Cherry-picking sympathetic journals while not even addressing the obvious correlation between piracy and decreased music sales is intellectually dishonest.
And rejecting studies just because of where they were published, without any contrary evidence, would be intellectually lazy...
I'm not sure about that. It seems clear to me that a high degree of bias is likely from any report paid for by an interested party. Such documents then require much greater scrutiny in their facts and interpretation. Perhaps going to great lengths to analyse these documents for misinterpretation or skewed statistics would be warranted if there were not hundreds of other publications presenting results based on the same data but from an unbiased perspective. Its not like the numbers that these reports are based on are secret.
What I see here is that people have discovered "hey, I can download stuff for free" and then just make up all sorts of excuses like "RIAA suppresses innovation" to desperately justify what they are doing.
Do you like to unnecessarily pay for things you can get for free?
Couldn't the dissenters just respond, "You've asserted that atmospheric carbon is causative with global temperature increases. The last ten years contradict that assertion. The increase of atmospheric carbon has continued unabated even while temperatures have remained more-or-less flat."?
10 years is too short a time. Look at these plots. In any 10 year period you could easily fit a constant to the data, but you could also fit quite a steep slope; the shorter term fluctuations are too large to distinguish the two. However I think even the most jaded sceptic would have difficulty denying the worrying ~0.5 degrees C increase in the mean temperature anomaly since the 1960s, which is far outside of any of the error bars, and increasing almost linearly over that time.
its just a glorified egg and spoon race. For some reason this justifies almost 10 billion pounds of taxpayer money being pumped into getting the thing organised. This is one thing I would not regret seeing privatised.
Duh is right. Considering that belief is the opposite of thinking, they would have to be negatively correlated.
Just to play the fictitious Devil's Advocate: You must therefore understand everything about every currently accepted theory, as you seem to have no need to believe anything.
We all have beliefs; some are just a little (or a lot) less plausible than others.
If a scientist believes in anything then they are doing it wrong. (Before this comes up, by 'belief' I mean 'acceptance as true without questioning'; synonym for 'faith') The whole point of science is to question *everything*. Every single thing in the world observed or not yet observed should be scrutinised and tested as often as possible. Even a well tested theory should not be accepted as truth, and should continue to be tested wherever possible. This is the exact opposite of belief. They are contradictory. Any scientist who claims to be religious as well is guilty of double-think.
Maybe we should also start screening at train stations, bus terminals, office buildings, restaurants, public toilets...
Except, they haven't shown much of an interest in that sort of thing, have they? Not in the US, anyway. Buses and trains full of dead people have certainly appeared elsewhere, at these guys' hands. But not in the US. They want the highly telegenic aircraft stuff, or something a whole lot bigger than a bus or train.
Actually the TSA VIPR unit have been screening train stations, bus stations, subway stations and truck weighing stations, to name those I could see in this article. America is very much beginning to remind me of my trip to Beijing, although amusingly they were more concerned there with screening the locals than the foreigners.
So what you're saying is that the security checks do not work?
No. I'm saying it's attacks like the ones I mentioned that are why we screen passengers in the first place. It's why they're looking for odd wires, odd containers, chemical signatures on clothing/bags, and of course for inexplicable payloads under people's clothing. Because those turn out to be the things you have to look for if you want to stop the guy who isn't sweating the very same sort of bomb into failing to kill everybody on board.
Maybe we should also start screening at train stations, bus terminals, office buildings, restaurants, public toilets, etc, to further perpetuate the illusion of safety? Just in case there is a non-sweaty guy with a bomb trying to kill everyone.
To my mind, the terrorists won. Why? Because they have instilled in us a culture of fear and paranoia. We have handed over our freedoms in exchange for peace of mind, but it is all just an illusion. There is no such thing as perfect safety, there will always be a chance of someone slipping through the net. The tighter we pull the net the more we have to sacrifice. The best thing we could have done after 9/11 is to continue with business as usual.
You do understand, right, that since the take-over-the-plane-with-knives-and-use-plane-as-missle attacks on 9/11, we've had multiple attempts to simply destroy the aircraft in-flight. The more dangerous of those was obviously given a little more thought, and included attempting to do so while on approach over a large city. You know, in an attempt to kill hundreds or thousands of people. The only thing that prevented it from happening was the degree to which the suicide bomber was nervous, sweating, and thus damaging his explosive device. Had he not sweated his bomb into being non-functional, his fellow passengers would have had absolutely no chance to subdue, defend, or even stop to think about things. They'd be dead.
