There's actually a clever way to try to account for this kind of thing - you ask them something like "Do you file-share, or is your birthday in January" (or perhaps something even more obscure that the questioner/Government wouldn't know). The point is that people are more willing to admit to it, because people can't know for sure if they really do file-share, or if they answered yes because of the second question.
But when it comes to the population as a whole, because you can estimate the proportion who fall into the second category, you can factor that out, and work out the true value.
But it doesn't look like they did anything like that here.
Indeed, let's look at the maths - supposing each person only shares 24 mp3s. By US standards at least, that's a cost of $1.92 million. So with 7 million file sharers, that's $13.44 trillion.
Usually pro-filesharers try to make it sound like filesharing is usual activity and try go for most or 70-90% user share
Indeed - but equally the Government has also been trying to over-inflate the extent, from an window-breaking-fallacy angle "It's costing the economy billions of pounds!"
So could someone please explain *why* is it a questionable research.
Because of the way that 11.6% was replaced with 16.3%, and an incorrect value of the number of Internet users was used, as clearly stated in TFS. If you RTFA:
"If the BPI-commissioned Jupiter research had used the Government's online population figures, the total number of file sharers would be 5.6m. If the researchers hadn't adjusted their figures upwards, the total number of file sharers would be only 3.9m - or just over half the figure being bandied about by the Government."
Yes, you are right that saying "only 136" is silly, as 1,176 is more than enough for a valid sample as long as it is random, but there are other concerns that are clearly spelled out in TFA and TFA.
With karaoke, you can just sing "la" and, while you would likely annoy those around you, all is well. In Rock Band, if you just sing "la" then you will fail unless you enable the No Fail cheat.
But the issue wasn't about pass or failing (obviously - there is no pass or fail in Karaoke), the issue was what people thought about you. If someone just sung "la" at it, they'd think that person was crap anyway, and yes, they would say that that person needed lessons. The point is that a person who sings (not "la") at Karaoke can sing. But a person who plays Guitar Hero isn't playing guitar, no matter how well they play it.
Note, I have nothing against Guitar Hero - I'm merely pointing out that the OP's analogy to Karaoke was flawed.
And I'm also talking specifically about Guitar Hero - if people can sing in Rock Band, then yes, that would be comparable to Karaoke, and they would actually be singing. My post wasn't about that.
As for your question regarding how close playing Guitar Hero is to real guitar, not very. For the most part, playing a real guitar is much harder.
Exactly. Now ask how much is singing on a Karaoke different to singing? (And note, I say singing, not la-ing - yes you could la in Karaoke, but by that reasoning, you can la when you're supposed to be singing anytime.)
Thanks - so that's another case where someone is receiving large regular doses of mod points, compared to others who never receive them. When I did get them, it was only very occasionally. I don't know why they decided to make it so unbalanced all of a sudden, I think it's a far worse system (and not just because I don't get them:) I do believe it's more tempting to use negative mods for disagreement when you have no end of mod points - it's one of the reasons why I think Digg moderation isn't as good. I note that many comment sites with user moderation disallow negative mods altogether, for this reason).
And my favourite computer game is Civilization - I guess I should just become a god and control an entire civilization for 6,000 years, rather than just playing around for pretend.
Learning to play a guitar = Writing and designing a game.
Which has given me a brilliant idea for a new game: Programmer Hero.
You play a geek programming a computer. Using a specially designed custom "keyboard" that plugs into the console, you have to press differently coloured buttons in sequence at the correct moment, in order for the computer computer programmer to complete the game he is writing.
Choose from endless classic games just waiting to be programmed by you: Quake, Doom, Halo.
Everyone wants to play a computer games programmer, don't they?
I take your point, but with karaoke, you actually are singing - if you're good at that, you ought to be good at a non-karaoke performance too (the only difference is that usually you don't have an autocue). There's no need to get "REAL" singing lessons, because there is no distinction.
How close is playing GH to playing an actual guitar? Okay, there are similar skills such as rhythm and dexterity, but there's an awfully big difference too. In order to play an actual guitar, you'd still need to specifically learn that.
Imagine if instead of karaoke, you just had to sing an out of tune "la" into a computer at timed moments, in order for the computer to then play samples of someone else singing. Would people still view it in the same way as karaoke? Or would they point out how playing this game is not about learning to sing properly?
Yeah, I see the same thing with any criticism of Apple.
How are mod points distributed these days, I wonder? I used to get them occasionally, but now I haven't had any in years. Meanwhile another poster commented to me that he continually received large numbers of mod points, more than he knew what to do with.
If points really are distributed in such an uneven fashion, it would explain why the moderation has gone downhill lately, with all the "troll" abuse and so on. (If you have lots of mod points, you're more likely to abuse them for simply people you disagree with rather than reserving them for genuinely good or bad posts; and if only some people are allowed to mod, whilst others never do, you introduce bias into the system.)
