libflashsupport is a problem of the communities own making. There's absolutely no reason why the existing sound APIs (eg, libasound) can't be made to support the needed features but somebody decided to create yet another sound daemon. The fact that the Flash developers have better things to do with their lives than support this weeks sound daemon shouldn't surprise anybody, and has nothing to do with open vs closed source. It has to do with immature platform management. Open source apps will have the same problem, except instead of a file called libflashsupport you'd need a file called foo-bar-1.2-pulseaudio.patch.
No they don't support it. I've had many, many conversations with distributors over the years about this topic. It "works" simply because of the way the tools are constructed. But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees. In fact it's even possible for you to break peoples systems by distributing software on your own.
Trivial example of how things can go wrong, there's no namespacing in Linux. Let's say I make a game and call it Epiphany, then start distributing it outside the framework of the distributions. What sort of things could happen? Well, somebody else might make a web browser called Epiphany, which then might become a part of the base set of packages. What happens when the user tries to upgrade their distribution? Anything might happen, because you have two packages with the same name (or which both try to provide/usr/bin/epiphany).
In the best case the upgrade will just break and the user will be stuck having to choose one of the two packages. But they can't have both.
In the worst case, I decided not to fuck about with 10 different but somehow identical package management systems and used an autopackage or a Loki Installer. Almost all commercial software for Linux does this sort of thing. Now the package manager will just silently overwrite my game files with the web browser. It won't notify the user it's going to do this - it'll just uncleanly corrupt the game.
So what's the solution? Back when I was involved in distribution of apps for Linux, the usual proposal was to put third party software in/usr/local rather than/usr. Unfortunately no distributor properly supports this prefix, and besides, it just moves the problem around rather than solve it. Sadly there actually isn't a solution for this on UNIX - it's fundamental to the design.
You'll notice that Android doesn't use UNIX style directory trees or package management... and this is probably one of the reasons why.
TFA talks a lot about the cathedral vs bazaar model, which I find to be sort of funny. Android supports downloading applications (.apk files) from wherever you want, although it's intended that the market be the primary place you get them. In this sense it's every bit as open as a Linux distribution.
But wait. A typical Linux distribution doesn't actually support you adding other repositories or downloading packages from the web. Sure it might be technically possible, but you're going to encounter a lot of glitches, and if you ask the distro about that they'll just shrug and say it's your own fault for not using the official repositories.
In fact, given that the Android Market is planned to support for-pay software as well as free-beer software, that makes it technically more open than a typical Linux distro, in which the only reliable way of getting your software to end users is to get the distributors to do it for you, and they usually insist on particular kinds of licensing. Doing it yourself is a good way to find yourself in distro-compatibility hell.
(disclaimer: am a googler, but have no more info than the average slashdotter does on this)
What you meant to say is Strongly Static typed, which is found in only a few languages and is a huge hinderance in those languages. Duck Typing, as implemented in JS and few other languages, is far more flexible and just as robust as you still can't screw with memory arbitrarily.
Wow, that's a pretty extreme point of view. Static typing may be "found in only a few languages" but those languages happen to be the most popular languages by far. Just because every man and his dog has written an interpreted language without static type checking doesn't mean it's somehow a small irrelevant feature. In fact as code bases become larger it becomes nearly essential. I don't see how you can claim it's a "huge hindrance" - you sound like something of a cowboy programmer to be honest. Defining and declaring your types up front may seem inconvenient but it means your codebase can scale, more bugs are found ahead of time, future programmers can more easily comprehend your code and compilers can optimize your code much more easily.
If there was some kind of efficient, statically typed language available for use in web browsers making it run fast wouldn't be a research problem, and we could replace the unintuitive CSS box model with something that actually worked for web apps. The reason you can't do this today is that JavaScript is just too damn slow to do real time GUI reflow, so you have to let the web browser do it in C++, so you're stuck with CSS.
The OP doesn't have to wait for SilverLight to get the benefits of static typing however. GWT does the exact same thing today, for Java.
