I pirate everything. Honestly, the only things I don't pirate are like 1-2 games a year that me and some friends end up playing together. For software I generally just run whatever FOSS thing I can find, and in the case of movies and music I have never spent a cent on them in my life. I've been pirating since I started using a computer.
The same rich people trying to sell predatory subscriptions and vendor lock-in are the same ones trying to raise my rent and food bill every year, so I have no incentive to give them money for pointless entertainment on top of that.
It's not as if you're obligated to buy their products, therefore need to find a less expensive workaround. If you don't like the people producing them and think they're overpriced, play dwarf fortress or watch TV. There are some obviously valid reasons for pirating, but I don't understand this sense of entitlement.
TV aint free. Worst yet if the Funimation and others fully got their way with the claims they do I would not be able to watch the shows I did in Japan here in Europe. Not because funimation is showing them here and I dont want to pay for them but cause they own the US rights and will take down any online source with no european broadcaster sending them out.
Many people have pirated; includes myself when I was a teenager in developing country. I don't pirate now as its worth neither risk nor time but I can't claim some weird moral high ground - it's a complex issue with nuances and circumstances.
But I still find it intriguing when I see rambling half baked internally self-contradictory attempts at moral justification - do you believe what you said there? Do you even know what you said there? Cause I'm having a hard time following - Food has inflation therefore I'll pirate movies even though they're pointless, and this is just and right?
It takes minimal amount of empathy and observation to notice hard work talented creative people put into "pointless entertainment", so just like I don't buy the notion that every pirate is evil sociopathic villain, so I don't buy notion that watching entertainment for free is inherent right and creators don't deserve any compensation ever. If anything, this type of incoherence and self righteousness feeds exactly the stereotype mpaa / riaa try to portray...
I agree, but would it be agreeable and right if one was to have a free but lower quality version (smaller screen, shortened game, program with fewer options) allowing eyeballs and consumers to best gauge a products quality and thereby validate paying for integral or physical product (licenced/dvd/etc)
rather than have a moralistic black and white view (generally held) of pirating bad , paying good (I certainly don't mean you in this case and am just trying to point to a middle way..
You realize that actual people work on those things that you pirate, right? That those people also need to get paid so they can have food on the table? It's one thing to not buy any media at all, but it's contradictory to enjoy media produced by people and then not want to pay them. Their work isn't less valuable because it's related to media production instead of engineering or whatever.
The problem with this argument is that most large studios treat their workforce like trash. Any surplus profit they make is going to the executives and shareholders. The developers will be used up and discarded regardless.
It's also funny that you're upset about the guy pirating software (lifetime economic impact in 10s of thousands of dollars) but not the games publishers themselves who regularly dodge taxes - in some cases paying effectively negative tax rates[1] (lifetime impacts in the 10ss of millions of dollars if not more).
"most large studios treat their workforce like trash ... It's also funny that you're upset about the guy pirating software ... but not the games publishers themselves who regularly dodge taxes"
Where did I say I support publishers not paying their taxes or treating employees unfairly? Those are separate issues completely unrelated to the one we're discussing. (Obviously, I think everyone should pay taxes fairly and treat their employees fairly.)
Company A doing bad thing B does not mean we morally justify crime C. Either pay for the thing you -want, not need-, or don't if you don't support various actions or stances from the company. This also is based on the premise that all media comes from bad corporations, which is not true. Many artists these days can be supported directly, self publish, etc.
Also, I'm not "upset", nor am I looking at one singular individual. I am looking at this from a societal and long-term perspective of the long-term effects of people pirating media.
"If I don't have to pay for it then their work was objectively unproductive. It's an inherent failure of market economics"
I feel I'm reading Deepak Chopra - individual words are fine and you'd swear sentence should make sense... But it doesn't, no matter how many times you read it.
Not paying for something makes it unproductive? And you don't feel there are easy trivial immediate counter-examples for your axiom with big-boy words?
I'm not sure what you've quoted, because that is -not- what I said.
People should be paid for their work. Pirating doesn't pay them for their work. Work includes art and media. I'm not sure how I can state this more simply.
I'm not sure why this is even a complicated topic. With literally everything else, if you want something, you need to pay to acquire it because it took time and resources to make. That doesn't go away just because the end product is digital.
> With literally everything else, if you want something, you need to pay to acquire it because it took time and resources to make. That doesn't go away just because the end product is digital.
The thing is that making a copy of something digital is really really cheap compared to something physical. The difference between the cost of producing one copy of a software or music and a million is way lower than for a physical object.
I agree that it's not a great analogy. However, the fact that copying technically has a "zero" cost, doesn't mean that we can just ignore the time, money, and effort spent by the people making that media. It's not literal theft but it does hurt the artists/creators in the long run.
I quoted knz_. It may not show up for you because his is a dead comment now so it'll depend on your settings. Not sure why it looks I responded to you, feels we are on similar page.
I mean, being named and shamed has lower impact on your life then being charged, prosecuted and sentenced. And it is cheaper as payments fot layer alone can bankrupt you whether guilty or not.
Companies are already trying to flood the market with H1Bs to suppress wages and pushing people towards CS and STEM degrees in general. They don't need to do anything special, in 10 years the market will be flooded and you will be competing with someone who is willing to work 10+ hrs/day for half the wage.
Childcare for 2 children under the age of 5 in my area will cost roughly $4000. Mortgage for a very modest 4 bedroom house is another $2500. $1500 for all the rest starts to get very tight. Insurance as a category alone can eat half of that. There’s not much left to gamble or drug with.