Indeed, that would be a great idea (or perhaps an equivalent of open source, for patents?) And the fact that they haven't done that is even more evidence against the argument that they'll play nice.
Thank you, we know what a design patent is. How does that make it different such that the objections people have put forward here are not valid?
E.g., does that mean other people are free to design a similar interface? Of course not. In which case, they share the same property of other kinds of patents that people disagree with.
Put it another way - why does putting the word "design" in front make it okay? ("Don't bother, hamburger lady sees the 'd' word, and flips out, there's obviously no valid argument here." - see how invalid that argument is?)
And they are not "non-functional", rather, they cover non-functional designs. The patent itself certainly functions.
I know what a design patent is. How does that change what I said - why do we need patents to protect "decorative, non-functional elements of a design"?
How is it intuitive - and in a way that is highly non-obvious such that experts in the field would not develop the same idea?
Text fields with buttons beneath surely has prior art anyway - why does doing it for a search engine make it any more novel? Also, surely it should be the creators of the first web browser or creators of the HTML Form code that get the patent? I mean, people have brought up Apple as an example, but at least they were the ones who wrote the code for the UI. In this case, Google did not. It would be like a Mac application developer trying to patent part of Apple's UI toolkit!
Google were the first ones to design a decent search engine. That's got nothing to do with the interface - and the only thing notable about the interface is that it was less cluttered (thus loaded faster) than other search engines of the time. (And I do hope you're not suggesting that should be patented - there's plenty of prior art for that, anyway.)
What about chilling effects? You're telling me that you're happily invest your life savings into a business venture that includes something covered by a patent, merely on the hope that they won't care?
And what about when you're trying to find an investor or a loan, and the person points out the patent problem - are you going to be arguing "Oh that doesn't matter, Google are really really nice, they'd never do anything like taking someone to court. Oh go on, lend me the money, please?"
And besides... what if some malevolent entity decided to patent this before Google did?
Then there'd be obvious prior art such that the patent wouldn't be valid. Plus I can play that game too - "What if some nicer-than-Google entity wanted to patent it?"
Believe it or not, bad patents should not be dished out because we think a company has been "nice".
But that's the point - the singularity (which TFA was trying to claim was rubbish) *is* primarily about information technology (and in particular, AI). Coming up with examples about how travel and exploration hasn't improved since the 60s is not a counter argument to it.
No one is claiming there will be a "travel" singularity - that we'll hit a point where we rapidly go from having landed on the moon, to having explored the entire universe. That would clearly be ludicrous.
Furthermore, I'd argue that the problem with space travel is economic and political - so even if we are talking about technology in general, it's not that our technology has gone backwards, it's just that no one wants to use it to go to the moon. The economic and political lack of will for space travel doesn't seem to apply to technology in general, so again it's not a valid counter example.
(And I am not sure I would describe Apollo as "routine".)
Now sure, every other contract phone on the market will give you a phone for free. But I didn't think that breaking the contract meant you get a free phone out of the bargain?
And given we can make a clear distinction between the two kinds of patents, what justification is there for design patents at all? The fact that a company like Apple have loads is hardly a ringing endorsement - next you'll be telling me it's okay, because MS have them too.
If they're worried about distinctive look and feel, that's the domain of trademark law. If an interface might be a creative work, that's a copyright issue.
Why on earth should it be considered an invention? Next you'll have people winding us up by saying if I create a search page with two buttons below it, it should be a criminal offence.
Anyhow, I hereby declare a patent for a search box with three buttons below it. See how innovative I am?
And how many decades did it take for cars, planes, phones or TV to change things?
E.g., the TV was invented in the 30s. In the 50s, many homes still didn't have a TV, and it was still a primitive device.
(And why do you qualify "mass-produced cars"? See, this is the problem. There was a gap between the car being invented, and mass production, so you add "mass-produced" to specify a difference. Yet one someone points out the vast changes caused by the Internet, people plead that it's only an "incremental" change of something that existed since the 60s...)
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I would hope it's no.
There's actually a clever way to try to account for this kind of thing - you ask them something like "Do you file-share, or is your birthday in January" (or perhaps something even more obscure that the questioner/Government wouldn't know). The point is that people are more willing to admit to it, because people can't know for sure if they really do file-share, or if they answered yes because of the second question.
But when it comes to the population as a whole, because you can estimate the proportion who fall into the second category, you can factor that out, and work out the true value.
But it doesn't look like they did anything like that here.
Indeed, let's look at the maths - supposing each person only shares 24 mp3s. By US standards at least, that's a cost of $1.92 million. So with 7 million file sharers, that's $13.44 trillion.