Another Googler here. I just gotta say, 20% time isn't a myth. It is wildly misunderstood, even within the company IMHO.
I'm working on my 20% project right now actually (well, I was until I saw this story anyway;) I do usually get to dedicate about one day a week to it, although that "day" is sometimes a mix of 20% coding and email on my regular project as well. Here are some things I've found:
20% time does not magically appear. Meetings don't move themselves, colleagues don't stop asking questions, urgent email doesn't vanish. You have to be disciplined to make 20% time happen. In case you think this doesn't apply to you because your job is so tough, I work in SRE and am constantly being interrupted by random stuff breaking in production, or people who need a ticket resolved right now because otherwise it'll block their progress. It took a long time to learn how to take 20% in this environment, but it is possible with a combination of delegation, careful timekeeping and sheer stubbornness.
20% time doesn't have to be on your main project. Between fixing problems in our datacenters and capacity planning, I'm writing what will hopefully one day be a new launched product (a web app).
There is a process for 20% projects to graduate into full staffed projects. I'm hoping to take my project through it in the next few months. This is make or break for my little codebase - it's pretty ambitious and if it doesn't make it to a real Google project, I'm not sure where I'll take it. But I do feel reasonably in control of this process. I guess we'll see how it goes.
Management has always been 100% supportive of this, even though it means they lose 20% of my time from my main job and might lose me for good from my current project and team. That is appreciated.
Generally, I'd say 20% time is a great idea, but I think management of it is harder than it appears. If your team sets very aggressive goals for itself and that means you feel you can't take 20% time, that's something to take up with your management and your team. Remember, EMG have clarified this on several occasions - your manager cannot deny you 20% time in perpetuity.
The problem is lots of people will just click "no" to get rid of the popup because they're busy or don't understand the question. This has been proven by many usability studies and is why Windows now ships with automatic online update enabled by default, and why it nags you to reboot so hard. If they weren't asked repeatedly, they'd end up running an unsupported and thus insecure browser. That's bad for everyone.
You must have missed all the "Google is now evil" stories floating around.
Anyway, IJW isn't an ideal as you put it. According to Apple it's practically the primary reason to buy their hardware. Why buy a Mac if not because of IJW? Are they really going to change their ad campaigns to "It just has prettier icons"? I think not.
If you attack your competition with arrogant adverts that personify them as unattractive, old fashioned people that don't work, and then sell stuff that doesn't work, people are going to notice. That's life.
There's also a widespread problem in which multiple C++ libraries are loaded into Firefox at once, something Windows handles just fine but Linux (ELF+GCC really) does not. This has been a very common cause of Firefox instability in my experience but is not the fault of anybody but the GNU toolchain team and maybe the ELF standards body.
DRM doesn't have to be perfect to work, and if you'd read the thread you'd see that the guy who is complaining recognises this fact. He doesn't care if it's merely difficult to extract the stream. He cares that it can apparently be done using easy, cheap, off the shelf tools that require no expertise. Key quote:
Keep in mind that there are other companies that are using protections that are being more successful. For example, iTunes videos are truly encrypted by DRM technologies that no one (with the exception of tunebite which again is a screen recorder software, not an actual decrypter or catcher) except the most skillful hackers can bypass. The tools are truly underground, because Apple took action to ensure that the tools required to crack the DRM in the files was not readily available on the internet. (In fact I can't even find them online anywhere, but I know they exist.) All the sites that were known to host these tools had them removed due to Apple's actions to protect their technology.
Now, I don't know for sure what his problem is. Judging from the thread he's a newbie and might have made a mistake somewhere. But if it's true that encrypted video streams can be dumped using an easy to use tool then the guy has a point. Adobe aren't doing as well as some other companies are.
Whilst I agree with you that the police can over-react, especially at mass rallies, do you realise what you just wrote?
Some people did break into the power station.... but the protest was entirely non-violent
I'd assume that forcing your way into a power station of all things is a pretty great way to get the attention of the police and definitely involves violence against property if not other people. Assuming there were no security guards who tried to stop them of course.
