Simmoril's prodding, along with my having reached the point where I'm reading enough stuff that using an RSS aggregator is starting to look like a pretty good idea, has finally inspired me to mess with my RSS feed. Because Blosxom rocks, it's incredibly easy to get RSS going. All I had to do was mirror my strange templating changes into my story.rss file so that I won't be missing my starting and ending HTML tags, and bam: fully functioning (I hope) feed. To celebrate, I've added the little orange icon we've all come to know and love to my badge collection.

Happy feeding!

Category: Geek

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Articles like this one really frustrate me. Sure, the BSA/RIAA/MPAA/whoever are going to lie to serve their own interests. But does every journalist have to parrot their report as if it were gospel? Every story I saw today about the BSA's report on software piracy contained a paragraph functionally equivalent to the following:

A BSA study of $80 billion in software installed on computers last year found only $51 billion was legally purchased, resulting in a $29 billion loss.

Now, I only took a year of economics, and that was in high school, but I'm pretty sure I have a basic understanding of the laws of supply and demand. Dumbed down, and ignoring weird fringe effects like prices of luxury status symbols, it goes like this: more people buy stuff when it's cheaper. And yet, everyone who reports "losses" from illegal software/movie/music trading seems to have skipped this basic lesson, and blithely assumes that every high-school and college student with a pirated copy of Photoshop would have shelled out $650 dollars for a legal version if they didn't know a guy who could give them a free copy. Yeah.

I'm not condoning piracy, saying that it doesn't legitmately hurt any industries, or that no-one with pirated software would buy it if they had to, but please. If the real number is even a few percent of the $29 billion they quoted, I would be shocked. Some of the countries where they quote the biggest piracy numbers are places where Office or Windows would cost months, sometimes years, of the average salary of their inhabitants.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to set up a paid subscription to my weblog. I figure I'll charge $100,000 or so per page view—so far, people have been getting this content for free, resulting in millions, maybe even billions, in losses for me.

[Edit 7/8: Apparently I can't type. Hopefully it was clear that I was not condoning piracy. Thanks Laura!]

Category: Society

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