So what you're saying is that the security checks do not work?
In my opinion the introduction of a security door between the cabin and cockpit is the major factor behind the lack of any successful take-over-the-plane-with-* attacks. If the terrorist cannot get to the cockpit they cannot take over the plane. Yeah they might kill a couple of hundred people, which would be truly horrible, but no worse a scenario than a gunner/bomber walking into any office building, train, public park, etc.
Does it really cost $30 per copy just to get a game into the stores? That sounds like a ludicrous amount considering we can ship bananas from South Africa for fractions of a dollar per unit. Also, games never used to cost anywhere near the amount they currently do (even adjusting for inflation), and that was in the day you got full manuals and custom boxes, not just a printed sleeve in a generic black plastic case. Why has the cost increased so drastically, and why, if this is indeed the case, is this not the thing the industry are devoting their time to solving, rather than increasing the prices on the consumers in the middle of a damned recession!
...what a bunch of non-scientists *opinions* are about climate change? It sickens me that such an important scientific question has become politicized to such a degree. Every politician and celebrity chimes in with their own misinformed opinion, building a controversy out of thin air to win political points at the cost of our future. Piss off and let the climate scientists do their jobs!
I think "real property" is like "real estate" - you know, land and buildings.
Rules like that aren't that hard most of the time. "At the state level, I can exempt income I received that was a refund of a QEZE credit for real property taxes? Do I own any real estate? No? Skip that. Did I pay or receive a QEZE credit, or even know what a QEZE credit is? No? Skip that. Do I remember getting a refund check from any state or local government in the past year that wasn't from the previous year's taxes? No? Skip that."
This is pretty much the process that I use, although I feel that I might be missing out on a deduction somewhere.
I've had to do my taxes by hand for the past 2 years because I am a non-resident alien, which most software is unable to handle. Isn't it nice that they give the hardest job to the people who know the least about the tax system in this country?
Although most of the work is straightforward, there is a lot of terminology that has to be learned. For example, your residency status at the federal level is determined differently at state level, so you have to go trawling through the 70 page 'how to fill in' documents to find out which you are. For the deductions and exemptions I probably understand only half of what they mean. For example, one of the NY state exemptions is for 'Refund of QEZE credit for real property taxes'. Real property taxes? As opposed to imaginary property taxes? There's one called 'cost depletion' - what on Earth does that mean? The net result is that I probably know more about tax than a lot of American citizens!
The problem with the free market is that it does not account for the so-called 'external cost' of a transaction . An example of such a cost is environmental damage. These imbalances must be corrected by the government through taxation or regulation. There really is no way round this.
Do we even need to be asking such an obvious question? British is the foreign language that Americans are most likely to understand...
Perhaps the more obvious question is why do you consider "British" a foreign language? Or one that Americans need to "understand"?
As a Brit living in New York I find that alot of people find it very difficult to understand me (especially people with South American or Chinese descent), and even my girlfriend (native New Yorker) often has difficulty. She said that for the first 2 months after we met she understood about 20% of what I said. My accent is pretty standard for southern England and should therefore be pretty easy to understand. I often get the feeling that British English really is a foreign language.
And have Sony remotely killed all games? No they haven't. Your comparison falls flat on its face and is ludicrous to boot.
My point was that Sony's reaction was over the top. They are so desperate to remain in control that they close up shop to prevent (oh no) people from running unsigned software on their own machine. You said that they would be insane to leave the exploitable software on their store -- I tried to point out that this implies Microsoft are insane because they don't halt all sales when someone finds an exploit in Windows 7; they just release a patch like any sensible software company. Sony are the insane ones.
If hackers are saying a game is exploitable Sony would have to be insane to leave the exploit up on their store. Why would they expose themselves to an exploit? So they've taken it down presumably with the intention of fixing whatever the exploit is before putting it back up. Perhaps Everyone's Tennis does something such as peer to peer gameplay or hitting an external url which leaves it vulnerable to an exploit.
