You're implying that they're only making a big deal out of this thing with China because it happens to be convenient to do so, and if they'd taken over the Chinese market they would be happily rolling over? Do you have any reason to think this?
This would have certainly not been allowed, but I would've liked it if Google had met China's demands by showing the user how many items are censored. The search result wouldn't provide any links, images, etc, just a box that says "censored". They could have expanded that functionality by providing such metrics along the top as: "Results 1 - 30 of about 122,000 for [search terms], (2415 items censored, ~2%)"
The Chinese people, being human, would eventually see that enough times and think...hmm, I wonder what those say. Why am I not allowed to see that? (Especially when censored links pop up on the first result page.) There'd undoubtedly be search games like: Find the search terms with the highest censorship rate! Fun for the whole subversive family!
I couldn't disagree more. China is allowed to operate the way it does specifically because of the silence.
If every time they pulled some sh!t like this it was in the news, people would begin to understand that their information online is not safe in a very real way. This goes without saying to the tinfoil hat crowd here on/., I would hope most people understand that when you put something on the web you should be comfortable with it being public unless: you ssh tunneled to the other endpoint, you trust the other endpoint, and your info is stored with military grade encryption. (I welcome the barrage of emails that will point out all the requirements I missed...they shall serve to make my point even stronger that we here on/. know what's up, and further highlight the difference between us and the rest of the world comprised of ignorant meat piles who think any site that verifies their login by emailing them the password they chose--cleartext--is good enough. Oh yea, we're arrogant here on/. too.:-) )
Seriously, if every company simultaneously stood up and started loudly shouting: WAIT WHAT'S THIS CHINESE GOVT? HOW COME YOU'RE POKING AROUND THERE, WHAT ARE YOU UP TO AHHHHHH!, the constant noise level would prompt a lot of serious conversation about their ongoing oppression of basic human rights.
Or we could continue to be cynical about any behavior that doesn't push that bottom line, move a few more dollars, and turn that marketplace screw a little tighter. That's definitely another way to go.
I think the user experience design meeting at MS must have gone something like this...
"Listen, we've developed this feature that lets users manage their systems very conveniently. Access to everything from one place."
"Wow, that does look good. All in favor of hiding it?" (all, in unison) "Aye!"
Why do we have to pick? We could just have a secure messaging system that encrypts and signs messages for intended recipients. If you can read it, congratulations, it's from who it says it's from (unless they hacked the endpoint, of course--but that's a good deal better than what we have now, innit?).
Ah, but if only we had such a system. ahemcoughcoughwavecoughcough
This is an interesting supposition, but there's no evidence that anything other than a quick revival would result in life being restored. We know that thermodynamically, the body is a veritable panic of high energy formations that are just dying to degrade (literally). We know that cryogenic freezing would suspend many of these processes...but all of the critical ones?
We've not yet begun to imagine what those processes even are, much less say with any certainty that cold temperature will suffice to prevent them over a sufficiently long period of time.
And then there's a whole segment of the population that will argue once the soul flies away, there's no getting it back.:-)
I don't see the big deal here. There's a much bigger photo stitch with interactive browser that makes this 26GP image look positively tiny. It's called "Google Street View".
Really? I always wonder about people who say this...you find ads annoying, and you don't actually engage them in the intended way (i.e., convert to an actual sale), but you feel some obligation to sit through a mini-pitch?
Have we forgotten that advertising is not an end unto itself? Advertisers are not trying to get appreciation for their beautiful work, and they don't really care about views that don't convert. So, if you're not interested in buying anything, don't beat yourself up.
I don't feel bad at all when I block ads. When I want to buy something, I go out and find it. I think that besides movie trailers, I've probably only bought like 3 things in my entire life that I wouldn't have otherwise bought if not for an ad. If all ads went away tomorrow, I would not miss them in the least, and I would definitely appreciate the lower cost of products that don't have to pay for huge marketing budgets. (Imagine it—soda companies could turn a handsome profit while cutting the cost of a can at the vending machine to, what, 7 cents? Maybe 10? Not that I drink soda, but it is the most apt example.)