Now let's check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) - wow, these 7 million people are causing damage to the UK economy equal to almost 5 times the entire GDP of the UK...
Usually pro-filesharers try to make it sound like filesharing is usual activity and try go for most or 70-90% user share
Indeed - but equally the Government has also been trying to over-inflate the extent, from an window-breaking-fallacy angle "It's costing the economy billions of pounds!"
So could someone please explain *why* is it a questionable research.
Because of the way that 11.6% was replaced with 16.3%, and an incorrect value of the number of Internet users was used, as clearly stated in TFS. If you RTFA:
"If the BPI-commissioned Jupiter research had used the Government's online population figures, the total number of file sharers would be 5.6m. If the researchers hadn't adjusted their figures upwards, the total number of file sharers would be only 3.9m - or just over half the figure being bandied about by the Government."
Yes, you are right that saying "only 136" is silly, as 1,176 is more than enough for a valid sample as long as it is random, but there are other concerns that are clearly spelled out in TFA and TFA.
Theres some error margin, but its close enough.
Is an error of 79% "close enough" for you?
With karaoke, you can just sing "la" and, while you would likely annoy those around you, all is well. In Rock Band, if you just sing "la" then you will fail unless you enable the No Fail cheat.
But the issue wasn't about pass or failing (obviously - there is no pass or fail in Karaoke), the issue was what people thought about you. If someone just sung "la" at it, they'd think that person was crap anyway, and yes, they would say that that person needed lessons. The point is that a person who sings (not "la") at Karaoke can sing. But a person who plays Guitar Hero isn't playing guitar, no matter how well they play it.
Note, I have nothing against Guitar Hero - I'm merely pointing out that the OP's analogy to Karaoke was flawed.
And I'm also talking specifically about Guitar Hero - if people can sing in Rock Band, then yes, that would be comparable to Karaoke, and they would actually be singing. My post wasn't about that.
As for your question regarding how close playing Guitar Hero is to real guitar, not very. For the most part, playing a real guitar is much harder.
Exactly. Now ask how much is singing on a Karaoke different to singing? (And note, I say singing, not la-ing - yes you could la in Karaoke, but by that reasoning, you can la when you're supposed to be singing anytime.)
Even better would be if you could play the programmers of Guitar Hero, then we could have Guitar Hero Programmer Hero :)
Thanks - so that's another case where someone is receiving large regular doses of mod points, compared to others who never receive them. When I did get them, it was only very occasionally. I don't know why they decided to make it so unbalanced all of a sudden, I think it's a far worse system (and not just because I don't get them :) I do believe it's more tempting to use negative mods for disagreement when you have no end of mod points - it's one of the reasons why I think Digg moderation isn't as good. I note that many comment sites with user moderation disallow negative mods altogether, for this reason).
Everyone knows it's better in a computer game than real life.
That's why, rather than be like all these fools who actually play World of Warcraft for real, I prefer to play World of World of Warcraft.
And my favourite computer game is Civilization - I guess I should just become a god and control an entire civilization for 6,000 years, rather than just playing around for pretend.
Learning to play a guitar = Writing and designing a game.
Which has given me a brilliant idea for a new game: Programmer Hero.
You play a geek programming a computer. Using a specially designed custom "keyboard" that plugs into the console, you have to press differently coloured buttons in sequence at the correct moment, in order for the computer computer programmer to complete the game he is writing.
Choose from endless classic games just waiting to be programmed by you: Quake, Doom, Halo.
Everyone wants to play a computer games programmer, don't they?
I take your point, but with karaoke, you actually are singing - if you're good at that, you ought to be good at a non-karaoke performance too (the only difference is that usually you don't have an autocue). There's no need to get "REAL" singing lessons, because there is no distinction.
How close is playing GH to playing an actual guitar? Okay, there are similar skills such as rhythm and dexterity, but there's an awfully big difference too. In order to play an actual guitar, you'd still need to specifically learn that.
Imagine if instead of karaoke, you just had to sing an out of tune "la" into a computer at timed moments, in order for the computer to then play samples of someone else singing. Would people still view it in the same way as karaoke? Or would they point out how playing this game is not about learning to sing properly?
And what does any of that have to do with TFA?
If you have evidence that these artists are lying or are being hypocritical, then please, let's hear it?
They'll just blame that on the downloading though :/
But how many copies does the latest incarnation of Madden sell every year?
I still don't think that "not selling as many copies as a very popular thing" counts as a "flop".
If everyone in the games industry could guarantee at least a million sales, even for a bad release, they'd be laughing!
Yeah, I see the same thing with any criticism of Apple.
How are mod points distributed these days, I wonder? I used to get them occasionally, but now I haven't had any in years. Meanwhile another poster commented to me that he continually received large numbers of mod points, more than he knew what to do with.
