estimate of where people are and so on, and the number of people who go from a pirated copy to a hacked one is well..0. But small data sets, with a less than perfect tracking scheme, when you're talking 40-50k copies being pirated).
Tyranny of the masses is a term I used specifically (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority) - the idea that a majority of people can oppress the minority in a democracy. In the context I used it I mean specifically that the majority of the population could demand free stuff from the existing content creators without paying for it. It can be done, and it's probably legal, parliament is supreme after all, but it's not a way to foster business.
And yes, MPAA, RIAA etc. 'lost sales' figures are wildly misleading estimates. They're trying to write entertaining headlines and they don't really understand. But that doesn't mean it isn't costing them sales, it's a matter of 'not nearly as many as they claim'. Which is exactly my point on saying that if you want perfect data, you're never going to get it, and using that as an excuse to keep pirating is intellectually dishonest. That doesn't make the MPAA and RIAA fabricating numbers any more honest, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that piracy is costing them something, because the whole fucking point of piracy is to not have to pay for things you would otherwise have to have paid for.
Copyright didn't exist for the most part of human history, and a lot of the best artistic production of our species happened in its absence.
Um... wow... how to even start with this one. So first of all, depending on some rich guy for patronage of your business isn't a good business model. It works for a small number of people, with makes extremely rare talent valuable. But it's not an industry.
Copyright has actually been around since the 15th century, and in the english world a bit later than that. The idea of *international* copyright is relatively new, to account for a more interconnected world (and the fact that we all pretend to like each other more). But that time period is when much of the creative artistic work you're thinking of came into being, copyright exist. Copyright as we think of it was a direct result of the printing press. To reiterate my house example. When the primary cost of producing something is in building the first one, and replication is cheap you need one set of rules. Prior to the printing press duplicating a book was enormously expensive, so the whole notion of 'copyright' is very different. You can absorb the cost of 'development' of the book in the cost of paying dozens of people to transcribe copies of it and taking a little off the top for each copy.
And look at the war on drugs to see how effective is to try to force people to do what they strongly don't want to do. Nothing will work on piracy for the exact same motive, but be my guest to think otherwise. If anything piracy has been steadily increasing despite any effort against it and I dare to bet it will continue like so indefinitely until copyright is a long dead concept
I used electrical power as an example for a reason. Failed strategies fail, the drug war and the current approach to piracy have both failed. And yet smoking (regular cigarettes) is way down where I am, because the government has managed to take steps against it. Repeating the same failed strategy over and over is a sign you should be in politics or a mental institution, and that's been the history of the drug war and the much shorter history of piracy. Governments are slowly coming around to realizing that piracy poses a fundamental threat to business models, and will have to do something about it. Since the industry itself hasn't emerged with any solutions they are going to start stepping in (by, for example, trying and failing to block the pirate bay). With the drug war they've never made progress because they keep doing the same thing over and over, and it's not going to work. That doesn't mean an alternate strategy wouldn't work, they just haven't tried.
True Valve is an American corporation and doesn't have to follow EU legislation... unless they want to do business within the EU and well there certainly is a non-trivial number of Valve users within EU.
not true. They can simply do all sales in US dollars. If you're importing it that's your problem.
The problem from Valve's point of view is is that this not a new law but a precedent on an old law and as such all EU citizens have the right to sell games bought since the creation of said law, should Valve refuse them that right they will probably have to refund that game unless they want to get in legal trouble and since they do accept payment in Euro and from EU citizens they are obviously doing business in EU and as such are required to follow EU legislation.
or the EU will do what? They aren't in the EU. They may have servers in the EU, but those can be moved (or turned off). Gamersgate on the other hand....
Valve doesn't need to have a physical presence in the EU. Shy of the EU blocking access to steam (and that's problematic because they also offer a free services) there's really nothing the EU can do. Right now valves EU operations are handled through the UK, so they have to pay VAT, but ask them to change their business model and expect the UK branch to disappear.
Valve is doing a dance of 'operating in europe' etc right now because it's convenient. But they don't have to.
Actually it was more of a rhetorical 'what do you think a steam subscriber is?'. There's no actual term, and I asked precisely because it's important to know what the person who used the phrase thinks it means.
What you said is how I figured they were using the term, but I clarified what the steam service actually is, and how it works from a user perspective to be clear that steam isn't like a magazine subscription.
Yes, but that's why the next gen consoles probably won't play used games, and why most PC developers no longer deal with gamestop. Their time is rapidly coming to an end.
So I want to make it clear here. There are two parties who are interested in consumption data. You have providers and you have consumers. Providers don't care about your consumption habits individually; rather they care about your consumption habits in the context of their peak demand and as a function of trying to stabilize power output while minimizing waste, for outage management, and demand response. These things done at a fine-level by intelligent software powered by smart meters can save ENORMOUS amounts of money and make our grids much more efficient (in terms of less waste and fewer outages caused by a lack of sufficient power). This is what a provider cares about.
Sure, as I said there's a legitimate value to the data. Privacy invasion is more of a misuse of data. Whether or not a regulatory framework would ever exist that could allow such a misuse is important, but only in the narrow case of allowing invasive uses of that data.
They don't care about your usage
They do if they can monetize it. Seriously. That's facebooks entire business model. I specifically references the phone companies because they could do something equally if not more sinister than power companies. But they aren't allowed to do it. There are reasonable privacy protections in place, because god knows, if one of them could have sold your calling habits to someone they would have. And there is a legitimate (and legal) privacy invasion exclusion explicitly for the benefit of law enforcement in the form of wiretapping.
