Yes, piracy exists, yes it has an impact, but no, that impact cannot be reliably measured with any precision -- there are too many factors influencing the sales numbers you get...
Yes, humans are creating C02, yes C02 has an impact, but no, that impact cannot be reliably measured with any precision -- there are too many factors influencing the global climate...... therefore we should do nothing about global warming?
I don't mean to be glib, but your argument reminds me forcibly of anthropogenic global warming skeptics, who I think are a relatively rare breed here and would be heavily criticized for such an argument. I don't know the methodology of the study, but I think that it's unfair to presuppose that no general conclusions can be reached without being able to model every facet of a complex situation. I do not think that it is a stretch to say that piracy is causing large losses for the *AA -- maybe they deserve it, and maybe it's less than this particular study indicates, but I think that any reasonable analysis will probably come to the conclusion that they are making less money than they would without the massive piracy proliferation.
Maybe this particular study can be criticized for specific statistical failures, but I don't believe your argument that says that no meaningful data can be generated. We have to work from certain assumptions and accept that any results will have a certain margin for error, but these studies seem invaluable to meaningful discussions of piracy. I'm not sure that there's enough available information to critique this particular methodology, and I'm a little skeptical of the actual dollar amounts, but plain old common sense tells me losses are huge and I don't think it's fair to dismiss these studies simply because not all factors are known -- that's why we develop complex models and argue over the seed values.
Peter Woit, a critic of string theory, points out some of the misleading bits in this article on his blog, "Not Even Wrong:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress (scroll down for it). A brief discussion of why this isn't quite as exciting as it may sound.
JoAnne Hewett (one of the original authors) also comments in the blog, saying that the journalists tried to make the work a little more accessible by suppressing important details:
As for the headline that is blazened on the SLAC home page - I saw it for the first time when someone drew my attention to it. I knew it was going to cause headaches...
So while this may be solid work, it doesn't seem quite so sexy as it has been made out to be...
While there's clearly a certain amount of showboating going on with extremely high APM's, it's pretty short-sighted to claim that 150-175 is the maximum efficient number of actions (not sure what 'highest _most efficient_number' actually means here). I can't speculate too much about warcraft, but I was a top US player in starcraft several years ago, and I have definite experience there.
Most of those actions are not mouse clicks, but are using keyboard hotkeys: primarily cycling through hotkeys of production buildings, producing units while out fighting or scouting. Cycling through over and over may be a bit overkill, but the added efficiency of never having an empty building is one of the key advantages of a better player. If you check your buildings only when you think they might need new orders, you're liable to be missing valuable time.
That said, before the program to measure APM (http://www.bwchart.com) was created, even the professionals had significantly lower APMs, with few players over 250. Now most pros have 300+ APM, probably due to the prestige of it...
My own opinion (though it's a pretty hot issue even in the hardcore starcraft community) is that it's hard to compete at top levels without an APM exceeding 200 (less may be ok for Protoss players).
As to the assertion that it's hard to get over 250, I suspect you were relying on the mouse instead of hotkeys (which composes a large percentage of top-player actions).
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Yes, piracy exists, yes it has an impact, but no, that impact cannot be reliably measured with any precision -- there are too many factors influencing the sales numbers you get...
Yes, humans are creating C02, yes C02 has an impact, but no, that impact cannot be reliably measured with any precision -- there are too many factors influencing the global climate...... therefore we should do nothing about global warming?
I don't mean to be glib, but your argument reminds me forcibly of anthropogenic global warming skeptics, who I think are a relatively rare breed here and would be heavily criticized for such an argument. I don't know the methodology of the study, but I think that it's unfair to presuppose that no general conclusions can be reached without being able to model every facet of a complex situation. I do not think that it is a stretch to say that piracy is causing large losses for the *AA -- maybe they deserve it, and maybe it's less than this particular study indicates, but I think that any reasonable analysis will probably come to the conclusion that they are making less money than they would without the massive piracy proliferation.
Maybe this particular study can be criticized for specific statistical failures, but I don't believe your argument that says that no meaningful data can be generated. We have to work from certain assumptions and accept that any results will have a certain margin for error, but these studies seem invaluable to meaningful discussions of piracy. I'm not sure that there's enough available information to critique this particular methodology, and I'm a little skeptical of the actual dollar amounts, but plain old common sense tells me losses are huge and I don't think it's fair to dismiss these studies simply because not all factors are known -- that's why we develop complex models and argue over the seed values.
Peter Woit, a critic of string theory, points out some of the misleading bits in this article on his blog, "Not Even Wrong: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress (scroll down for it). A brief discussion of why this isn't quite as exciting as it may sound.
JoAnne Hewett (one of the original authors) also comments in the blog, saying that the journalists tried to make the work a little more accessible by suppressing important details: As for the headline that is blazened on the SLAC home page - I saw it for the first time when someone drew my attention to it. I knew it was going to cause headaches...
So while this may be solid work, it doesn't seem quite so sexy as it has been made out to be...
While there's clearly a certain amount of showboating going on with extremely high APM's, it's pretty short-sighted to claim that 150-175 is the maximum efficient number of actions (not sure what 'highest _most efficient_number' actually means here). I can't speculate too much about warcraft, but I was a top US player in starcraft several years ago, and I have definite experience there. Most of those actions are not mouse clicks, but are using keyboard hotkeys: primarily cycling through hotkeys of production buildings, producing units while out fighting or scouting. Cycling through over and over may be a bit overkill, but the added efficiency of never having an empty building is one of the key advantages of a better player. If you check your buildings only when you think they might need new orders, you're liable to be missing valuable time. That said, before the program to measure APM (http://www.bwchart.com) was created, even the professionals had significantly lower APMs, with few players over 250. Now most pros have 300+ APM, probably due to the prestige of it... My own opinion (though it's a pretty hot issue even in the hardcore starcraft community) is that it's hard to compete at top levels without an APM exceeding 200 (less may be ok for Protoss players). As to the assertion that it's hard to get over 250, I suspect you were relying on the mouse instead of hotkeys (which composes a large percentage of top-player actions).