Not really. And here's why:

We're just a little over a month before Christmas, a MAJOR point in times when people buy stuff. Even people who couldn't be bothered buying something for September, are likely to buy stuff for Christmas. Either for themselves or for someone else.

So I'd say expect to see more of this kind of advertising over the next month. Or actually more accurately: PR firms and departments generating buzz. In fact expect it to ramp up over the next month.

Besides, if we're making up hypotheses, maybe Cthulhu mugs and posters also actually make programmers more motivated to finish the project before Great Cthulhu rises from R'lyeh to kill us all with tentacles. See, it's not just coincidence that so many of us nerds are cultists of the Great Old Ones. What? Are you saying it's just me? ;)

I have no problem with trying to find out. It's just when something as wide-spread as drugs overlaps with pretty much everything happening at the time, just the overlap doesn't say much.

I mean, equally a lot of politicians did drugs and... err... wait, it would explain a few things ;)

Well, I should, but I spend far more time on an UBB based site, so by now it's a reflex to write things that way.

then Cthulhu t-shirts and mugs and solstice carols are good for programming.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for legalizing drugs. And I don't like it one bit that my tax money goes into making victims of some harmless pot smokers.

But [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cum_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc]cum hoc ergo propter hoc[/url] is a fallacy for a reason.

Actually, utilitarianism doesn't work that way either. A fictional entity doesn't count at all when the topic is how to maximize the happiness of the people on the whole.

Whether it makes a corporation happy is just about as irrelevant as whether it makes my Skyrim archmage happy, or whether it makes my imaginary army of zombie pirate ninja vikings happy. Which is to say, not at all. The fictive entity "corporation" doesn't count even as 1 person, it counts as exactly 0 (ZERO) persons for utilitarian considerations. Which, again, is what we're really talking about in such "the good of one vs the good of the many" scenarios.

What matters is sorta whether the net sum on the total of society. Including, of course, its employees, share holders, economic effect on the whole, etc.

And then not all transactions are created equal.

E.g., very oversimplified,

- if I'm a baker and you're hungry, selling you a sandwich is working out to be better for both of us. I want money more than I want another sandwich sitting there and getting spoiled, and you obviously want the sandwich more than you want the money it costs. Or you probably wouldn't buy it.

- if I hit you upside the head with a half brick in a sock to steal 100$ from your wallet, it's a net loss. You lost more than I gained. Possibly even your life. It's the kind of transaction you don't really want. Enough of that happening around, and society gets worse on the whole.

And that's not even counting the all too common case where I'd make a loss for you without gaining anything myself, or even making a loss too. E.g., a guy who just keys cars for the heck of it, and then goes to jail for it. I.e., it's not just detrimental, but stupid too.

And just so it's not completely off topic, really, the latter is what a lot of this raping privacy six ways to Sunday is all about. I'm under the impression that a lot of data being collected, and a lot of companies collecting it, don't even come with a plan as to how to make any gain out of it.

E.g., take the trend of needing to give all your data, down to exact birthday and street number and everything, just to be allowed to download a patch for a program you bought. Most of those companies don't actually plan to sell that to spammer or scammers, and it's too much detail even for data mining. You can get some meaningful correlation by age group or general geographic area, but you're never going to get some insight as to what those living at houses numbered 15 buy more than those living in houses numbered 17. It's trivia, not data, and as good as random noise for basing anything on.

So when they inevitably get pwned by some script kiddie, or some disgruntled IT worker sells the whole client database to a spammer, they made a lot of people a loss, but they still haven't gained anything out of it. And what for? Just because basically some marketroid drone is stupid.

Sorry, utilitarianism, because that's what it's all about, works at the scale of society. You don't get to gerrymander the groups arbitrarily to justify any kind of antisocial behaviour.

For a start, if you have a hundred million people preyed upon, you count a hundred millions, you don't do something as idiotic as counting each person as one injured for the benefit of a whole corporation. Even taking the short-sighted view that ignores collateral damage, you have to count some hundreds of millions on one side, vs a corporation of... what? A few thousand employees? Tens of thousands?

