A while back Joel Spolsky (joel on software) tried switching to an SSD and compared his compile times to his old HDD. The result: no difference. Apparently, the disk access isn't the slow part of the compilation process. The bottleneck in compiling seems to be the processor speed.
Small projects can be about purity. Making the best possible code base you can. Especially ones where people work on it for free -- they wouldn't be working on it if they didn't deeply believe in it.
That may be true, but if people are working for free, the project can suffer from an inadequate amount of labor and the existing workers might have trouble getting stuff done in addition to their day job.
Purgathofer calls the creation a 'reflection on the loss of long established rights.'
The right to make a copy of a book and instantly send it to a million other people all around the world without the author or publisher receiving anything for their work?
The key thing that was lost in the digital book revolution is the ability to lend.
Lend or Borrow Kindle Books
You can lend a Kindle book to another reader for up to 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle device and can read the book after downloading a free Kindle reading app. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320
I'll take the pirate stuff any day of the week, because the groups that do it are small enough that reputation matters; It's their only currency.
Yeah, because the *reputation* of the software companies doesn't matter at all. (roll eyes)
A large corporation can just claim "oh noes! piracy destroyed my business!" and get a fat handout and a pile of FBI agents with orders to beat people in their homes until money falls out.
What a load of crap. A fat handout? Do you have any clue at all what you're talking about? Prove it by showing some instances of the government giving money to companies because of claimed losses due to piracy. What a load of crap. I can't think of any companies that have made a bunch of money by "beating people in their homes until money falls out". You're seriously in fantasy land with this one. But, hey, whatever fantasy makes you feel good about pirating other people's hard work without paying a dime. You're a real hero. The world owes you everything for free.
Pirates on the other hand... release a single malware-infested item and the forums fill up with complaints, and that group never gets any respect again.
Yeah, because real companies can release a malware-infested piece of software and suffer no consequences. Give me a break.
Bittorrent also ensures, at the protocol level, that everything downloaded matches what was uploaded.
Oh, so if a malware infested piece of software is uploaded, Bittorrent will make sure you're downloading the same malware-infested software that someone uploaded? That's reassuring.
Even Bill Gates said if you're gonna pirate, he hopes you'll pirate Microsoft... it's a sign of a software's usefulness.
Bill Gates prefers you pirate his software over someone elses because it helps block other people out of the market. If you're trained on Microsoft software, you're more likely to buy it in the future than if you learned some other piece of software. It's good for blocking other people out of the market (and it's most useful if you're a monopoly or nearly a monopoly) because if helps prevent other companies from getting a foot in the door.
A good example is somebody with a job who gets cancer. Sure, he/she may have excellent health insurance, but what about when he/she loses his/her job because they didn't show for four months while undergoing chemo therapy?"
Three answers: short term disability, long term disability, and COBRA (which allows you to continue your health insurance even if you lose your job). Yeah, COBRA is a bit expensive, but it's a heck of a lot less expensive than paying for cancer treatments yourself.
Sneaknet is such a stupid idea. It's horrendously slow and takes a lot of work. You really think lazy pirates are going to be happy about having to get off their asses and physically move stuff around in order to get copies of stuff? In a sneakernet environment, most will start paying for the shit they steal. Not to mention that any hard drive that exists is only going to contain a small subset of all the stuff they want to steal ("What? This hard drive only has Photoshop from 2009 and no music? I wanted a copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster.")
I'm not even sure what this Slashdot article is trying to say. Perhaps Soulskill wants us all to believe that piracy happens *only* because there are no legal alternatives. Of course, that's clearly not true. (Does anybody remember that the Humble Indie Bundle got pirated?) So, he treats us to an article showing that - if you make the TV show unavailable - that piracy increases. Let's take a moment to examine the logical fallacy in this. It's call "affirming the consequent" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
Here's an example of "affirming the consequent":
(1) If it rains, the sidewalk will be wet.
(2) If the sprinklers are on, the sidewalk will be wet.
We turned on the sprinklers and verified that the sidewalk gets wet. Conclusion: if we see a wet sidewalk, we can say that the sprinklers were on.
Obviously that conclusion is wrong.
Here's how that applies to piracy: if you notice that a CBS blackout leads to piracy (i.e. the sprinklers were on and now the sidewalk is wet), that still doesn't mean you can conclude that all instances of wet sidewalks are caused by TV blackouts (i.e. that all piracy is due to a lack of legal alternatives).
