DVD pirating costing industry $1.7b

 

“Instead many of the DVDs that are being bought by members of the Australian public today are effectively being bought from crime syndicates who are also engaged in drug trading, child pornography and other heinous crimes,” he said.”

That is a LOT of money for Australia. We only have 22 million people. Divide it by 28 to 32 dollars and you can see the numbers being pirated. Arithmetic is not my thing. Numbers, though, are playing a big role in our society. There is a Facebook experiment looking at the snowball effect and it builds up incredibly quickly to epic numbers. We can rally millions of people very quickly with our current technology and it is having an impact on boundaries. People know piracy is illegal but they don’t stop copying because you can. You can copy so it must be all right. That is the thinking. We have the technology to block piracy, surely? Then there is the belief that it only costs around 2 dollars to make a copy of a CD/DVD and so the cost of 34 dollars top price seems to be exorbitant. There are just some things which cannot get into people’s heads these days. Some of it is the wonderful sense of entitlement people have and then there is the complete ease with which computers can do things. So we need to know more about these spurious connections. Some of it is people thinking they have bought a bona fide copy of something on the Net only to find out it is pirated. That happens too frequently with software and downloads. The scamming there is putting people in a retaliatory mode and so I guess some of what occurs is what people see as revenge on a system which keeps ripping them off. Then, of course, people just want to have things and there is the lazy approach of it being easier to copy than actually getting up, going out the door and buying it. I think the solution is in technology. Block it.

DVD pirating costing industry $1.7b: Debus – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Vista vs XP

I have had an interesting time with my computers this week and it has set me straight about XP and Vista. I use XP at work but I have a laptop and desktop at home which I was using and they were Vista and Office 2007. I came to Vista with an open mind and quite like the shiny new look. It was irritating me because it kept checking and double checking what I was doing and then the endless updates became a joke. I have had yet another stream of updates tonight. We have an XP laptop and on Tuesday for reasons best known to itself it lost the onboard wifi connection to the Net. I thought it would be easy to get it back. No. I cleaned everything. I checked everything, updated drivers and then did what you do these days…Google. As it turned out I was not alone with this problem but there did not seem to be a solution on any of the problems. The two I tried just didn’t work. So then I did a clean install to no avail and as I did I suddenly thought that XP just was old hat. I re established the connection with a USB wifi adaptor and it’s fine but a bit silly on a laptop. So now I use that laptop for my work things because I don’t really need the Net for that. I was relieved to get back onto Vista. Vista does weirdo things like uninstall my supposedly compatible printer which is highly annoying but it fixes things up pretty quickly. I like how it looks and I like how it is set up for use. I accept it is trying to help people and builds in security against malicious damage and inadvertent absentmindedness on the part of the user. By and large it is very flexible and Office 2007 allows me to produce things which have a wow factor and make me look good. My previous opinion was that XP was better but when I had connection problems with Vista it had the whole lot sorted out within half and hour or less and the thing is, when it goes wrong on Vista, the help is somehow there to get the problem resolved quickly. The other criticism I have heard is that it won’t run old programmes. I have some ancient software and it runs perfectly well as does the new software. There is not a programme I have had a problem with and I have not had to abandon any of my software that I like.