With inaccurate numbers such as these, lobby groups can convince government to regulate, hinder or even ban torrent usage harming legitimate usage
Whatever inaccuracies are in this study (and I doubt it is that inaccurate, TFS just describes their research badly), accurate numbers really wouldn't undermine the case against piracy. What puts legitimate usage at risk is not originally "lobby groups", it is the illegitimate users - i.e. the pirates - that threaten legitimate usage. If it weren't for the mass free-loading, then those of us fighting to protect digital freedoms would have a much stronger case.
I know you're going for funny, but it's worth pointing out your logic is flawed. Read more carefully and you see that 0.3% of the files available are legal. That doesn't mean that 0.3% of the downloads are legal.
The article states that they selected randomly from the most actively seeded files so these files are in use, but we don't know what the drop off is. It could go '5k files of Iron Man 2, 5k files of Lady Gaga... 400 files of Ubuntu 10.04, 350 files of Centos 5.4, etc.' If the cut off point of the thousand is at Ubuntu 10.04 then it gets included as part of the 0.3%, but is far less of how many are being downloaded.
This is an arbitrary example just to clarify. Because they picked a thousand of the more active downloads, it does have some relation to popularity, but it's not a clear one and likely less than 0.3%.
Has it been clarified exactly what was meant by "child porn"? The laws have been so politicized recently that the term is starting to cover all sorts of things, right up to and including models who are just a shade under 18.
You're not kidding. In the United Arab Emirates, some clever marketoids are selling MP5 players. I've tried explaining to someone from there that what they actually own is an MP3 player, but I made limited progress. They just kept insisting "no - it's an MP5 player".
He realized that charity was a much better ego-booster than being the much-maligned head of a big corporation.
Wow! Some people just can't win, can they? Get involved in big charity work, you're just feeding your ego. Anyway, those were some pretty strong words about Linus that you kicked off this discussion with. I take it you either know him personally or have worked with him fairly closely?
You mentioned "natural talent" in your post. Whilst certainly true that some people don't have much aptitude for graphic design and others take to it more easily, a large factor is the effort one puts into a piece of work. To illustrate, long before I actually studied art, I thought I was crap at drawing. I'd look at some professional artist's work and it would be fantastic compared to what I could do. I'd pull out a bit of paper, try drawing something, and see it was no-where near as good. Then I talked to an artist and asked him how long a piece had taken him. "About four hours," he replied. And the light-bulb went on. So I sat down and decided that I would spend four hours on the next drawing I did. And okay - it wasn't anywhere near as good as the actual artist's as I was just a kid at the time - but I had realised that talent and training were only part of the equation.
To bring this back to the subject at hand, the same is true of Graphic Design. If something is going to be crowdsourced, then you can't just say "I'm great" and bang out a submission in half an hour. It's not only, or even mostly, a question of "natural talent". It's kind of like a Dutch Auction of how much work you are willing to do for free in the mere hope of being paid.
Are their downsides to that model? You betcha. It's akin to the same thing we're seeing in other fields. In theory it's an excellent thing for society when work can be done more cheaply, but in practice it isn't because of the unequal distribution of the rewards. When thr tractor was invented, did a load of farm-hands say: 'great, we can all work slightly less and still produce the same amout of food'? No, of course not. They found wages dropping and people getting laid off because the rewards of progress were taken by the owning classes. Their career became devalued.
I think an alternative analogy could be a particular profession - let's call them graphic designers - being subjected by market forces, to a business model where they are required to invest a lot of work in the hopes of getting paid, knowing that only one amongst them actually will be reimbursed for their time.
I mean, I admit this is a bit complicated and probably not as accurate as thirty post discussion about apples, but you know, I'm just putting it out there...
You work for the company and you couldn't be bothered making it a proper link? Don't you know that making people have to copy and paste a URL will actually halve the number of referrals? No joke!
The Daleks are created by a great intelligence to be his chosen people who will triumph over all other races. Jews are genetically just the same as everyone else.
Genetically speaking, it doesn't seem to be a problem.
It's actually a good thing from the point of view of the species due to something called the Founders' Effect. A bit of intermarriage helps positive traits (commonly in the immune system) become established. Of course, you don't want to get any closer than first cousins and you don't want to do the first cousins thing too often.