I'm glad that people worry about this kind of stuff, but this problem specifically...not a problem. It's not as if people have no way to know who has nice things, and there's enough people in the world that don't even bother stopping their morning paper when they vacation that criminals never have a hard time finding easy targets.
The real trick here is to try not to be an easy target, and to accept that if someone really wants to target you, they're going to get you. There's not much you can do about it, but it's not worth worrying about because that's not how crime works.
You should not have stopped reading so early...I continued:
I expect some pages would probably spend more time in an edit war state than not (some might always stay in that state). That's fine too, as long as there's a filter between the two, why not just capture everything?
I've been robbed two times by clowns. If I come home to find grease paint smeared on my door handle and unicycle tracks all over my hardwood floors, I swear I'm gonna do something drastic!
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. There can be more than one version of an article.
I've always wondered why, when you encounter a page in the middle of an edit war, why the page doesn't provide a link at the top that says: "This page is currently experiencing an edit war because of controversial content. Click here to see the most up-to-date page along with a recent annotated edit history explaining the different points of view--go there if you have a point of view to contribute. The page you are now viewing is a locked version of the page as it existed before the controversy started, and will be replaced with the final edited version of the page when the controversy ends."
It's the web. Don't force people to choose. Show the low-controversy information for those who want that. Show the controversial up to the second page for people that want that. And let them edit that page for people that want to take up arms in the edit war. Why do we always all have to agree on everything?
As opposed to just locking the page, giving it a slightly more out-of-band place to exist and still comply with basic wikipedian principles will make most everyone happy, and allows these pages to be categorized for easy browsing. "Today, I want to browse the edit wars!" I bet there's a lot of useful information in those wars that comes through too, and every now and then privileged editors could pick through the carnage, take out the best factual bits, and integrate that content into the low-controversy page.
I expect some pages would probably spend more time in an edit war state than not (some might always stay in that state). That's fine too, as long as there's a filter between the two, why not just capture everything?
If it takes money (over $13,000 since January so far) then how does it make it economically worthless?
Again, I'm not making a qualitative judgment, but $13k for nearly a year of sales is small potatoes...it's not like you're going to retire on that. Not that it's a bad deal—I'd love to have that extra bit of money for something I did, for sure...but it's incidental income. (More relevant to this discussion, why have the customers you've got paid you? Is it just that there's no place to steal it, or they otherwise would have?)
So for something cutting edge like my program, I have little to fear, it's not just about anyone who could do something like this, and if they could they'd be stupid to give it up for free.
You're missing the point...you're looking at it from an emotional standpoint of having a dog in the fight. From a standpoint of purely rational analysis, if something can be had for no money, the value the economy is assigning that item is zero. Any amount paid for it over zero is inefficiency in the market, and if we accept that optimal markets are efficient markets... (Again, notwithstanding ethical and legal issues.)
The way a rational actor that is aware of this system works is by adjusting pricing to correspond with the valuation assigned to the item by the market. That way, there's no inefficiency, and no friction between seller and buyer. Example: if cable providers charged you on a per-show basis, you'd go out of your way to reduce the number of shows you watch (or that are measured, more like). So if you could watch the Daily Show on your TV and pay, or you could set up your computer to download it and transfer it to your DVR and watch it for free, you'd do the latter. Pricing of cable doesn't work this way, however, because that would be assigning value to a show that is economically worthless. What is not worthless to consumers is the service of providing easy access to the show. Consumers pay for cable because it's the service of easy delivery to their screen that they value, and so the cable company charges them for it.
What I've said so far seems reasonable unless you ask: if the service is valuable to the consumer but the individual shows are not, that would seem to imply that all shows are created equal, which we know is not true. Yet, what seems to come out of this economic model is that, if all shows are equally worthless to the consumer and only service is valued, then as long as the service is delivered the consumer will continue to pay...which we know is not true. So for this to be right there must be some actor in the mix that places more value on the Daily Show than other shows.