To see what's wrong with it, your exact same logic can be applied to a mafia don and his gangsters, extorting a few thousand shopkeepers. And occasionally, sadly, having to kneecap someone or fit them into cement shoes, to keep the others in line. Each individual victim is one victim, and their unwilling contribution is keeping a couple dozen gangsters fed, clothed and armed. So, you know, one versus many.

Except, as I was saying, it doesn't work that way. Even the most myopic view has to count both sides as a group. You have some thousands of people preyed upon, for the benefit of some dozens of gangsters. The utilitarian conclusion is to get rid of the gangsters, not to tell the victims that they had to put up with it because, you know, the good of the one vs the good of the many.

But even that's not taking into account other effects, which negatively affect the well being of more people than the thousands of extorted shopkeepers. E.g., the negative effect on the local economy. E.g., the fact that people have to fear of ending up being in the wrong pub when some gangster decides to machinegun it because it belongs to a rival gangster family. Etc.

The point is that there is the difference between a job as a way to get something done, and a job just for the sake of paying some people. Both are a job, but one gets something done, the other is just a fancy way to redistribute wealth.

Then again, considering that half the private IT projects and probably three quarters of government ones are about as needed as the pyramids, it's probably no wonder that so many people on this site are unable to see the difference :p

Well, maybe not as we know it today, but the idea of building something useless, or which you don't really need, as a way to give a wage to the poor has been used before. E.g., the follies in the 19'th century.

What makes it effectively welfare from the point of view of the state is that you're not really getting anything you need either way. I mean, if you pay to have a bridge built over a river to relieve a busy ferry, you've bought something useful with that money. If you build a bridge in the middle of a field, just to pay some workers, that's really what you get when people don't want to just pay any loafer but still want to feed some unemployed who want to work.

What Imhotep as high priest came up with is hard to describe as anything else than a religious BS rationalization for why the pharaoh should do that. It wasn't jump from a mastaba tomb (simple rectangular house, so to speak, as a crypt) to pyramid AND the whole complex around it, but also a tradition that it's sorta bad luck to stop building SOMETHING at it. The great pyramid for example, because the Pharaoh still wasn't dead after a long time, ended up with tunnels dug under it to nowhere and stuff like that.

I like the idea, but I'd go even farther than that: Imhotep.

For a high priest of Ra, the guy wrote a thoroughly secular first medicine manual ever. As in, unlike even later texts from the same area, this guy doesn't do healing with prayers, amulets, etc, and just deals with stuff like washing and bandaging a wound, or extracting medicine from plants.

Also came up with an irrigation system that fed a whole lot of people.

And with the first pyramid. Though that actually doesn't do justice to his contribution to architecture. When you look at the complex of buildings around it, the guy was a frikken genius for that time. E.g., to support some tremendously heavy ceiling blocks, he used the first columns we know of in Egypt AND he figured out anchoring them to the walls for extra strength.

And actually he wrote the first manual of architecture too, which was used by Egyptians a long time after his death.

And arguably, if the pyramids were an early welfare system, in which people could volunteer to pull some blocks for a huge monument in exchange for a wage, this guy pretty much invented welfare.

And all that was happening in 2600 BC. I mean, even Hero was working in the Greek culture which was pretty scientific, and he had some giants on whose shoulders to stand. Imhotep was doing his stuff back when anything even resembling a scientific method OR philosophy wouldn't be discovered for another 2000 years.

It's really a shame that most people probably only know him as the magic-wielding undead villain of The Mummy. The guy really didn't deserve that.

I dunno, didn't we already have an article years ago about how those higher up the hierarchy tend to be more sociopathic? Well, here's the original link: Is Your Boss A Psychopath?

But anyway, if you have to ask "how much of an asshole does someone have to be to do X?" I think you'll find that there are big enough assholes to do just about anything. Especially in positions that involve money, power, or both. In fact it seems like even the drive to end up in a position with enough power to no longer have to give a damn about the peons around, is disproportionately higher in... exactly those who are sick and tired of having to fake giving a damn about those peons around them.