Sounds like a good and healthy model, but it needs some work. Minor point being that having a child will interfere with you becoming a financially secure and ready thirty year old. Larger point being that at the age of thirty, you don't suddenly stop wanting to have kids. Maybe if you've already had some you feel differently, but who knows? The biological urge to have children is even stronger at that age I think than when you're in your teens. So what happens with the thirty year olds who want kids? Are the having them with the fifteen year olds? Doubling up the burden of looking after their own and their childrens kids?
She must have been 18 because God's not a pedophile! >:-(
Pedophilia does not mean anyone under the age of 18. Pedophilia is pre-pubescent as I understand it. Not that this makes it a great thing to start having sex with fifteen year old girls (assuming you're significantly older), but I think the term for that is hebephilia (early adolescence) or Ephebolphilia (late adolescence). So if you find seventeen year olds attractive, that's ephebophilia (try to remember they're still growing up and vulnerable). Fourteen year olds are hebephillia (you probably shouldn't go into teaching). Just hitting puberty or younger, is where pedophilia is the correct term (just, I don't know, seek help, seriously).
There's a shockingly small number of actual different stories, (I can't remember the exact number, but it's somewhere around 4 or maybe 8).
I believe you may be recalling the statement from George Orwell's 1984 where a character working in the government's fiction department remarks "they only have six plots, but they swap them about a bit". The comment was meant to be a cynical one about their creativity, not to be taken as some sort of authoritative statement on the fundamentals of storytelling. Joseph Campbell has a lot to answer for.
Oh yes, totally. I really liked David Tennant's Doctor and even if the final episodes had plot holes you could lose a planet down, his farewells were still moving and it was sad to see him go. I determined to give the new Doctor a fair chance, even though deep down I had some doubts. The first five minutes of the Matt Smith episode were a bit "well this could go either way". The next ten minutes or so were odd, but strangely endearing. The Doctor's "I don't even have an aunt" is delivered with a great deal more humour and less pathos than Ten would have squeezed into the line. Basically, he's really good. And then from there the episode takes off like a rocket. I wont give away any spoilers, but suffice to say the entire theme of the episode seems to be to get away from all the Deus Ex Machinae that plagued previous series (Sonic Screwdrivers that can redirect spaceships, TARDISes that have the power to turn humans into Time Re-Writing divinities, mixing three jars of coloured liquids together to cure all known diseases, etc.). It's basically the Doctor's intellect vs. a world-ending threat. If you like the sound of that, then I suspect you'll enjoy it immensely. The series has a couple of weak episodes and the odd thing that doesn't make sense, but on the whole it's extremely strong. They've also done away with the omnipotent Doctor tendency a bit. You see that he really does need his friends to get him through some situations in a way that wasn't emphasized very often in the previous series. Eleven also has a great and calm sense of humour. It's great stuff. Just keep an open mind for the first part of the new series.
But to be fair, many of them really, really suck too. Especially Runaway Bride (worst monster in Who by far), The Next Doctor (resurrecting the Robot Monster alien design, then adding in giant robots for no reason).
I agree with the giant Cyberking. So bad that Moffat actually needed to ret-conn it out of existence. But The Runaway Bride was one of my favourite episodes. Aside from Donna being a great change after a whole season of Martha's simpering ("this friend of yours, just before she left, did she slap you?"), I thought the actress playing the Racnoss was fantastic. She was utterly relishing that role and was hillarious and horrible all at the same time. Of course, you feel differently and that doesn't affect me. I'm just continuously amazed by how differently people can perceive the same episode. What was it that turned you off from Runaway Bride? The TARDIS - car chase alone had me laughing out loud and I tend to prefer the more serious Doctor Who ones.
Ever watched "The Tenth Planet"? The Cybermen are so goofy in their first appearance, but it's great stuff...