Indeed this is true. To advertisers, all shows are not created equal. Because TDS gets more viewers, it is worth more to that market. How much more? Easy, just look at ad rates.
It's a bit counter-intuitive, and again, you have to be willing to divorce your own value judgments about things from your economic understanding of them to make sense of it, but that's how it works.
Dude, I work hard and make half the minimum salary. It won't be hard to find people who make ten times what I do while working less hard.
I disagree. I'm sure you believe you work very hard compared to other people, but again, these kinds of subjective judgments have no place in economics. Let's look at what you've written from a dispassionate standpoint informed by economics...
Every day when I wake up and go to work, I am presented with a choice. I can (a) go to a job where I make X dollars with Y effort, or I could (b) go to a different job where I make 10*X for <Y effort. Every morning, I choose (a). If this is really what you mean to say, then I'd say that you're crazy. Why not do less work for 10 times the money if that option exists?
In fact, that option does not exist, or I'm sure you'd take it. The reason you d
Math is simply a system of reasoning...it, in and of itself, doesn't model or universe or anything in particular, though it can be a useful tool for expressing and creating such models.
You, and AC below (who doesn't get a reply because, well, AC), are apparently unfamiliar with the SF bay area. I'm presuming a "reasonable" house for a young couple with 2 kids is 2k-3k sq ft, 2 or 3 bed, 2.5 bath, 1 or 2 car garage. In any decent neighborhood on the SF peninsula, that's $1M+. If you're looking at ~nice~ neighborhoods, you're looking at more...
I'm not saying this is absolutely necessary to survive. I'm saying this is what's comfortable. If you lived in rural Iowa or Nevada, this is what you'd have.
If this happened to me, I would call Apple tech support and insist I had somehow become infected with a spambot virus. After much time and effort on their part, if they were able to convince me it was working as designed, I would then say this was unacceptable and I want a full refund.
Apple's attempt to waste a few seconds of my time would end up wasting several hours of theirs. If enough people joined me, this wouldn't last long.
IF I had an iPhone, which I do not. I have a gPhone. Google has proven for a long time now that they understand how to advertise in a non-obtrusive way.
(By the way, I can't help but wonder if a good solution to your problem would have been to encapsulate the code that handles the different logic for each quadrant in a Strategy pattern, to physically isolate it from other code given the apparent complexity of what you were doing.)
If you regard software as something that is written to meet a set of fixed goals—in other words, something that can be "completed" and released—then this would be ok. In fact, there isn't much about software that's like that. Real software should be written as though it will continue to evolve and grow forever...because, if it's successful, that's exactly what it will do. Many features of modern programming languages and the point of software development processes is aimed at dealing with this one simple fact of life.
That's not to say code or developers have to be perfect. It's ok to let the occasional code section like you describe by...however, if you can't figure out why what you've written works, the onus is on you to prove that it actually does do what you say it does. That means your unit tests have to be extra-tight, to the point that they literally define the specification of the desired behavior, and you should document the living hell out of that code and the unit tests for the next poor guy that inherits it and has to change it, extend it, etc.
Well, the "service" business model doesn't work for everything, for example it wouldn't work with my program for which no support is needed.
I submit that there is an excellent chance your program is worthless from an economic standpoint. Unless you have done something that no one else on earth knows how to do, there is nothing stopping an open source developer from rewriting it and releasing it. Perhaps no one has done this yet—but to me, that means there isn't much demand for whatever you've done or it would have been a priority to the open source world.
Please don't confuse what I'm saying with some kind of value judgment on your work. I'm not slamming it, I'm only saying that a thing's utility and economic value are very different. And I have a pretty good handle on the economic value given the fact that you're posting here on/. instead of skiing down an Alpine mountain while drinking Cristal and eating filet mignon.