Sure. And when Microsoft hear that someone has found another exploit for Windows 7 they should immediately pull all CDs off the shelves, shut down their online store and trigger their remote killswitch?
ANY company would do the same thing if suddenly they're product they were expecting revenue from was suddenly able to be accessed for free.
Many companies would, true, but not all. For example Mojang owner Markus Persson is ok with people pirating his game.. Other companies like Valve realise that piracy is better combated by offering a good service to buyers and building their reputation rather than trying desperately to retain control while pissing off their customer base. These companies are doing very well, perhaps they are on to something?
I don't disagree with you -- it is far too easy to hide behind the corporate veil in this country. But the GP advocated fining the company enough to send them into bankruptcy. That amounts to a belly-flopping high dive down the rabbit hole of unforeseen consequences.
That suggestion wasn't meant to be serious. I meant only to point out that fining a company is generally pointless as they can always pass it on to their customers, but only up until the point where the cost of losing customers outweighs the cost of taking the fine on the chin.
So what do you suggest? Make corporations immune to fines and damages? Yes, their customers will have to pay off the judgement. IF they stay their customers. There is nothing stopping them from going to the competition (which will of course raise their prices, due to the sudden high demand).
According to this article, in early 2011 AT&T had roughly 96 million customers. They can pay back a paltry $50 million dollar fine by increasing their customers monthly fee by 50 cents for one month.
I suggest making the management responsible. Depending on the level of collusion (an investigation will need to take place) certain managers should be fined or even jailed. This would certainly discourage others from hiding behind the 'corporations are people' bullshit while committing crimes that citizens would be locked away for. Another alternative is making the fine so large that they could not afford to pass it on to their customers - of course this will likely take the company down anyway, but who cares? You do the crime, you do the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Cherry-picking sympathetic journals while not even addressing the obvious correlation between piracy and decreased music sales is intellectually dishonest.
And rejecting studies just because of where they were published, without any contrary evidence, would be intellectually lazy...
I'm not sure about that. It seems clear to me that a high degree of bias is likely from any report paid for by an interested party. Such documents then require much greater scrutiny in their facts and interpretation. Perhaps going to great lengths to analyse these documents for misinterpretation or skewed statistics would be warranted if there were not hundreds of other publications presenting results based on the same data but from an unbiased perspective. Its not like the numbers that these reports are based on are secret.
What I see here is that people have discovered "hey, I can download stuff for free" and then just make up all sorts of excuses like "RIAA suppresses innovation" to desperately justify what they are doing.
Do you like to unnecessarily pay for things you can get for free?
Couldn't the dissenters just respond, "You've asserted that atmospheric carbon is causative with global temperature increases. The last ten years contradict that assertion. The increase of atmospheric carbon has continued unabated even while temperatures have remained more-or-less flat."?
10 years is too short a time. Look at these plots. In any 10 year period you could easily fit a constant to the data, but you could also fit quite a steep slope; the shorter term fluctuations are too large to distinguish the two. However I think even the most jaded sceptic would have difficulty denying the worrying ~0.5 degrees C increase in the mean temperature anomaly since the 1960s, which is far outside of any of the error bars, and increasing almost linearly over that time.
its just a glorified egg and spoon race. For some reason this justifies almost 10 billion pounds of taxpayer money being pumped into getting the thing organised. This is one thing I would not regret seeing privatised.
Duh is right. Considering that belief is the opposite of thinking, they would have to be negatively correlated.
Just to play the fictitious Devil's Advocate: You must therefore understand everything about every currently accepted theory, as you seem to have no need to believe anything.
We all have beliefs; some are just a little (or a lot) less plausible than others.
If a scientist believes in anything then they are doing it wrong. (Before this comes up, by 'belief' I mean 'acceptance as true without questioning'; synonym for 'faith') The whole point of science is to question *everything*. Every single thing in the world observed or not yet observed should be scrutinised and tested as often as possible. Even a well tested theory should not be accepted as truth, and should continue to be tested wherever possible. This is the exact opposite of belief. They are contradictory. Any scientist who claims to be religious as well is guilty of double-think.
Maybe we should also start screening at train stations, bus terminals, office buildings, restaurants, public toilets ...
Except, they haven't shown much of an interest in that sort of thing, have they? Not in the US, anyway. Buses and trains full of dead people have certainly appeared elsewhere, at these guys' hands. But not in the US. They want the highly telegenic aircraft stuff, or something a whole lot bigger than a bus or train.