Goofy, yes. And yet there's something very wonderful about those early episodes. My favourite Doctors are Troughton, Smith and Tennant in that order. An honourable mention for Pertwee. Those early Who episodes never really treat you as an idiot. And it doesn't matter that the little robots are clearly short people in black boxes (Quarks, I'm looking at you), because you soon forget this and enjoy the story. In a lot of ways, Matt Smith is the closet Doctor to Patrick Troughton there's been. He's has the same capacity to lose track of what he's doing sometimes. When Troughton says: "The planet will be safe now. The explosion will be confined to a small volcanic eruption that just consumes the island", and Jaimie replies "But Doctor, we're on the island." Well, it's the sort of thing you can almost see Eleven doing as well. He's got some of the same inherent gentleness that wasn't really part of Ten's psychological make-up.
Sorry - as you can tell, big Who fan.:) I really, really do hope Matt stays around for more than a couple of seasons.
That's a terrible parallel to Ubuntu vs. Windows. For what it's worth, I'm a long time user of Linux - started off with an early SuSE then moved to Slackware. These days, I use either Gentoo (preferred) or Ubuntu (anything other than my main dev box I can't be bothered setting up Gentoo on). And you know what? I'd recommend Windows 7 to most people. I have it on my laptop and though I personally sometimes run into limitations on it, they're not limitations most people will encounter. I can't see my mother complaining that she can't open a bash shell for example.
Ubuntu is probably the easiest Linux out there, but it's not as easy as Windows 7. Some of that results from the world in general being set up for Windows, rather than for Linux, and some of it is due to Ubuntu not being as slick or hassle-free as Windows 7. If you want security, then people are less likely to hack your Linux box than they are a Windows one, that's for sure, and you're not very likely to pick up a virus or be tricked into running some trojan. So as the summary states, there are arguments for and against. But it's pretty far from the truth to start talking about people who don't know enough to remove their clothes before ironing. I need a lot from my OS so I use Linux. But if I just wanted to surf, write emails and do some light word-processing, I have to say Windows 7 would be fine for me. My laptop which is primarily used for those things, has Windows 7 on it for this reason. If I need to do anything more on it, I just open a remote shell to my main system and use Screens and that's good enough for me.
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Whatever inaccuracies are in this study (and I doubt it is that inaccurate, TFS just describes their research badly), accurate numbers really wouldn't undermine the case against piracy. What puts legitimate usage at risk is not originally "lobby groups", it is the illegitimate users - i.e. the pirates - that threaten legitimate usage. If it weren't for the mass free-loading, then those of us fighting to protect digital freedoms would have a much stronger case.
I know you're going for funny, but it's worth pointing out your logic is flawed. Read more carefully and you see that 0.3% of the files available are legal. That doesn't mean that 0.3% of the downloads are legal.
The article states that they selected randomly from the most actively seeded files so these files are in use, but we don't know what the drop off is. It could go '5k files of Iron Man 2, 5k files of Lady Gaga... 400 files of Ubuntu 10.04, 350 files of Centos 5.4, etc.' If the cut off point of the thousand is at Ubuntu 10.04 then it gets included as part of the 0.3%, but is far less of how many are being downloaded.
This is an arbitrary example just to clarify. Because they picked a thousand of the more active downloads, it does have some relation to popularity, but it's not a clear one and likely less than 0.3%.
Question (not argument): How would one procedurally generate drivers? Is this humour, hyperbole, or are you actually talking about a valid principle?
Has it been clarified exactly what was meant by "child porn"? The laws have been so politicized recently that the term is starting to cover all sorts of things, right up to and including models who are just a shade under 18.
Well that was one of the arguments that piracy proponents used to use to say piracy should be legalised.
You're not kidding. In the United Arab Emirates, some clever marketoids are selling MP5 players. I've tried explaining to someone from there that what they actually own is an MP3 player, but I made limited progress. They just kept insisting "no - it's an MP5 player".
Wow! Some people just can't win, can they? Get involved in big charity work, you're just feeding your ego. Anyway, those were some pretty strong words about Linus that you kicked off this discussion with. I take it you either know him personally or have worked with him fairly closely?
Somewhere out there is an underfunded galaxy filled with old computers that I can't get permission to throw out?
and tell what they are at a distance that take light slightly longer than our recorded history as a species to travel.
Fuck yeah!