People get lots of money from doing much less.
Sure, there are outliers, but by and large people who accumulate a lot of wealth do so by creating value for society. I'm sure you can point to individual examples, but can you point to a significant demographic of the population that gets a lot for "doing much less"? I submit that you cannot...because if you could, there would be an influx of people wanting that job...salaries they could demand would go down, etc.
Are you actually asking for how long are you entitled to receive money from the work you did after you stopped doing anything to it? Sounds like what you're pondering to me! Is it fair to reap the fruits from something you did 20 years ago? What's fair?
No, I'm not asking that. I'm saying what actually happens, and what people actually do, per the example with the marketing software company I worked for.
Look, if I tell you that I've created this epic application and I'll never update it or extend it or release it for others to work on or support it again, it's done for now and ever and nothing is ever going to happen with it from here on out, would you pay me for it? If you go through the list of software you currently have on your computer and ask yourself that question for each and every one, what percentage of apps in that situation would you still pay for? Not many, I expect.
I pirate anything I want cause I need it/want it and I don't have the money for it and even if I did I'd rather not pay for what I can have for free...
See, this is exactly what I'm saying. You pirate software why? Because you'd get no value out of paying for it. There's no incentive for you to do so. To you, buying it and stealing it result in the exact same situation...there's no more benefit to you one way or the other. In your zeal to argue, you've proven my point...you yourself are not willing to pay for something that can be digitally mass produced for free.
On the other hand, if you can get people to pay you for something you've done once, great, more power to you. I'm just saying that it's not a sustainable business model across the industry, even though there are small pockets like perhaps you've found, if you scaled your business up you'd find diminishing returns unless you provided ongoing work on it. (Especially once it became popular and someone made an open source knock-off.)
I'm in SF. All $1M would mean to me is a downpayment on a very reasonable but well-located house. And I'd have to use Google to research the neighborhoods I'd consider moving into.
And I'm just a dude. We're talking about companies here. I work for a relatively small software lab, and $1M is less than 1 month's payroll, bennies, and taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
The buzz is: that's buzz. (The economy's not doing so hot, so marketing folks will take what they can get.)
Yea, I've heard they've even slipped nanobots into the water supply to reprogram our bra—DISREGARD. EVERYTHING IS FINE. NO MIND CONTROL HERE.
PAY MORE TAXES.
You're implying that they're only making a big deal out of this thing with China because it happens to be convenient to do so, and if they'd taken over the Chinese market they would be happily rolling over? Do you have any reason to think this?
This would have certainly not been allowed, but I would've liked it if Google had met China's demands by showing the user how many items are censored. The search result wouldn't provide any links, images, etc, just a box that says "censored". They could have expanded that functionality by providing such metrics along the top as: "Results 1 - 30 of about 122,000 for [search terms], (2415 items censored, ~2%)"
The Chinese people, being human, would eventually see that enough times and think...hmm, I wonder what those say. Why am I not allowed to see that? (Especially when censored links pop up on the first result page.) There'd undoubtedly be search games like: Find the search terms with the highest censorship rate! Fun for the whole subversive family!
I couldn't disagree more. China is allowed to operate the way it does specifically because of the silence.
If every time they pulled some sh!t like this it was in the news, people would begin to understand that their information online is not safe in a very real way. This goes without saying to the tinfoil hat crowd here on /., I would hope most people understand that when you put something on the web you should be comfortable with it being public unless: you ssh tunneled to the other endpoint, you trust the other endpoint, and your info is stored with military grade encryption. (I welcome the barrage of emails that will point out all the requirements I missed...they shall serve to make my point even stronger that we here on /. know what's up, and further highlight the difference between us and the rest of the world comprised of ignorant meat piles who think any site that verifies their login by emailing them the password they chose--cleartext--is good enough. Oh yea, we're arrogant here on /. too. :-) )
Seriously, if every company simultaneously stood up and started loudly shouting: WAIT WHAT'S THIS CHINESE GOVT? HOW COME YOU'RE POKING AROUND THERE, WHAT ARE YOU UP TO AHHHHHH!, the constant noise level would prompt a lot of serious conversation about their ongoing oppression of basic human rights.