But at any rate, let's just say that goatse was a lightweight, compared to the kind of huge assholes you see in upper management ;)

Actually, here's another idea for where at least a part of those 8 billion are coming from. Now probably none of them accounts for 8 billion by itself, but I do believe it adds up.

1. Just the economy and more importantly how it impacted culture. In 1999 it was in the middle of a bubble, and everyone who got some of that money was flaunting it somehow. Buying stuff to show you can was expected.

Nowadays we're still on the tail curve of a depression, where a bunch of people lost their homes, unemployment is still very high, a bunch of people ARE having less disposable income (the median family income didn't follow the GDP per capita, so pretty much everyone south of the median is getting shafted) and most importantly this creates uncertainty for the future. It's looking like a lot less of a good idea to blow all your money on entertainment and luxuries when you're not sure if next year you'll be able to afford the essentials (medical care included) and/or keep your home.

A bunch of other industries are feeling the same pinch, so I fail to see why the RIAA would think they're exempt from it and should see the same income as at the apex of a bubble and of economic optimism, if it weren't for those pesky pirates.

2. Less free time for that entertainment. We just had a front page article yesterday about how overtime demanded is steadily climbing.

3. Competing with other forms of entertainment. You can see the movie industry and TV having the same problem. Less people are going to the movies when they can play WoW or TOR or whatever for a month instead. And it's not just games. Social networks for example also sink a heck of a lot of the time left after that overtime.

It's stuff that was still regarded as (borderline) stuff for socially dysfunctional nerds in 1999. The idea that if you play Ultima as an adult you're probably one of those 40 year old virgins living in mom's basement was flung around by many a lot more seriously than nowadays.

Internet access also was spotty and slow, and frankly there wasn't all that much to do on the Internet, compared to nowadays.

The whole culture was more favourable to sitting and listening to a record as a way to pass the time, while nowadays it's at best something you use as background music while doing something else. And not just while you sit at home but also...

3. Share of the MOBILE entertainment. Frankly there was not much more you could do in 1999 on the road than listen to some music on your walkman or CD player or, if you were really high tech, MP3 player. Sure, you could use a gameboy, but see again, a lot saw that as stuff just for kids, and it also didn't help that most of those mobile games WERE made for kids.

There was a lot of music bought just to have something to listen to while you're on the bus or train or plane.

Nowadays even kids have phones capable of doing much more than that, including again Internet stuff. That's got to mean less albums you need to buy just to keep from being bored out of your skull on the road.

Which in turn sets the stage for the next point...

4. A different culture among the youth. Which, honestly, was always a big target demographic there.

It used to be that music was a major topic in high school, and buying the same records that the rest of the lemmings were persuaded by marketing hype to buy, was the way to fit in. There were a lot of Britney Spears albums (chosen as an example because she had her first album in 1999) and whatnot bought just to fit in with the cool kids who were listening to Britney Spears.

And don't kid yourself if you were all counter-culture, the same applied there. There were a lot of The Cure and Sex Pistols albums sold to kids who wanted to fit in with the goth and respectively punk gang. We were so independent and defying convention and totally unlike the rest of the sheeple, and whatnot... that we bought the exact same clothes, music, etc, as a group we were trying to fit in. Yeah, different and independent my ass.

Nowadays even "hey, look what cutesy game I have on my iPhone" may well be a bigger topic. You CAN find other things to talk to the group that don't involve buying the same CDs they do.

5. Last, but probably the biggest factor, people ARE buying less music just because they're buying less PADDING.

Honestly, I can't think of many albums where I actually wanted or even liked every track. In fact, other than one or two, I'm drawing blanks. Try thinking about it yourself, and you'll probably get the same results.

Heck, even for the kids' culture reasons I was mentioning before, you didn't really need the whole effing album. Even if the cool gang were talking about that new Britney Spears album, chances are you'd only hear about the couple of songs that were all over the radio and TV, and nobody would mention 8 or 9 of the tracks on it.

But you had to buy a whole CD, didn't you? You'd pay for all those tracks even if they didn't interest you.