(That is all)
You mentioned "natural talent" in your post. Whilst certainly true that some people don't have much aptitude for graphic design and others take to it more easily, a large factor is the effort one puts into a piece of work. To illustrate, long before I actually studied art, I thought I was crap at drawing. I'd look at some professional artist's work and it would be fantastic compared to what I could do. I'd pull out a bit of paper, try drawing something, and see it was no-where near as good. Then I talked to an artist and asked him how long a piece had taken him. "About four hours," he replied. And the light-bulb went on. So I sat down and decided that I would spend four hours on the next drawing I did. And okay - it wasn't anywhere near as good as the actual artist's as I was just a kid at the time - but I had realised that talent and training were only part of the equation.
To bring this back to the subject at hand, the same is true of Graphic Design. If something is going to be crowdsourced, then you can't just say "I'm great" and bang out a submission in half an hour. It's not only, or even mostly, a question of "natural talent". It's kind of like a Dutch Auction of how much work you are willing to do for free in the mere hope of being paid.
Are their downsides to that model? You betcha. It's akin to the same thing we're seeing in other fields. In theory it's an excellent thing for society when work can be done more cheaply, but in practice it isn't because of the unequal distribution of the rewards. When thr tractor was invented, did a load of farm-hands say: 'great, we can all work slightly less and still produce the same amout of food'? No, of course not. They found wages dropping and people getting laid off because the rewards of progress were taken by the owning classes. Their career became devalued.
I think an alternative analogy could be a particular profession - let's call them graphic designers - being subjected by market forces, to a business model where they are required to invest a lot of work in the hopes of getting paid, knowing that only one amongst them actually will be reimbursed for their time.
I mean, I admit this is a bit complicated and probably not as accurate as thirty post discussion about apples, but you know, I'm just putting it out there...
You work for the company and you couldn't be bothered making it a proper link? Don't you know that making people have to copy and paste a URL will actually halve the number of referrals? No joke!
The Daleks are created by a great intelligence to be his chosen people who will triumph over all other races. Jews are genetically just the same as everyone else.
It's actually a good thing from the point of view of the species due to something called the Founders' Effect. A bit of intermarriage helps positive traits (commonly in the immune system) become established. Of course, you don't want to get any closer than first cousins and you don't want to do the first cousins thing too often.
Sounds like a good and healthy model, but it needs some work. Minor point being that having a child will interfere with you becoming a financially secure and ready thirty year old. Larger point being that at the age of thirty, you don't suddenly stop wanting to have kids. Maybe if you've already had some you feel differently, but who knows? The biological urge to have children is even stronger at that age I think than when you're in your teens. So what happens with the thirty year olds who want kids? Are the having them with the fifteen year olds? Doubling up the burden of looking after their own and their childrens kids?
Pedophilia does not mean anyone under the age of 18. Pedophilia is pre-pubescent as I understand it. Not that this makes it a great thing to start having sex with fifteen year old girls (assuming you're significantly older), but I think the term for that is hebephilia (early adolescence) or Ephebolphilia (late adolescence). So if you find seventeen year olds attractive, that's ephebophilia (try to remember they're still growing up and vulnerable). Fourteen year olds are hebephillia (you probably shouldn't go into teaching). Just hitting puberty or younger, is where pedophilia is the correct term (just, I don't know, seek help, seriously).
I believe you may be recalling the statement from George Orwell's 1984 where a character working in the government's fiction department remarks "they only have six plots, but they swap them about a bit". The comment was meant to be a cynical one about their creativity, not to be taken as some sort of authoritative statement on the fundamentals of storytelling. Joseph Campbell has a lot to answer for.