You also wrote:
All in all the police spent some 3 million UKP intimidating a group of entirely peaceful, and largely law abiding people exercising their democratic right to protest.
I'm sure the police would phrase it as "mounted a successful operation that balanced the right to protest against the need to protect the local areas power supply". And it sounds like you and them might both be right.
I wouldn't call it a working class stereotype. You make chavdom sound far more nuanced than it actually is. In reality it's some kind of urban subculture with very well defined ways of dressing and acting. Many, many people absolutely loath chavs and can quite easily identify them even at a distance.
Cuz it defies common sense? If I pay for something I'd like to think that most of that money goes to whoever created it when in reality the reverse is true. Unfortunately I doubt this will change and I also doubt it's because of The Man. There are so many people who can write music, sing, and want to be musicians that supply/demand takes over and forces the value of their labor down to almost nothing.
where I learned that in 1999, 90% of companies spent less than 10% of their R&D budget on licensing, but by 2009, that figure had dropped to only 10% of companies spending less than 10% on licensing. Wow.
Wow indeed. I guess the licensing on time travel is pretty damn expensive;)
About 80% of Windows blue-screens are due to drivers, according to various Microsoft studies of crash dumps. It's pretty significant. I suspect the rest are hardware on its way out... the Windows kernel has been debugged for many years and is now pretty solid.
I wish I could say the same for my MacBook Pro. I've never seen a kernel panic but the thing regularly refuses to come back from sleep, or wakes up and then goes back to sleep, or comes back from sleep in some semi-corrupted way where the keyboard doesn't work.
Given that Apple do control every bit of hardware in this machine, and most of the software (all I've got here is regular apps), how the hell did a roughly 50% failure rate for resume escape their testing? Or maybe it didn't and they decided to ship anyway. Every time I am left dicking around with this machine trying to resurrect it after yet another resume failure I remember the "it just works" slogan and become that tiny bit more cynical.
TCPA yes. It's not the same as what Microsoft proposed with Palladium but has similar roots. I'm not suggesting that joe average come up with solutions to complicated problems, just that they be able to vote on legislation being passed through parliament. And if that legislation is too huge or complicated for joe average to understand, it's probably a bad law anyway. Send it back for refactoring.
There's no particular reason why you need to change voting systems. Majority-wins works fine.
The problem is that when you reduce a 10,000 dimensional problem down to a left/right vote every 5 years (which is what most modern democracies have decayed into) you get noise. The solution isn't to say "oh noes but democracy is the least worst system!", it's to make a better system.
We will shortly have the technology to make secure online voting a reality. The work that Intel and others are doing on trusted computing means that, if all goes well, in a few years most people with a computer will be able to cryptographically prove to a third party that a human (and not a bot) has voted in a certain way. To use England as an example, with such a system you could easily put every issue placed before Parliament to the vote. Why should my MP make decisions on my behalf, when I could make them myself?
Of course, most people only care about a tiny subset of issues discussed in Parliament. Here on Slashdot we might care about technology related issues, but are unlikely to care about pig farming, or rambling rights, or the exact allocation of funds to the immigration service. But everyone will have their own set of issues that they care about, and thus everyone should have the option of voting on everything.
The problem now is that if you scrap MPs most issues won't get many votes at all. Interested minorities could easily swing the vote and bring extreme laws into existence. The free market is the solution - I should be able to pay someone to vote for me. Perhaps that someone would even be my existing MP! Or perhaps I'd delegate most issues to my MP, votes on matters of tax to my accountant, and take technology issues for myself.
You might object that the average man is not well informed enough to make decisions of importance. The moment you believe that, you are back to Platos Republic and have about as much legitimacy. By definition society, when averaged out, must be reasonably smart, otherwise society would never go forwards and nothing would ever get done... life would be a pale imitation of Idiocracy. Fortunately the same tools that would let us vote (computers) would let people become easily informed about the issues of the day. And of course you don't have to stick to yes/no votes but could have any kind of input... sliding scales for instance, with the final result being the median.