Or we could continue to be cynical about any behavior that doesn't push that bottom line, move a few more dollars, and turn that marketplace screw a little tighter. That's definitely another way to go.
I think the user experience design meeting at MS must have gone something like this...
"Listen, we've developed this feature that lets users manage their systems very conveniently. Access to everything from one place."
"Wow, that does look good. All in favor of hiding it?"
(all, in unison) "Aye!"
Why do we have to pick? We could just have a secure messaging system that encrypts and signs messages for intended recipients. If you can read it, congratulations, it's from who it says it's from (unless they hacked the endpoint, of course--but that's a good deal better than what we have now, innit?).
Ah, but if only we had such a system. ahemcoughcoughwavecoughcough
This is an interesting supposition, but there's no evidence that anything other than a quick revival would result in life being restored. We know that thermodynamically, the body is a veritable panic of high energy formations that are just dying to degrade (literally). We know that cryogenic freezing would suspend many of these processes...but all of the critical ones?
We've not yet begun to imagine what those processes even are, much less say with any certainty that cold temperature will suffice to prevent them over a sufficiently long period of time.
And then there's a whole segment of the population that will argue once the soul flies away, there's no getting it back. :-)
I've been trying that for years now, but I must be skipping the wrong ones...I'm only picking every other loser. :-(
I don't see the big deal here. There's a much bigger photo stitch with interactive browser that makes this 26GP image look positively tiny. It's called "Google Street View".
Really? I always wonder about people who say this...you find ads annoying, and you don't actually engage them in the intended way (i.e., convert to an actual sale), but you feel some obligation to sit through a mini-pitch?
Have we forgotten that advertising is not an end unto itself? Advertisers are not trying to get appreciation for their beautiful work, and they don't really care about views that don't convert. So, if you're not interested in buying anything, don't beat yourself up.
I don't feel bad at all when I block ads. When I want to buy something, I go out and find it. I think that besides movie trailers, I've probably only bought like 3 things in my entire life that I wouldn't have otherwise bought if not for an ad. If all ads went away tomorrow, I would not miss them in the least, and I would definitely appreciate the lower cost of products that don't have to pay for huge marketing budgets. (Imagine it—soda companies could turn a handsome profit while cutting the cost of a can at the vending machine to, what, 7 cents? Maybe 10? Not that I drink soda, but it is the most apt example.)
I'm glad that people worry about this kind of stuff, but this problem specifically...not a problem. It's not as if people have no way to know who has nice things, and there's enough people in the world that don't even bother stopping their morning paper when they vacation that criminals never have a hard time finding easy targets.
The real trick here is to try not to be an easy target, and to accept that if someone really wants to target you, they're going to get you. There's not much you can do about it, but it's not worth worrying about because that's not how crime works.
That answers your question, no?
I've been robbed two times by clowns. If I come home to find grease paint smeared on my door handle and unicycle tracks all over my hardwood floors, I swear I'm gonna do something drastic!
Well, hang on a second. How big is the flat screen, and is the Xbox modded?
Wikipedia is not a traditional encyclopedia. There can be more than one version of an article.
I've always wondered why, when you encounter a page in the middle of an edit war, why the page doesn't provide a link at the top that says: "This page is currently experiencing an edit war because of controversial content. Click here to see the most up-to-date page along with a recent annotated edit history explaining the different points of view--go there if you have a point of view to contribute. The page you are now viewing is a locked version of the page as it existed before the controversy started, and will be replaced with the final edited version of the page when the controversy ends."
It's the web. Don't force people to choose. Show the low-controversy information for those who want that. Show the controversial up to the second page for people that want that. And let them edit that page for people that want to take up arms in the edit war. Why do we always all have to agree on everything?