Oh yes, totally. I really liked David Tennant's Doctor and even if the final episodes had plot holes you could lose a planet down, his farewells were still moving and it was sad to see him go. I determined to give the new Doctor a fair chance, even though deep down I had some doubts. The first five minutes of the Matt Smith episode were a bit "well this could go either way". The next ten minutes or so were odd, but strangely endearing. The Doctor's "I don't even have an aunt" is delivered with a great deal more humour and less pathos than Ten would have squeezed into the line. Basically, he's really good. And then from there the episode takes off like a rocket. I wont give away any spoilers, but suffice to say the entire theme of the episode seems to be to get away from all the Deus Ex Machinae that plagued previous series (Sonic Screwdrivers that can redirect spaceships, TARDISes that have the power to turn humans into Time Re-Writing divinities, mixing three jars of coloured liquids together to cure all known diseases, etc.). It's basically the Doctor's intellect vs. a world-ending threat. If you like the sound of that, then I suspect you'll enjoy it immensely. The series has a couple of weak episodes and the odd thing that doesn't make sense, but on the whole it's extremely strong. They've also done away with the omnipotent Doctor tendency a bit. You see that he really does need his friends to get him through some situations in a way that wasn't emphasized very often in the previous series. Eleven also has a great and calm sense of humour. It's great stuff. Just keep an open mind for the first part of the new series.
I agree with the giant Cyberking. So bad that Moffat actually needed to ret-conn it out of existence. But The Runaway Bride was one of my favourite episodes. Aside from Donna being a great change after a whole season of Martha's simpering ("this friend of yours, just before she left, did she slap you?"), I thought the actress playing the Racnoss was fantastic. She was utterly relishing that role and was hillarious and horrible all at the same time. Of course, you feel differently and that doesn't affect me. I'm just continuously amazed by how differently people can perceive the same episode. What was it that turned you off from Runaway Bride? The TARDIS - car chase alone had me laughing out loud and I tend to prefer the more serious Doctor Who ones.
I totally agree with your post, with the exception of Doctor Who. Basically because I like it.
Only as the Rani and the Master, respectively. :)
Goofy, yes. And yet there's something very wonderful about those early episodes. My favourite Doctors are Troughton, Smith and Tennant in that order. An honourable mention for Pertwee. Those early Who episodes never really treat you as an idiot. And it doesn't matter that the little robots are clearly short people in black boxes (Quarks, I'm looking at you), because you soon forget this and enjoy the story. In a lot of ways, Matt Smith is the closet Doctor to Patrick Troughton there's been. He's has the same capacity to lose track of what he's doing sometimes. When Troughton says: "The planet will be safe now. The explosion will be confined to a small volcanic eruption that just consumes the island", and Jaimie replies "But Doctor, we're on the island." Well, it's the sort of thing you can almost see Eleven doing as well. He's got some of the same inherent gentleness that wasn't really part of Ten's psychological make-up.
:) I really, really do hope Matt stays around for more than a couple of seasons.
Sorry - as you can tell, big Who fan.
That's a terrible parallel to Ubuntu vs. Windows. For what it's worth, I'm a long time user of Linux - started off with an early SuSE then moved to Slackware. These days, I use either Gentoo (preferred) or Ubuntu (anything other than my main dev box I can't be bothered setting up Gentoo on). And you know what? I'd recommend Windows 7 to most people. I have it on my laptop and though I personally sometimes run into limitations on it, they're not limitations most people will encounter. I can't see my mother complaining that she can't open a bash shell for example.
Ubuntu is probably the easiest Linux out there, but it's not as easy as Windows 7. Some of that results from the world in general being set up for Windows, rather than for Linux, and some of it is due to Ubuntu not being as slick or hassle-free as Windows 7. If you want security, then people are less likely to hack your Linux box than they are a Windows one, that's for sure, and you're not very likely to pick up a virus or be tricked into running some trojan. So as the summary states, there are arguments for and against. But it's pretty far from the truth to start talking about people who don't know enough to remove their clothes before ironing. I need a lot from my OS so I use Linux. But if I just wanted to surf, write emails and do some light word-processing, I have to say Windows 7 would be fine for me. My laptop which is primarily used for those things, has Windows 7 on it for this reason. If I need to do anything more on it, I just open a remote shell to my main system and use Screens and that's good enough for me.
Doesn't matter. He can buy a Fez.
Yeah, but the Daleks already hate everybody. The only way you could make them anti-semitic would be to make them nicer to everyone else.
"BE-FORE WE EXTERMINATE YOU ALL, EVERY-ONE WILL GET A CUP OF TEAAA. EXCEPT FOR MIS-TERRR GOLDSTEIN! GOLDSTEIN GETS NO TEAA!"