The nice thing about a voting system based on trusted computing is that it could be implemented in an entirely open source, auditable and platform independent manner with pretty decent built-in security, whilst still preserving the anonymity of the vote. But because computers scale so much better than paper ballots, it'd be feasible to finally bring true democracy into fruition.
Everybody hates a goodie-two-shoes. The "don't be evil" slogan creates too much cognitive dissonance in the minds of people who believe, with 100% conviction, that corporations are inherently evil. "Google ate my privacy" is thus a great angle, even though it's not really backed up by reality.
Trivial example - try and find three people in the whole world who have had their lives seriously worsened by some personal information Google has released.
The problem with your attitude is that it fails the "golden rule" - would my behavior still be OK if everybody did what I do? If it's not, that's a pretty good signal it's unethical. You can, if you wish, live your life without a tip of the hat to ethics but don't be surprised when nobody cries at your funeral.
Your last paragraph in particular is pretty naive. You say the games industry thrived in the face of piracy. There isn't a binary thrives/fails outcome here, it's more subtle than that.
Let's say you create a game on the assumption that 500,000 people will want to play the game, based on demographics and popularity of similar games. You want to sell it for $50 each so that's a $25,000,000 budget - pretty good! Although that has to pay for quite a lot of stuff. Not just salaries for a large team for several years, but business overheads, engine licensing, and then you need to make enough profit to cover your next game which might be a flop.
Your game is awesome and indeed garners 500,000 players very fast. Unfortunately only 20% of those people pay for the game (this figure seems reasonable sadly). Instead of being rewarded with a nice profit and the ability to make a new game, you are now on the verge of bankruptcy. But let's say you're bailed out. For your next game, you'll rectify your mistake. Instead of budgeting based on how many players a game might get, you budget based on the sales you'll get. The result is a much smaller budget. Fewer programmers, worse artwork, perhaps some characters don't get voiceovers this time around. The whole project just doesn't live up to what it could have been.
Piracy is not cost-free as you seem to believe. It results in a worse experience for all gamers, both through more limited games and less risk taking (because studios don't have as much money to cover the potential losses). Instead people stick with what they know can make money - boring MMORPGs that can't be pirated because they need an account, or console games that don't have a keyboard.
This is what happens because of pirates actions. But wait - it gets worse. When the law is not upheld honest people start to wonder why exactly they inconvenience themselves by following it. Why, they say, should that guy over there get free music and movies and games when I work hard and can only buy one of those things this month? Why shouldn't I break the law too? This is how corruption starts and if you want to know what a culture of corruption is like take a visit to any developing country. It's not good for their economy and just keeps them poorer for longer.
Slashdot Mirror
libflashsupport is a problem of the communities own making. There's absolutely no reason why the existing sound APIs (eg, libasound) can't be made to support the needed features but somebody decided to create yet another sound daemon. The fact that the Flash developers have better things to do with their lives than support this weeks sound daemon shouldn't surprise anybody, and has nothing to do with open vs closed source. It has to do with immature platform management. Open source apps will have the same problem, except instead of a file called libflashsupport you'd need a file called foo-bar-1.2-pulseaudio.patch.
No they don't support it. I've had many, many conversations with distributors over the years about this topic. It "works" simply because of the way the tools are constructed. But they provide absolutely no guarantees that your app won't break tomorrow with some update they push, and are completely unwilling to make any such guarantees. In fact it's even possible for you to break peoples systems by distributing software on your own.
Trivial example of how things can go wrong, there's no namespacing in Linux. Let's say I make a game and call it Epiphany, then start distributing it outside the framework of the distributions. What sort of things could happen? Well, somebody else might make a web browser called Epiphany, which then might become a part of the base set of packages. What happens when the user tries to upgrade their distribution? Anything might happen, because you have two packages with the same name (or which both try to provide /usr/bin/epiphany).