As opposed to just locking the page, giving it a slightly more out-of-band place to exist and still comply with basic wikipedian principles will make most everyone happy, and allows these pages to be categorized for easy browsing. "Today, I want to browse the edit wars!" I bet there's a lot of useful information in those wars that comes through too, and every now and then privileged editors could pick through the carnage, take out the best factual bits, and integrate that content into the low-controversy page.
I expect some pages would probably spend more time in an edit war state than not (some might always stay in that state). That's fine too, as long as there's a filter between the two, why not just capture everything?
Nope...it's clear I'm not going to convince you, so that response is to convert everyone else to my way of thinking. ;-)
Again, I'm not making a qualitative judgment, but $13k for nearly a year of sales is small potatoes...it's not like you're going to retire on that. Not that it's a bad deal—I'd love to have that extra bit of money for something I did, for sure...but it's incidental income. (More relevant to this discussion, why have the customers you've got paid you? Is it just that there's no place to steal it, or they otherwise would have?)
You're missing the point...you're looking at it from an emotional standpoint of having a dog in the fight. From a standpoint of purely rational analysis, if something can be had for no money, the value the economy is assigning that item is zero. Any amount paid for it over zero is inefficiency in the market, and if we accept that optimal markets are efficient markets... (Again, notwithstanding ethical and legal issues.)
The way a rational actor that is aware of this system works is by adjusting pricing to correspond with the valuation assigned to the item by the market. That way, there's no inefficiency, and no friction between seller and buyer. Example: if cable providers charged you on a per-show basis, you'd go out of your way to reduce the number of shows you watch (or that are measured, more like). So if you could watch the Daily Show on your TV and pay, or you could set up your computer to download it and transfer it to your DVR and watch it for free, you'd do the latter. Pricing of cable doesn't work this way, however, because that would be assigning value to a show that is economically worthless. What is not worthless to consumers is the service of providing easy access to the show. Consumers pay for cable because it's the service of easy delivery to their screen that they value, and so the cable company charges them for it.
What I've said so far seems reasonable unless you ask: if the service is valuable to the consumer but the individual shows are not, that would seem to imply that all shows are created equal, which we know is not true. Yet, what seems to come out of this economic model is that, if all shows are equally worthless to the consumer and only service is valued, then as long as the service is delivered the consumer will continue to pay...which we know is not true. So for this to be right there must be some actor in the mix that places more value on the Daily Show than other shows.
Indeed this is true. To advertisers, all shows are not created equal. Because TDS gets more viewers, it is worth more to that market. How much more? Easy, just look at ad rates.
It's a bit counter-intuitive, and again, you have to be willing to divorce your own value judgments about things from your economic understanding of them to make sense of it, but that's how it works.
I disagree. I'm sure you believe you work very hard compared to other people, but again, these kinds of subjective judgments have no place in economics. Let's look at what you've written from a dispassionate standpoint informed by economics...
Every day when I wake up and go to work, I am presented with a choice. I can (a) go to a job where I make X dollars with Y effort, or I could (b) go to a different job where I make 10*X for <Y effort. Every morning, I choose (a). If this is really what you mean to say, then I'd say that you're crazy. Why not do less work for 10 times the money if that option exists?
In fact, that option does not exist, or I'm sure you'd take it. The reason you d
Math is simply a system of reasoning...it, in and of itself, doesn't model or universe or anything in particular, though it can be a useful tool for expressing and creating such models.
You, and AC below (who doesn't get a reply because, well, AC), are apparently unfamiliar with the SF bay area. I'm presuming a "reasonable" house for a young couple with 2 kids is 2k-3k sq ft, 2 or 3 bed, 2.5 bath, 1 or 2 car garage. In any decent neighborhood on the SF peninsula, that's $1M+. If you're looking at ~nice~ neighborhoods, you're looking at more...