This article says nothing other than try to convince us all that "the only thing that causes piracy is a lack of access to legal alternatives". All it proves is that one factor that increases piracy is a lack of legal alternatives. It does not show that there aren't other factors that cause piracy. (Besides the Humble Indie Bundle example mentioned earlier, I've also seen people pirate movies off the internet even though they were available via other methods, like Amazon video on demand.)
P.S. Soulskill is posting another pro-piracy article? I'm shocked.
Yeah, I verified that the comment exists, but I'm certain that it's wrong. Based on the damage he does to the cans and the laptop computer, there's no way his bullets are travelling at 6000+ MPH.
Really? When I read the statement that "the only thing everyone could agree on is that the PRISM revelations came as no surprise", my first thought was "Yeah, I bet all the DEFCON guys said they weren't surprised -- but that's because they'd come off looking like an ignorant newbie if they said they were surprised. They want to appear like they know whats going on - that they have secret knowledge, that they're one step ahead of everyone because it makes them look like experts. To admit that they were surprised by the PRISM revelations, it makes them look like ignorant novices - something that they'd never want to do in front of their fellow hackers." I read it as a statement of immature posing, or (perhaps more generously) a statement indicative of their general paranoia.
Yup. That part struck me as particularly hypocritical, considering how much shit the US gets for "supporting the enemy of our enemy", but it's apparently justified to support the enemy of your enemy if you're really emotional about it.
So... your argument is that the technology *might* not exist or be common in 10 years? Let's all pile on. We might not be driving cars in 2024, either. Let's get rid of automobile driving courses. We might not be using a keyboard in 2024. Let's stop teaching kids to use a keyboard. Intelligent computers might do all our calculations for us. Let's get rid of math classes. Learning that stuff is like the last generation teaching us to be proficient at using a typewriter or handwriting in cursive!
I'm not even going to bother writing a decent response to your post, since it's a just a collection of assumptions, unsubstantiated claims, and wishful thinking.
> "Stardock Systems, creators of Sins of a Solar Empire, picked up the rights to the Star Control franchise, which they intend to reboot."
Sins of a Solar Empire was created by Ironclad Games and published by Stardock. Stardock has developed their own games in the past, but let's give credit where credit is due: it belongs to Ironclad Games. It's sad that publishers get more credit and name recognition than developers these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire
With patents, only the patent holder and its closest allies are capable of manufacturing, and improving on a product for N years. Moreover, the patent itself gives them a clear incentive NOT to improve on a product for N years, because the research costs money, and the patent shields them from competition. Additionally, the patent itself gives them a clear incentive NOT to manufacture enough product for everyone who would buy it, as long as keeping the price artificially high maximizes their revenue (see anti-cancer drugs in USA). Without patents, things WILL be co-invented by first movers, and then the entire world can start manufacturing and improving on them. How can anyone think that patents improve the rate of innovation is beyond me.
Hm. There are plenty of things I could nitpick here, but I'll skip those and just say that a while back I listened to a Pirate Party talk (I am very much against piracy and the pirate party) and one of the things they suggested was elimination of patents. They argued that the government would pay for drug development (I don't recall if it was directly by the government or a government bounty to drug companies for creating something). Apparently, they didn't believe that drug companies had enough of an incentive to create medical drugs without patents. I happen to agree with them on that point. Afterall, if the development costs are high (and it seems to range in the hundreds of millions of dollars), they need to attach a premium cost to each pill sold so that they can pay-off those investment costs, and every other company in the world can undercut their price by simply manufacturing the drug after it's been developed, then, yes, patents do help improve the rate of innovation. I'm not saying that patents are better than the government-funded system, but even the Pirate Party seems to agree that no drug patents and no government funding seems like a losing proposition for the creation of medical drugs.
Is there any evidence that this is being done because of US pressure? I can imagine a number of other scenarios: New Zealand's government decided on it's own to do this (which is worrying for the sustainability of democracies in general), or maybe the US acted as a role-model but didn't actually pressure anyone. I can't help but wonder if your comment was inspired by the fact that it's in-vogue to blame the US for everything bad that happens -- and I'm not defending the US, merely questioning the pile-on behavior (i.e. if you do something wrong, we'll add on a few other things that you probably aren't guilty of, but we'll blame you for anyway), and meanwhile giving cover to New Zealand's government by pretending that they they aren't responsible or guilty for their own bad behavior. I'm sure New Zealand's politicians are happy that you're deflecting blame.