In the best case the upgrade will just break and the user will be stuck having to choose one of the two packages. But they can't have both.
In the worst case, I decided not to fuck about with 10 different but somehow identical package management systems and used an autopackage or a Loki Installer. Almost all commercial software for Linux does this sort of thing. Now the package manager will just silently overwrite my game files with the web browser. It won't notify the user it's going to do this - it'll just uncleanly corrupt the game.
So what's the solution? Back when I was involved in distribution of apps for Linux, the usual proposal was to put third party software in /usr/local rather than /usr. Unfortunately no distributor properly supports this prefix, and besides, it just moves the problem around rather than solve it. Sadly there actually isn't a solution for this on UNIX - it's fundamental to the design.
You'll notice that Android doesn't use UNIX style directory trees or package management ... and this is probably one of the reasons why.
TFA talks a lot about the cathedral vs bazaar model, which I find to be sort of funny. Android supports downloading applications (.apk files) from wherever you want, although it's intended that the market be the primary place you get them. In this sense it's every bit as open as a Linux distribution.
But wait. A typical Linux distribution doesn't actually support you adding other repositories or downloading packages from the web. Sure it might be technically possible, but you're going to encounter a lot of glitches, and if you ask the distro about that they'll just shrug and say it's your own fault for not using the official repositories.
In fact, given that the Android Market is planned to support for-pay software as well as free-beer software, that makes it technically more open than a typical Linux distro, in which the only reliable way of getting your software to end users is to get the distributors to do it for you, and they usually insist on particular kinds of licensing. Doing it yourself is a good way to find yourself in distro-compatibility hell.
(disclaimer: am a googler, but have no more info than the average slashdotter does on this)
Wow, that's a pretty extreme point of view. Static typing may be "found in only a few languages" but those languages happen to be the most popular languages by far. Just because every man and his dog has written an interpreted language without static type checking doesn't mean it's somehow a small irrelevant feature. In fact as code bases become larger it becomes nearly essential. I don't see how you can claim it's a "huge hindrance" - you sound like something of a cowboy programmer to be honest. Defining and declaring your types up front may seem inconvenient but it means your codebase can scale, more bugs are found ahead of time, future programmers can more easily comprehend your code and compilers can optimize your code much more easily.
If there was some kind of efficient, statically typed language available for use in web browsers making it run fast wouldn't be a research problem, and we could replace the unintuitive CSS box model with something that actually worked for web apps. The reason you can't do this today is that JavaScript is just too damn slow to do real time GUI reflow, so you have to let the web browser do it in C++, so you're stuck with CSS.
The OP doesn't have to wait for SilverLight to get the benefits of static typing however. GWT does the exact same thing today, for Java.
Another Googler here. I just gotta say, 20% time isn't a myth. It is wildly misunderstood, even within the company IMHO.
I'm working on my 20% project right now actually (well, I was until I saw this story anyway ;) I do usually get to dedicate about one day a week to it, although that "day" is sometimes a mix of 20% coding and email on my regular project as well. Here are some things I've found:
Generally, I'd say 20% time is a great idea, but I think management of it is harder than it appears. If your team sets very aggressive goals for itself and that means you feel you can't take 20% time, that's something to take up with your management and your team. Remember, EMG have clarified this on several occasions - your manager cannot deny you 20% time in perpetuity.
How did they get the wayback machine modified? Is there some kind of exclusion form you can use?
The problem is lots of people will just click "no" to get rid of the popup because they're busy or don't understand the question. This has been proven by many usability studies and is why Windows now ships with automatic online update enabled by default, and why it nags you to reboot so hard. If they weren't asked repeatedly, they'd end up running an unsupported and thus insecure browser. That's bad for everyone.
You must have missed all the "Google is now evil" stories floating around.
Anyway, IJW isn't an ideal as you put it. According to Apple it's practically the primary reason to buy their hardware. Why buy a Mac if not because of IJW? Are they really going to change their ad campaigns to "It just has prettier icons"? I think not.