Actually the TSA VIPR unit have been screening train stations, bus stations, subway stations and truck weighing stations, to name those I could see in this article. America is very much beginning to remind me of my trip to Beijing, although amusingly they were more concerned there with screening the locals than the foreigners.
So what you're saying is that the security checks do not work?
No. I'm saying it's attacks like the ones I mentioned that are why we screen passengers in the first place. It's why they're looking for odd wires, odd containers, chemical signatures on clothing/bags, and of course for inexplicable payloads under people's clothing. Because those turn out to be the things you have to look for if you want to stop the guy who isn't sweating the very same sort of bomb into failing to kill everybody on board.
Maybe we should also start screening at train stations, bus terminals, office buildings, restaurants, public toilets, etc, to further perpetuate the illusion of safety? Just in case there is a non-sweaty guy with a bomb trying to kill everyone.
To my mind, the terrorists won. Why? Because they have instilled in us a culture of fear and paranoia. We have handed over our freedoms in exchange for peace of mind, but it is all just an illusion. There is no such thing as perfect safety, there will always be a chance of someone slipping through the net. The tighter we pull the net the more we have to sacrifice. The best thing we could have done after 9/11 is to continue with business as usual.
You do understand, right, that since the take-over-the-plane-with-knives-and-use-plane-as-missle attacks on 9/11, we've had multiple attempts to simply destroy the aircraft in-flight. The more dangerous of those was obviously given a little more thought, and included attempting to do so while on approach over a large city. You know, in an attempt to kill hundreds or thousands of people. The only thing that prevented it from happening was the degree to which the suicide bomber was nervous, sweating, and thus damaging his explosive device. Had he not sweated his bomb into being non-functional, his fellow passengers would have had absolutely no chance to subdue, defend, or even stop to think about things. They'd be dead.
So what you're saying is that the security checks do not work?
In my opinion the introduction of a security door between the cabin and cockpit is the major factor behind the lack of any successful take-over-the-plane-with-* attacks. If the terrorist cannot get to the cockpit they cannot take over the plane. Yeah they might kill a couple of hundred people, which would be truly horrible, but no worse a scenario than a gunner/bomber walking into any office building, train, public park, etc.
Does it really cost $30 per copy just to get a game into the stores? That sounds like a ludicrous amount considering we can ship bananas from South Africa for fractions of a dollar per unit. Also, games never used to cost anywhere near the amount they currently do (even adjusting for inflation), and that was in the day you got full manuals and custom boxes, not just a printed sleeve in a generic black plastic case. Why has the cost increased so drastically, and why, if this is indeed the case, is this not the thing the industry are devoting their time to solving, rather than increasing the prices on the consumers in the middle of a damned recession!
...what a bunch of non-scientists *opinions* are about climate change? It sickens me that such an important scientific question has become politicized to such a degree. Every politician and celebrity chimes in with their own misinformed opinion, building a controversy out of thin air to win political points at the cost of our future. Piss off and let the climate scientists do their jobs!
I think "real property" is like "real estate" - you know, land and buildings.
Rules like that aren't that hard most of the time. "At the state level, I can exempt income I received that was a refund of a QEZE credit for real property taxes? Do I own any real estate? No? Skip that. Did I pay or receive a QEZE credit, or even know what a QEZE credit is? No? Skip that. Do I remember getting a refund check from any state or local government in the past year that wasn't from the previous year's taxes? No? Skip that."
This is pretty much the process that I use, although I feel that I might be missing out on a deduction somewhere.
I've had to do my taxes by hand for the past 2 years because I am a non-resident alien, which most software is unable to handle. Isn't it nice that they give the hardest job to the people who know the least about the tax system in this country?
Although most of the work is straightforward, there is a lot of terminology that has to be learned. For example, your residency status at the federal level is determined differently at state level, so you have to go trawling through the 70 page 'how to fill in' documents to find out which you are. For the deductions and exemptions I probably understand only half of what they mean. For example, one of the NY state exemptions is for 'Refund of QEZE credit for real property taxes'. Real property taxes? As opposed to imaginary property taxes? There's one called 'cost depletion' - what on Earth does that mean? The net result is that I probably know more about tax than a lot of American citizens!