Gabe talks out of both sides of his mouth. It's true that making it convenient will reduce piracy. However, Steam is DRM. This shows that he full understands the other side of the equation as well: stopping piracy isn't just about better service, it's also about making piracy difficult for pirates.
> "iTunes manages to sell a lot of music without protecting it at all"
Keep in mind that iTunes has mostly captured sales from the physical market. If you compare how much music sales have declined since 2001 and then look at the amount of revenue that iTunes is bringing in, you'll notice that for about every $1 decline in music sales, iTunes has managed to pick up something like a paltry $0.15 in sales. (Now, I'm not arguing that the other $0.85 decline is necessarily caused by piracy, but it's wasn't caused simply by music streaming services like Pandora - the decline was visible years before any music streaming services were available.) If this guy's magazine follows the same trend as music sales (even with the existence of iTunes), he'll very likely go bankrupt.
Yeah, but there's only one copy of the magazine and the owner generally wants it back. Plus if the borrower is borrowing a copy every month, it gets onerous and makes him look like a cheap freeloader to his friend. Conversely, when people pirate on the internet, one upload means that a million people can get a copy, they get a permanent copy, they never worry about giving it back, and they don't look like an onerous freeloader to his friends.
My point is that there are more limitations and disincentives to borrowing a physical magazine than there is to digital piracy. This produces stronger incentives for a physical borrower to buy his own subscription than digital piracy does. As a result, creators see digital piracy as much more threatening than physical piracy. (This is the same reason creators see libraries as less problematic than digital piracy.)
I recently listened to a Scientific American podcast where they did some "lab" tests to figure out whether or not someone was carrying a contraban package. They had five people walk through a room. One of the five had a contraban package. Random selection would produce a 20% rate of success. I believe they had a "hit" ratio of 30% using ordinary college students - which is slightly higher than random. (They also did a test with college students who tested high on the "psychopath test" and they were actually 70% accurate.) My main point, though, was that people do slightly better than random.
Slashdot Mirror
A while back Joel Spolsky (joel on software) tried switching to an SSD and compared his compile times to his old HDD. The result: no difference. Apparently, the disk access isn't the slow part of the compilation process. The bottleneck in compiling seems to be the processor speed.
Small projects can be about purity. Making the best possible code base you can. Especially ones where people work on it for free -- they wouldn't be working on it if they didn't deeply believe in it.
That may be true, but if people are working for free, the project can suffer from an inadequate amount of labor and the existing workers might have trouble getting stuff done in addition to their day job.
Purgathofer calls the creation a 'reflection on the loss of long established rights.'
The right to make a copy of a book and instantly send it to a million other people all around the world without the author or publisher receiving anything for their work?
The key thing that was lost in the digital book revolution is the ability to lend.
Lend or Borrow Kindle Books
You can lend a Kindle book to another reader for up to 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle device and can read the book after downloading a free Kindle reading app.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200549320
I'll take the pirate stuff any day of the week, because the groups that do it are small enough that reputation matters; It's their only currency.
Yeah, because the *reputation* of the software companies doesn't matter at all. (roll eyes)
A large corporation can just claim "oh noes! piracy destroyed my business!" and get a fat handout and a pile of FBI agents with orders to beat people in their homes until money falls out.
What a load of crap. A fat handout? Do you have any clue at all what you're talking about? Prove it by showing some instances of the government giving money to companies because of claimed losses due to piracy. What a load of crap. I can't think of any companies that have made a bunch of money by "beating people in their homes until money falls out". You're seriously in fantasy land with this one. But, hey, whatever fantasy makes you feel good about pirating other people's hard work without paying a dime. You're a real hero. The world owes you everything for free.
Pirates on the other hand... release a single malware-infested item and the forums fill up with complaints, and that group never gets any respect again.
Yeah, because real companies can release a malware-infested piece of software and suffer no consequences. Give me a break.
Bittorrent also ensures, at the protocol level, that everything downloaded matches what was uploaded.
Oh, so if a malware infested piece of software is uploaded, Bittorrent will make sure you're downloading the same malware-infested software that someone uploaded? That's reassuring.