Nowadays people are buying just the tracks they want, and skip the rest of the filler, so obviously you see less tracks sold and at that for less money.

It's like if, dunno, imagine some dysfunctional imaginary country, let's call it Elbonia, where the bread bakers form a cartel and effectively enforced that you can only buy bread by the dozen loaves AND you're forbidden to give some of that to other people. Then one day this comes apart and you can again buy individual loaves or even halves. Don't you think they too would see their income plummet as people suddenly buy only as much bread as they need?

6. It IS sold cheaper.

At some point during my previous point you probably thought, "wait, you could buy singles too." Well, yes, but at a seriously higher price than a track on an album. Nowadays the industry is selling essentially singles at the price of a track on an album, and that is simply giving it away cheaper.

You just couldn't buy a single for 1$ unless maybe if it was second hand or something. Nowadays you can.

Heck, even for the tracks on a CD, a lot of CDs cost more than ten bucks or so, which is how much it would cost to get everything on them online.

So basically it strikes me as third degree mental retardation to sell stuff at half the price (actually even less), and then wonder what kind of thief made you get only half the money. I mean, seriously. Imagine if an individual person went to the police with a story boiling down to basically, "I started selling my bread at half price and, gosh darn it, even though I had baked as many loaves, at the end of the day I had made only half the money I made the previous day. There must be a bread thief around."

6. Even the elasticity of supply and demand won't really compensate for all of it, because frankly there is only a finite number of tracks that you can obsess about at a given time.

And here's another idea: most of the demand was artificially created by saturating the airwaves with a handful of songs and convincing kids that THESE tracks from THESE singers are the thing to have. The whole idea behind it is to have a handful and saturate the mindshare with them. If you do it with 10 times more songs, then each individual one is lost in a deluge of new stuff that you have no reason to pick one over another.

And more scarily for the music industry, unless they can tell you that THESE are the songs to have and saturate the mindshare with them, then you might go buy something from an indie musician and skip them completely.

The whole key to it working is that there's a dozen of new songs tops, often much less, that they can artificially manufacture the hype for and tell you to buy. If you try the same with two hundred new songs, none of them is on the air long enough to give you any particular reason to want exactly that one song. Or any of the others.

Briefly: perfectly elastic supply-demand economics can't exist in a market where the biggest driving factor is advertising, and you have the same finite and inelastic amount of marketing you can do. Sometimes if you give the songs for half the price, but fundamentally don't have the means to do twice the hype, you just sell the same number of hyped tracks and make half the money.

7. And here we come again to that aspect of competing with other entertainment. Only this time it's that marketing hype that's competing for time with it, and losing.

It's not just that people now spend more time surfing on their smartphone than listening to music on the train, or playing WOW instead of listening to the ol' vinyl at home, which I covered already. It's also that they spend less time looking at MTV or listening to the radio stations that were used to hype certain tracks to them, so they'll buy it. With TV viewing steadily declining in all that time, there are also less people watching MTV, and getting the idea which album they should they buy.

So in that marketing-driven market, not only the space and audience for marketing are inelastic and can't grow, they're actually shrinking. If they don't expect that to affect the bottom line, remind me WTH reality they live in.

Etc.

Basically, yes, their revenue shrank, but to blame all 8 billion on piracy is stupid.

Something like that. Though actually, i'd say it's not even just KNOWING the skillsets, but being used to doing certain things as a group.

It's something that's been known in the army for example for, oh, maybe a couple thousand years now: a legion of 5000 people acting as a group and already being used to act as a group, beats a horde of 10,000 uncoordinated barbarians any day, even if maybe individually they're better warriors.

Furthermore, that as long as a unit stays cohesive, it has a fighting chance, and when it lost cohesion it's pretty much already defeated. They just may or may not know it yet.

I wouldn't even necessarily write it under "being a better gamer". It's more just about the group. If everyone is used to the rest of the group acting in a certain way, and viceversa, essentially they've formed some group tactics. It doesn't even have to be stated, and in fact it's even better if you don't have to. You just already know that that guy will try to flank, that other guy prefers to keep the distance and snipe, etc, and most importantly you found SOME way to do all that, that SOMEHOW works. And that by itself will beat the same number of uncoordinated players, even if maybe individually they can aim better or react faster or whatever other "good player" criterion one may take.