If you attack your competition with arrogant adverts that personify them as unattractive, old fashioned people that don't work, and then sell stuff that doesn't work, people are going to notice. That's life.
Could you give an example of these bad Maps queries please?
There's also a widespread problem in which multiple C++ libraries are loaded into Firefox at once, something Windows handles just fine but Linux (ELF+GCC really) does not. This has been a very common cause of Firefox instability in my experience but is not the fault of anybody but the GNU toolchain team and maybe the ELF standards body.
DRM doesn't have to be perfect to work, and if you'd read the thread you'd see that the guy who is complaining recognises this fact. He doesn't care if it's merely difficult to extract the stream. He cares that it can apparently be done using easy, cheap, off the shelf tools that require no expertise. Key quote:
Now, I don't know for sure what his problem is. Judging from the thread he's a newbie and might have made a mistake somewhere. But if it's true that encrypted video streams can be dumped using an easy to use tool then the guy has a point. Adobe aren't doing as well as some other companies are.
I suggest checking out the Java proxy class.
Whilst I agree with you that the police can over-react, especially at mass rallies, do you realise what you just wrote?
I'd assume that forcing your way into a power station of all things is a pretty great way to get the attention of the police and definitely involves violence against property if not other people. Assuming there were no security guards who tried to stop them of course.
You also wrote:
I'm sure the police would phrase it as "mounted a successful operation that balanced the right to protest against the need to protect the local areas power supply". And it sounds like you and them might both be right.
I wouldn't call it a working class stereotype. You make chavdom sound far more nuanced than it actually is. In reality it's some kind of urban subculture with very well defined ways of dressing and acting. Many, many people absolutely loath chavs and can quite easily identify them even at a distance.
Cuz it defies common sense? If I pay for something I'd like to think that most of that money goes to whoever created it when in reality the reverse is true. Unfortunately I doubt this will change and I also doubt it's because of The Man. There are so many people who can write music, sing, and want to be musicians that supply/demand takes over and forces the value of their labor down to almost nothing.
Wow indeed. I guess the licensing on time travel is pretty damn expensive ;)
Since when is breaking the law a civil right?
But this is a law which definitely has some good uses, but only in a hypothetical future version has some bad uses?
Except that the price includes the cost of OS X, as Psystar buy a copy for you. Otherwise they'd be in the dock for copyright infringement.
About 80% of Windows blue-screens are due to drivers, according to various Microsoft studies of crash dumps. It's pretty significant. I suspect the rest are hardware on its way out ... the Windows kernel has been debugged for many years and is now pretty solid.
I wish I could say the same for my MacBook Pro. I've never seen a kernel panic but the thing regularly refuses to come back from sleep, or wakes up and then goes back to sleep, or comes back from sleep in some semi-corrupted way where the keyboard doesn't work.
Given that Apple do control every bit of hardware in this machine, and most of the software (all I've got here is regular apps), how the hell did a roughly 50% failure rate for resume escape their testing? Or maybe it didn't and they decided to ship anyway. Every time I am left dicking around with this machine trying to resurrect it after yet another resume failure I remember the "it just works" slogan and become that tiny bit more cynical.
TCPA yes. It's not the same as what Microsoft proposed with Palladium but has similar roots. I'm not suggesting that joe average come up with solutions to complicated problems, just that they be able to vote on legislation being passed through parliament. And if that legislation is too huge or complicated for joe average to understand, it's probably a bad law anyway. Send it back for refactoring.
What's so bad about a TPM? You realise they ship disabled, right? You have to go into the BIOS to enable them.
There's no particular reason why you need to change voting systems. Majority-wins works fine.
The problem is that when you reduce a 10,000 dimensional problem down to a left/right vote every 5 years (which is what most modern democracies have decayed into) you get noise. The solution isn't to say "oh noes but democracy is the least worst system!", it's to make a better system.