Even Bill Gates said if you're gonna pirate, he hopes you'll pirate Microsoft... it's a sign of a software's usefulness.
Bill Gates prefers you pirate his software over someone elses because it helps block other people out of the market. If you're trained on Microsoft software, you're more likely to buy it in the future than if you learned some other piece of software. It's good for blocking other people out of the market (and it's most useful if you're a monopoly or nearly a monopoly) because if helps prevent other companies from getting a foot in the door.
Indeed. This is why I only get my computer security news from cattle ranchers and Eskimos. They have no vested interest.
A good example is somebody with a job who gets cancer. Sure, he/she may have excellent health insurance, but what about when he/she loses his/her job because they didn't show for four months while undergoing chemo therapy?"
Three answers: short term disability, long term disability, and COBRA (which allows you to continue your health insurance even if you lose your job). Yeah, COBRA is a bit expensive, but it's a heck of a lot less expensive than paying for cancer treatments yourself.
Except that RT does make-up bad stuff about the US. For example, conspiracy theories about 9/11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUmGvyUIU_E
RT doesn't take pot-shots at FOX? How about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpXBVNlLuEY
Sneaknet is such a stupid idea. It's horrendously slow and takes a lot of work. You really think lazy pirates are going to be happy about having to get off their asses and physically move stuff around in order to get copies of stuff? In a sneakernet environment, most will start paying for the shit they steal. Not to mention that any hard drive that exists is only going to contain a small subset of all the stuff they want to steal ("What? This hard drive only has Photoshop from 2009 and no music? I wanted a copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster.")
If this were true, then why did it take 10 years for the PirateBay to create it?
It's "often debated by the big media" that a lack of legal alternatives has no effect on piracy rates? This seems hard to believe. Source?
I'm not even sure what this Slashdot article is trying to say. Perhaps Soulskill wants us all to believe that piracy happens *only* because there are no legal alternatives. Of course, that's clearly not true. (Does anybody remember that the Humble Indie Bundle got pirated?) So, he treats us to an article showing that - if you make the TV show unavailable - that piracy increases. Let's take a moment to examine the logical fallacy in this. It's call "affirming the consequent" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
Here's an example of "affirming the consequent":
(1) If it rains, the sidewalk will be wet.
(2) If the sprinklers are on, the sidewalk will be wet.
We turned on the sprinklers and verified that the sidewalk gets wet. Conclusion: if we see a wet sidewalk, we can say that the sprinklers were on.
Obviously that conclusion is wrong.
Here's how that applies to piracy: if you notice that a CBS blackout leads to piracy (i.e. the sprinklers were on and now the sidewalk is wet), that still doesn't mean you can conclude that all instances of wet sidewalks are caused by TV blackouts (i.e. that all piracy is due to a lack of legal alternatives).
This article says nothing other than try to convince us all that "the only thing that causes piracy is a lack of access to legal alternatives". All it proves is that one factor that increases piracy is a lack of legal alternatives. It does not show that there aren't other factors that cause piracy. (Besides the Humble Indie Bundle example mentioned earlier, I've also seen people pirate movies off the internet even though they were available via other methods, like Amazon video on demand.)
P.S. Soulskill is posting another pro-piracy article? I'm shocked.
Yeah, I verified that the comment exists, but I'm certain that it's wrong. Based on the damage he does to the cans and the laptop computer, there's no way his bullets are travelling at 6000+ MPH.
Really? When I read the statement that "the only thing everyone could agree on is that the PRISM revelations came as no surprise", my first thought was "Yeah, I bet all the DEFCON guys said they weren't surprised -- but that's because they'd come off looking like an ignorant newbie if they said they were surprised. They want to appear like they know whats going on - that they have secret knowledge, that they're one step ahead of everyone because it makes them look like experts. To admit that they were surprised by the PRISM revelations, it makes them look like ignorant novices - something that they'd never want to do in front of their fellow hackers." I read it as a statement of immature posing, or (perhaps more generously) a statement indicative of their general paranoia.
Yup. That part struck me as particularly hypocritical, considering how much shit the US gets for "supporting the enemy of our enemy", but it's apparently justified to support the enemy of your enemy if you're really emotional about it.
So... your argument is that the technology *might* not exist or be common in 10 years? Let's all pile on. We might not be driving cars in 2024, either. Let's get rid of automobile driving courses. We might not be using a keyboard in 2024. Let's stop teaching kids to use a keyboard. Intelligent computers might do all our calculations for us. Let's get rid of math classes. Learning that stuff is like the last generation teaching us to be proficient at using a typewriter or handwriting in cursive!