3.7M is wasted each year in DC on TOILET PAPER. Dont even try to tell me that 3.7M will buy something useful out of the government.
That money is secretly funnelled into research on alien technologies at Area 51!
President: I don't understand, where does all this come from? How do you get funding for something like this?
Julius: You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?
To be fair, it took an unprecidented Fiscal Crisis and economic crash to get the price of gas that low again.
Not to mention two wars in the Middle-East.
The problem with the free market is that it does not account for the so-called 'external cost' of a transaction . An example of such a cost is environmental damage. These imbalances must be corrected by the government through taxation or regulation. There really is no way round this.
> She said that for the first 2 months after we met she understood about 20% of what I said.
Still! she dates you? You must be some piece of work. ;-)
What can I say, American girls love a British accent :)
It helps if you unclench your jaw when you speak.
So I should mimic 'Cletus the slack-jawed yokel'? :P
Do we even need to be asking such an obvious question? British is the foreign language that Americans are most likely to understand...
Perhaps the more obvious question is why do you consider "British" a foreign language? Or one that Americans need to "understand"?
As a Brit living in New York I find that alot of people find it very difficult to understand me (especially people with South American or Chinese descent), and even my girlfriend (native New Yorker) often has difficulty. She said that for the first 2 months after we met she understood about 20% of what I said. My accent is pretty standard for southern England and should therefore be pretty easy to understand. I often get the feeling that British English really is a foreign language.
And have Sony remotely killed all games? No they haven't. Your comparison falls flat on its face and is ludicrous to boot.
My point was that Sony's reaction was over the top. They are so desperate to remain in control that they close up shop to prevent (oh no) people from running unsigned software on their own machine. You said that they would be insane to leave the exploitable software on their store -- I tried to point out that this implies Microsoft are insane because they don't halt all sales when someone finds an exploit in Windows 7; they just release a patch like any sensible software company. Sony are the insane ones.
Pirates are not customers
Customers become pirates and pirates become customers entirely depending on how the company treat them.
If hackers are saying a game is exploitable Sony would have to be insane to leave the exploit up on their store. Why would they expose themselves to an exploit? So they've taken it down presumably with the intention of fixing whatever the exploit is before putting it back up. Perhaps Everyone's Tennis does something such as peer to peer gameplay or hitting an external url which leaves it vulnerable to an exploit.
Sure. And when Microsoft hear that someone has found another exploit for Windows 7 they should immediately pull all CDs off the shelves, shut down their online store and trigger their remote killswitch?
ANY company would do the same thing if suddenly they're product they were expecting revenue from was suddenly able to be accessed for free.
Many companies would, true, but not all. For example Mojang owner Markus Persson is ok with people pirating his game.. Other companies like Valve realise that piracy is better combated by offering a good service to buyers and building their reputation rather than trying desperately to retain control while pissing off their customer base. These companies are doing very well, perhaps they are on to something?
found here sounds amusingly similar to Baron Cohen's version, although the intro does sound like the start of an old Disney cartoon!
I don't disagree with you -- it is far too easy to hide behind the corporate veil in this country. But the GP advocated fining the company enough to send them into bankruptcy. That amounts to a belly-flopping high dive down the rabbit hole of unforeseen consequences.
That suggestion wasn't meant to be serious. I meant only to point out that fining a company is generally pointless as they can always pass it on to their customers, but only up until the point where the cost of losing customers outweighs the cost of taking the fine on the chin.
So what do you suggest? Make corporations immune to fines and damages? Yes, their customers will have to pay off the judgement. IF they stay their customers. There is nothing stopping them from going to the competition (which will of course raise their prices, due to the sudden high demand).
According to this article, in early 2011 AT&T had roughly 96 million customers. They can pay back a paltry $50 million dollar fine by increasing their customers monthly fee by 50 cents for one month.
I suggest making the management responsible. Depending on the level of collusion (an investigation will need to take place) certain managers should be fined or even jailed. This would certainly discourage others from hiding behind the 'corporations are people' bullshit while committing crimes that citizens would be locked away for. Another alternative is making the fine so large that they could not afford to pass it on to their customers - of course this will likely take the company down anyway, but who cares? You do the crime, you do the time.