> (Edit: What I also came to think of is that GCC recently positioned itself in opposition to the FSF because of the "Stallman-Controversy". Is this a kind of retaliation on their part?)
More like a necessity to keep the project alive. Half of the top contributors threatened to leave when FSF tried to coup the steering committee.
Well, this is a problem that FSF created. They tried to unilaterally appoint RMS to the steering committee and were forced to renege when most of GCC's top contributors threatened to walk away from the project.
If they didn't get rid of the copyright aggreement there would have just been a fork or those people would have gone to work on other projects.
> Well, this is a problem that FSF created. They tried to unilaterally appoint RMS to the steering committee and were forced to renege when most of GCC's top contributors threatened to walk away from the project.
Do you have a source for this? The story appears to be the opposite - RMS was on the steering committee list since 2012 and was removed earlier this year by the rest of the steering committee as a reaction to RMS being put back as a FSF board member. https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235091.html
You cannot discuss things like this beforehand? You cannot do an RFD in the mailing list to gather feedback and questions? Even the announcement is sloppily written, because it sounds like gcc will now be licensed under GPLv3 exclusively (and not GPLv3+). This was later corrected in the thread, but confusion like this could have easily been avoided.
The most current version of the GPL is GPL v3.0. GCC specifically and somewhat controversially updated to GPLv3 when it was released. The version of the license that applies to GCC is GPL v3.0. There is no mythical GPL v3.1 or GPL v4.0.
The announcement specifically stated that GCC "will continue to be developed, distributed, and licensed under the GNU
General Public License v3.0." Until there is a revised license the "or later" is moot. One does not "continue" a policy that is a change in policy.
If this is the biggest complaint about the announcement, I think that the GCC SC did an excellent job.
> What incentive would the US government have to lie about this though?
The US government hasn't even made any statement.
> They were funding research at that lab, I don't understand why they would want people to think lab leak is correct all of a sudden - if that's what you're claiming?
No they weren't? You need to either get off the internet until you turn 18 or learn some serious critical thinking skills. The fact you're even considering the theory that the US is covertly funding virology research in it's biggest geopolitical enemy territory is completely unhinged and is classic schizophrenic type delusion.
It went through a non-profit, but trust me there is careful accounting of where money goes with NIH grants, there is no way the government was not aware that some of it's money was funding research at WIV. Especially because they suspended the funding once COVID blew up, per that article.
The commenter was implying the info didn't come from real intelligence but is actually a fabricated leak. I saw the other reply about Iraq and thought the implication was the US wanted to mislead about this, but it indeed could be another country.
Note that the NIH funding was cancelled under the Trump administration. That administration also attacked its own public health officials, denied the science, catastrophically failed in its response, and was generally incompetent. There's no reason to believe the cancellation was anything other than posturing for political reasons, coming from an Oval Office that never stopped referring to COVID-19 as the "Chinese Virus" while pushing hydroxychloroquine and suggesting that a cure was as simple as shoving a flashlight up your butt while drinking bleach.
I never made a comment one way or the other about whether the cancellation was logical, I was just responding to the claim that there was no funding to begin with.
Except for the Vietnamese invasion of the Chinese satellite regime in Cambodia, and the literal shooting war between China and Vietnam immediately afterwards.
The Sino-Soviet split was a Very Big Deal, and Vietnam was firmly on the Soviet side of that split.
> If left to develop its communist government by itself, it could be like China today - a superpower that's going to overtake the USA by important measures.
Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.
> Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.
Yeah, letting Russia and China subjugate the world would have gone SO MUCH better. What good has it done for nicaragua, cuba, north korea, afghanistan or the many noname countries in Africa? The USSR left only poverty and death whereever they went.
Ah yes, Afganistan, where Operation Cyclone funelled weapons to mujahadeen, which they used indiscriminantly against civilians. What could possibly go wrong?
And once USA took control of Afganistan, how has the situation improved?
Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.
Vietnam is communist but they're not very friendly with China, nor have they been since about 1975; vietnam is certainly not a satellite of China. Starting in 1979 they fought a low-intensity border war with China that went on for over a decade, a fact you seem to be unaware of.
Ehh no, we have history of thousands of years clashing with China so no we aren't that close to China. We might have some "co-operation" geographically and politically but the best depiction of our relationship is 2 guys shaking hands with knives on the other hand.
Oh and if you do some digging you will know that HCM sent a few letters to Trumman asking for US's aid, we could have been ally 70 years earlier, but no, the US branded him as a commie and the rest is history. Btw, the first line of our Proclamation of Independence is pretty much a paraphrase of the US's Declaration of Independence, that's to show how much we wanted the US to be ally.
> I'd dreading Nvidia crippling deep learning for all those not paying X more dollars (as the situation already is for server farms).
This already changed years ago when NVIDIA removed the last non-crippled double and half precision GPUs from their product lineup. The cheapest GPU you can buy for ML now is the titan v, which was $3000 at launch.
I'm only planning at this point - so I don't know but am very interested. I see the RTX 3080 reviewed as the most cost effective chip you can get for deep learning. I have the impression a lot of research is moving to lower precision also.
They have been going the other way recently:
Titan V ($3000) -> Titan RTX ($2500) -> RTX 3090 ($1500). The 3090 beats the Titan RTX in double precision and is close to 2x in single precision.
The same rich people trying to sell predatory subscriptions and vendor lock-in are the same ones trying to raise my rent and food bill every year, so I have no incentive to give them money for pointless entertainment on top of that.