We will shortly have the technology to make secure online voting a reality. The work that Intel and others are doing on trusted computing means that, if all goes well, in a few years most people with a computer will be able to cryptographically prove to a third party that a human (and not a bot) has voted in a certain way. To use England as an example, with such a system you could easily put every issue placed before Parliament to the vote. Why should my MP make decisions on my behalf, when I could make them myself?
Of course, most people only care about a tiny subset of issues discussed in Parliament. Here on Slashdot we might care about technology related issues, but are unlikely to care about pig farming, or rambling rights, or the exact allocation of funds to the immigration service. But everyone will have their own set of issues that they care about, and thus everyone should have the option of voting on everything.
The problem now is that if you scrap MPs most issues won't get many votes at all. Interested minorities could easily swing the vote and bring extreme laws into existence. The free market is the solution - I should be able to pay someone to vote for me. Perhaps that someone would even be my existing MP! Or perhaps I'd delegate most issues to my MP, votes on matters of tax to my accountant, and take technology issues for myself.
You might object that the average man is not well informed enough to make decisions of importance. The moment you believe that, you are back to Platos Republic and have about as much legitimacy. By definition society, when averaged out, must be reasonably smart, otherwise society would never go forwards and nothing would ever get done ... life would be a pale imitation of Idiocracy. Fortunately the same tools that would let us vote (computers) would let people become easily informed about the issues of the day. And of course you don't have to stick to yes/no votes but could have any kind of input ... sliding scales for instance, with the final result being the median.
The nice thing about a voting system based on trusted computing is that it could be implemented in an entirely open source, auditable and platform independent manner with pretty decent built-in security, whilst still preserving the anonymity of the vote. But because computers scale so much better than paper ballots, it'd be feasible to finally bring true democracy into fruition.
Everybody hates a goodie-two-shoes. The "don't be evil" slogan creates too much cognitive dissonance in the minds of people who believe, with 100% conviction, that corporations are inherently evil. "Google ate my privacy" is thus a great angle, even though it's not really backed up by reality.
Trivial example - try and find three people in the whole world who have had their lives seriously worsened by some personal information Google has released.
The problem with your attitude is that it fails the "golden rule" - would my behavior still be OK if everybody did what I do? If it's not, that's a pretty good signal it's unethical. You can, if you wish, live your life without a tip of the hat to ethics but don't be surprised when nobody cries at your funeral.
Your last paragraph in particular is pretty naive. You say the games industry thrived in the face of piracy. There isn't a binary thrives/fails outcome here, it's more subtle than that.
Let's say you create a game on the assumption that 500,000 people will want to play the game, based on demographics and popularity of similar games. You want to sell it for $50 each so that's a $25,000,000 budget - pretty good! Although that has to pay for quite a lot of stuff. Not just salaries for a large team for several years, but business overheads, engine licensing, and then you need to make enough profit to cover your next game which might be a flop.
Your game is awesome and indeed garners 500,000 players very fast. Unfortunately only 20% of those people pay for the game (this figure seems reasonable sadly). Instead of being rewarded with a nice profit and the ability to make a new game, you are now on the verge of bankruptcy. But let's say you're bailed out. For your next game, you'll rectify your mistake. Instead of budgeting based on how many players a game might get, you budget based on the sales you'll get. The result is a much smaller budget. Fewer programmers, worse artwork, perhaps some characters don't get voiceovers this time around. The whole project just doesn't live up to what it could have been.
Piracy is not cost-free as you seem to believe. It results in a worse experience for all gamers, both through more limited games and less risk taking (because studios don't have as much money to cover the potential losses). Instead people stick with what they know can make money - boring MMORPGs that can't be pirated because they need an account, or console games that don't have a keyboard.
This is what happens because of pirates actions. But wait - it gets worse. When the law is not upheld honest people start to wonder why exactly they inconvenience themselves by following it. Why, they say, should that guy over there get free music and movies and games when I work hard and can only buy one of those things this month? Why shouldn't I break the law too? This is how corruption starts and if you want to know what a culture of corruption is like take a visit to any developing country. It's not good for their economy and just keeps them poorer for longer.