The police already look at power consumption data to find marijuana grow ops around here. That's probably a legitimate exercise in public safety, but the issue at hand isn't whether any particular allowed use is reasonable, it's whether or not the data itself could be used in unreasonable ways. Smart power meters probably could be misused, but I would think most lawmakers will recognize those problems eventually. In the simplest case, could a power company employee check any persons power consumption to see if they are home, or should they need a specific reason? Are they trying to find out if a cheating spouse is at home, or if someone is not home so they can go rob the place etc.? It's not like these aren't solvable and avoidable problems.
didn't have what it took to succeed
FTFY
When you're 20 years old and have a business idea that isn't going to pan out does not mean you should keep hammering away at that idea. That's the sort of stupidity I'd expect from an MBA.
When I was 20 I made web pages (and this is when finding anyone who could write anything in HTML was a small miracle) and tried to sell computers with colourful cases. I also realized that I didn't have the CS background to write code properly, and wasn't about to hire someone to do it for me when that was the only thing that business did.
The colourful cases thing was a disaster. Not a particularly serious financial disaster, but when Dell started to kick into serious gear they undercut the entire low end of the business, and I could never source the high end parts for serious gaming PC's. So my market dried up. Your wife might want a computer that matches the drapes, but for 200 or 300 bucks she'll let you buy the cheaper one. If you want a high end PC that looks awesome you need to be able to source parts. Which is not something any bank will lend money to a 20 year old kid for (nor by the way would that have been a good idea).
Better to cut my losses there and so something else than keep wasting time on business ventures going no where. With a degree in CS I can actually make significantly better webpages, but that's not nearly as lucrative as other things I can do, and today I wouldn't go near the hardware business without a couple of hundred million dollars and supply contracts in China. I *consult* on hardware people should buy, and my past failed adventure taught me a lot about trying to get people to be honest about their requirements, and how to properly assess business value in various hardware/software(which depends a lot on what the business does). But trying to sell shitty computers in colourful cases as really their only selling point was not going to make me rich.
As long as you learn when you fail there's nothing wrong with some level of failure. But it's also important to realize when the market has changed and it's time to move on. A degree doesn't necessarily get you much, but it can give you credibility with a bank when you need a business loan, or it can get you into a job where you work 9-5 and don't have to worry about a business if you have other shit you want to do with your life.
Remember that quitting a degree makes you look like you can't stick to a plan for 4 years, and, unless you're dropping out of harvard, it looks like you can't even get a degree.
certainly not enough to justify the witch hunting US and its aligned countries have been practicing against end users.
So there are a couple of problems with what you said. First, there's no data to perfectly prove a relationship between downloads and selling losses because we can't test this in a vacuum, with two perfectly equally desirably products where one can be pirated and the other can't. So you're always basing stuff on estimates, which means any argument will eventually boil down to you saying "you can't prove that was a lost sale" and the other guy saying "the effect is statistically significant, we're just sure exactly how much, but that makes a bad sound bite so I simplified it", Secondly of course is that there's a lot of piracy from places you can't sell to, or don't try and sell in (think china). I was working with an indie game dev and they figured half of their piracy was from china etc. type places where they can't sell the game anyway, so that's clearly not a loss.
Where you run into problem is that you're assuming that the 'witch hunting' isn't in the end a necessary evil. All laws ultimately limit freedoms and privacy to try and investigate crime, and all laws can, indirectly, destroy someones life even when it's not dangerously criminal (think doping in sports, or sports gambling by athletes). Software piracy undermines the industry of people creating software to try and sell. Making a copy of a book costs next to nothing compared to the cost of writing the first copy, but we still want there to be authors, and you can't expect book to be published solely by people who have some other job that pays the bills. I think most reasonable people agree there should be laws to prevent theft for example, but of course 'piracy' isn't exactly theft, and nor is counter fitting, so then we're trying to find the sweet spot between letting people own the work they did long enough to get paid enough to justify the time they spent making it versus letting everyone benefit from knowledge and hoping that some socialist utopia will come along that will pay people for whatever they do somehow. In the digital era when a 'counter fit' copy can be a perfect copy of the original you run headlong into an extreme example of a problem we've had for as long as we've been making things, who gets credit for making the first pointy stick so to speak?
All in all apparently the great majority of people do not think piracy is wrong, and considering we are living in Democratic countries last time I checked
That's a dangerous statement. Tyranny of the masses and all that. I'm sure Bill Gates house is nicer than yours, but you can't just move into it for the fun of it. You might actually be able to make a copy though, because the act of making the copy is the primary value of the house.
The value of the production of knowledge is what keeps the entertainment industry going, and basically all of academia. But they have completely different business models. In academia the government pays for information to be mostly free and mostly public (or thereabouts), and it gets the money for this by taxing people like you, to pay people like me. In the entertainment business they try and find some way to sell you an experience (live performance, theatre, the content itself on a disk or on paper), and that justifies the creation of new content. Without some financial incentive to create content no one can do so. The pirate argument with music is that the radio etc. are actually just ads for live performances, ok fair enough, I'm not sure it's true, but that's a valid business model. There isn't any obvious business model for Books or TV/Movies or Video games other than ads, and those create their own slew of problems. Your mileage may vary, but I'd rather the business model involve paying for content and not have to have it filled with ads than the reverse (and I will point out that in the reverse scenario rather than trying to find ways to du