If points really are distributed in such an uneven fashion, it would explain why the moderation has gone downhill lately, with all the "troll" abuse and so on. (If you have lots of mod points, you're more likely to abuse them for simply people you disagree with rather than reserving them for genuinely good or bad posts; and if only some people are allowed to mod, whilst others never do, you introduce bias into the system.)
Indeed, that would be a great idea (or perhaps an equivalent of open source, for patents?) And the fact that they haven't done that is even more evidence against the argument that they'll play nice.
Thank you, we know what a design patent is. How does that make it different such that the objections people have put forward here are not valid?
E.g., does that mean other people are free to design a similar interface? Of course not. In which case, they share the same property of other kinds of patents that people disagree with.
Put it another way - why does putting the word "design" in front make it okay? ("Don't bother, hamburger lady sees the 'd' word, and flips out, there's obviously no valid argument here." - see how invalid that argument is?)
And they are not "non-functional", rather, they cover non-functional designs. The patent itself certainly functions.
I know what a design patent is. How does that change what I said - why do we need patents to protect "decorative, non-functional elements of a design"?
Please read up on trademarks.
How is it intuitive - and in a way that is highly non-obvious such that experts in the field would not develop the same idea?
Text fields with buttons beneath surely has prior art anyway - why does doing it for a search engine make it any more novel? Also, surely it should be the creators of the first web browser or creators of the HTML Form code that get the patent? I mean, people have brought up Apple as an example, but at least they were the ones who wrote the code for the UI. In this case, Google did not. It would be like a Mac application developer trying to patent part of Apple's UI toolkit!
Google were the first ones to design a decent search engine. That's got nothing to do with the interface - and the only thing notable about the interface is that it was less cluttered (thus loaded faster) than other search engines of the time. (And I do hope you're not suggesting that should be patented - there's plenty of prior art for that, anyway.)
I think that's a false dichotomy. What about viewpoints like:
"We're fucked unless we reduce emissions quicker than we are currently planning to"?
What about chilling effects? You're telling me that you're happily invest your life savings into a business venture that includes something covered by a patent, merely on the hope that they won't care?
And what about when you're trying to find an investor or a loan, and the person points out the patent problem - are you going to be arguing "Oh that doesn't matter, Google are really really nice, they'd never do anything like taking someone to court. Oh go on, lend me the money, please?"
And besides... what if some malevolent entity decided to patent this before Google did?
Then there'd be obvious prior art such that the patent wouldn't be valid. Plus I can play that game too - "What if some nicer-than-Google entity wanted to patent it?"
Believe it or not, bad patents should not be dished out because we think a company has been "nice".
But that's the point - the singularity (which TFA was trying to claim was rubbish) *is* primarily about information technology (and in particular, AI). Coming up with examples about how travel and exploration hasn't improved since the 60s is not a counter argument to it.
No one is claiming there will be a "travel" singularity - that we'll hit a point where we rapidly go from having landed on the moon, to having explored the entire universe. That would clearly be ludicrous.
Furthermore, I'd argue that the problem with space travel is economic and political - so even if we are talking about technology in general, it's not that our technology has gone backwards, it's just that no one wants to use it to go to the moon. The economic and political lack of will for space travel doesn't seem to apply to technology in general, so again it's not a valid counter example.
(And I am not sure I would describe Apollo as "routine".)
Thanks for giving me this lovely iPhone.
Giving you? How much did you pay for it, again?
Now sure, every other contract phone on the market will give you a phone for free. But I didn't think that breaking the contract meant you get a free phone out of the bargain?
And given we can make a clear distinction between the two kinds of patents, what justification is there for design patents at all? The fact that a company like Apple have loads is hardly a ringing endorsement - next you'll be telling me it's okay, because MS have them too.
If they're worried about distinctive look and feel, that's the domain of trademark law. If an interface might be a creative work, that's a copyright issue.
Why on earth should it be considered an invention? Next you'll have people winding us up by saying if I create a search page with two buttons below it, it should be a criminal offence.
Anyhow, I hereby declare a patent for a search box with three buttons below it. See how innovative I am?
Illegal immigrants have the vote? I don't think so.
And yes, they're obviously that well known demographic in favour in ID cards.
And how many decades did it take for cars, planes, phones or TV to change things?
E.g., the TV was invented in the 30s. In the 50s, many homes still didn't have a TV, and it was still a primitive device.
(And why do you qualify "mass-produced cars"? See, this is the problem. There was a gap between the car being invented, and mass production, so you add "mass-produced" to specify a difference. Yet one someone points out the vast changes caused by the Internet, people plead that it's only an "incremental" change of something that existed since the 60s...)