I'm not even going to bother writing a decent response to your post, since it's a just a collection of assumptions, unsubstantiated claims, and wishful thinking.
> "Stardock Systems, creators of Sins of a Solar Empire, picked up the rights to the Star Control franchise, which they intend to reboot."
Sins of a Solar Empire was created by Ironclad Games and published by Stardock. Stardock has developed their own games in the past, but let's give credit where credit is due: it belongs to Ironclad Games. It's sad that publishers get more credit and name recognition than developers these days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire
Hm. There are plenty of things I could nitpick here, but I'll skip those and just say that a while back I listened to a Pirate Party talk (I am very much against piracy and the pirate party) and one of the things they suggested was elimination of patents. They argued that the government would pay for drug development (I don't recall if it was directly by the government or a government bounty to drug companies for creating something). Apparently, they didn't believe that drug companies had enough of an incentive to create medical drugs without patents. I happen to agree with them on that point. Afterall, if the development costs are high (and it seems to range in the hundreds of millions of dollars), they need to attach a premium cost to each pill sold so that they can pay-off those investment costs, and every other company in the world can undercut their price by simply manufacturing the drug after it's been developed, then, yes, patents do help improve the rate of innovation. I'm not saying that patents are better than the government-funded system, but even the Pirate Party seems to agree that no drug patents and no government funding seems like a losing proposition for the creation of medical drugs.
Is there any evidence that this is being done because of US pressure? I can imagine a number of other scenarios: New Zealand's government decided on it's own to do this (which is worrying for the sustainability of democracies in general), or maybe the US acted as a role-model but didn't actually pressure anyone. I can't help but wonder if your comment was inspired by the fact that it's in-vogue to blame the US for everything bad that happens -- and I'm not defending the US, merely questioning the pile-on behavior (i.e. if you do something wrong, we'll add on a few other things that you probably aren't guilty of, but we'll blame you for anyway), and meanwhile giving cover to New Zealand's government by pretending that they they aren't responsible or guilty for their own bad behavior. I'm sure New Zealand's politicians are happy that you're deflecting blame.
Gabe talks out of both sides of his mouth. It's true that making it convenient will reduce piracy. However, Steam is DRM. This shows that he full understands the other side of the equation as well: stopping piracy isn't just about better service, it's also about making piracy difficult for pirates.
> "iTunes manages to sell a lot of music without protecting it at all"
Keep in mind that iTunes has mostly captured sales from the physical market. If you compare how much music sales have declined since 2001 and then look at the amount of revenue that iTunes is bringing in, you'll notice that for about every $1 decline in music sales, iTunes has managed to pick up something like a paltry $0.15 in sales. (Now, I'm not arguing that the other $0.85 decline is necessarily caused by piracy, but it's wasn't caused simply by music streaming services like Pandora - the decline was visible years before any music streaming services were available.) If this guy's magazine follows the same trend as music sales (even with the existence of iTunes), he'll very likely go bankrupt.
Yeah, but there's only one copy of the magazine and the owner generally wants it back. Plus if the borrower is borrowing a copy every month, it gets onerous and makes him look like a cheap freeloader to his friend. Conversely, when people pirate on the internet, one upload means that a million people can get a copy, they get a permanent copy, they never worry about giving it back, and they don't look like an onerous freeloader to his friends.
My point is that there are more limitations and disincentives to borrowing a physical magazine than there is to digital piracy. This produces stronger incentives for a physical borrower to buy his own subscription than digital piracy does. As a result, creators see digital piracy as much more threatening than physical piracy. (This is the same reason creators see libraries as less problematic than digital piracy.)
I recently listened to a Scientific American podcast where they did some "lab" tests to figure out whether or not someone was carrying a contraban package. They had five people walk through a room. One of the five had a contraban package. Random selection would produce a 20% rate of success. I believe they had a "hit" ratio of 30% using ordinary college students - which is slightly higher than random. (They also did a test with college students who tested high on the "psychopath test" and they were actually 70% accurate.) My main point, though, was that people do slightly better than random.
Here's the podcast (jump to 2 minutes in): http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=psychopathys-bright-side-kevin-dutt-12-12-29