I'm not saying this is absolutely necessary to survive. I'm saying this is what's comfortable. If you lived in rural Iowa or Nevada, this is what you'd have.
To get the same here, though...not cheap.
I can see thru stuff, all at once. Like air, water, fog. Does that count?
If this happened to me, I would call Apple tech support and insist I had somehow become infected with a spambot virus. After much time and effort on their part, if they were able to convince me it was working as designed, I would then say this was unacceptable and I want a full refund.
Apple's attempt to waste a few seconds of my time would end up wasting several hours of theirs. If enough people joined me, this wouldn't last long.
IF I had an iPhone, which I do not. I have a gPhone. Google has proven for a long time now that they understand how to advertise in a non-obtrusive way.
(By the way, I can't help but wonder if a good solution to your problem would have been to encapsulate the code that handles the different logic for each quadrant in a Strategy pattern, to physically isolate it from other code given the apparent complexity of what you were doing.)
Yea, that's probably bad code. Here's why...
If you regard software as something that is written to meet a set of fixed goals—in other words, something that can be "completed" and released—then this would be ok. In fact, there isn't much about software that's like that. Real software should be written as though it will continue to evolve and grow forever...because, if it's successful, that's exactly what it will do. Many features of modern programming languages and the point of software development processes is aimed at dealing with this one simple fact of life.
That's not to say code or developers have to be perfect. It's ok to let the occasional code section like you describe by...however, if you can't figure out why what you've written works, the onus is on you to prove that it actually does do what you say it does. That means your unit tests have to be extra-tight, to the point that they literally define the specification of the desired behavior, and you should document the living hell out of that code and the unit tests for the next poor guy that inherits it and has to change it, extend it, etc.
I submit that there is an excellent chance your program is worthless from an economic standpoint. Unless you have done something that no one else on earth knows how to do, there is nothing stopping an open source developer from rewriting it and releasing it. Perhaps no one has done this yet—but to me, that means there isn't much demand for whatever you've done or it would have been a priority to the open source world.
Please don't confuse what I'm saying with some kind of value judgment on your work. I'm not slamming it, I'm only saying that a thing's utility and economic value are very different. And I have a pretty good handle on the economic value given the fact that you're posting here on /. instead of skiing down an Alpine mountain while drinking Cristal and eating filet mignon.
Sure, there are outliers, but by and large people who accumulate a lot of wealth do so by creating value for society. I'm sure you can point to individual examples, but can you point to a significant demographic of the population that gets a lot for "doing much less"? I submit that you cannot...because if you could, there would be an influx of people wanting that job...salaries they could demand would go down, etc.
No, I'm not asking that. I'm saying what actually happens, and what people actually do, per the example with the marketing software company I worked for.
Look, if I tell you that I've created this epic application and I'll never update it or extend it or release it for others to work on or support it again, it's done for now and ever and nothing is ever going to happen with it from here on out, would you pay me for it? If you go through the list of software you currently have on your computer and ask yourself that question for each and every one, what percentage of apps in that situation would you still pay for? Not many, I expect.
See, this is exactly what I'm saying. You pirate software why? Because you'd get no value out of paying for it. There's no incentive for you to do so. To you, buying it and stealing it result in the exact same situation...there's no more benefit to you one way or the other. In your zeal to argue, you've proven my point...you yourself are not willing to pay for something that can be digitally mass produced for free.
On the other hand, if you can get people to pay you for something you've done once, great, more power to you. I'm just saying that it's not a sustainable business model across the industry, even though there are small pockets like perhaps you've found, if you scaled your business up you'd find diminishing returns unless you provided ongoing work on it. (Especially once it became popular and someone made an open source knock-off.)
I'm in SF. All $1M would mean to me is a downpayment on a very reasonable but well-located house. And I'd have to use Google to research the neighborhoods I'd consider moving into.
And I'm just a dude. We're talking about companies here. I work for a relatively small software lab, and $1M is less than 1 month's payroll, bennies, and taxes.