And it's not just about "knowing" that that guy's skillset includes sniping, or that other guy can sneak around, which might still leave one wondering if they will. It's already being used to what each of those will do, and already being used to dash in a certain situation because you're already used that there's someone counter-sniping for you while you do that.

That said, if army taught me anything, I'd say that limiting their conclusions to "friends" is misleading. Sure, you want bonding between them and all, but ultimately what matters even more than friendship is exactly that being already trained to apply the same group tactics as a group. If I had to go to war and had to choose whether to entrust my life to my best buddy who can't tell a gun's butt from its muzzle, or to that guy I thought to be the biggest douchebag in the company, I'd pick the douchebag any day. Because friendship is grrreat, but already having the reflex to provide cover fire and when to provide it is better.

You clearly shouldnt be allowed anywhere near a computer if you think clicking add/remove, uninstall is a difficult feat.

The program itself is terrible but getting rid of it is ridiculously easy task.

I'm not up to date on the latest version of Symantec specifically, but I _do_ have experience with antiviruses which were about as easy to get rid of as an actual virus. Which is to say, not easy at all.

The most trivial example was an old McAffee, actually, which I installed on D: and apparently nobody at McAffee ever heard of people installing programs anywhere else than the default location. Because the first update (after I actually managed to make it update: let's just say that there were other things they had apparently never heard of, like people using a different browser) it installed an updated copy of itself in the default C:\Programs\ location, BUT left the old copy on D: also active and running, which slowed the computer majorly. Needless to say, uninstalling it also only uninstalled one of the copies, while leaving the other on the hard drive and still loaded all over the registry.

Sure, if you were Joe Average and didn't know jack shit about computers, you might think that the uninstall worked and your computer is now free of the buggy antivirus... it just keeps being slow and making your browser act weirdly for some completely other reason. But if you knew enough to at least look at what services are running, you'd discover that it was a more like James Bond: you may think you got rid of him, but he's still around to ruin your party ;)

But generally, given that these things are in a race to the bottom with the actual malware to get loaded even more invisible, at an even lower level, and take over even more functions than an actual virus, it should come as no surprise if the ARE more obnoxious than an actual virus, slow the computer down more than an actual virus, cause more network traffic than an actual virus, and occasionally are also harder to remove than an actual virus.

Bullshit. Sorry, there is no nice way to put it, but the scare mongering was pure, weapons-grade bullshit.

The REAL problems with any actual critical systems had been readily apparent to any company who would do any kind of forecasting or planning or had any contracts (including any loans given or taken) extending into the future. Even something as non-critical as import-export companies for packaging, or travel agencies or whatever, I know people actually working for them and they were aware at the very least in January 1999 (though most even earlier,) when forecast data or contracts extending in the next year started having problems. I actually know people working for such companies and NONE were waiting for the hype to convince them. As soon as the first report showed up as "uh, it says we'll achieve our goals if we get, uh, minus two thousand dollars a month in sales until 1900", some boss said, "fix the fucking thing NOW."

Meanwhile things were hyped as needing an urgent fix, that had no problem whatsoever. Network CABLES and speakers were hyped as Y2K Compliant, when, seriously, they didn't even have a calendar in them or anything. Scammers made off with billions from the rest of the economy, in upgrades for things that didn't need upgrading, and replacements for things that didn't need replacing.

THAT was what the shameless hype did: help some scammers milk the rest of the economy of money that would have been better spent elsewhere. Anyone who took part in spreading that scare, THAT is what they helped achieve: help some parasites loot the rest of society.

And it didn't even stop there. Things were hyped as going to bring civilization down, like street lights or car electronics which (especially in 1999) didn't even hold the date anywhere and had no use for it, AND which nobody could afford to just yank out and replace wholesale. Yet hordes of shameless snake oil vendors and their PR toadies were hammering non-stop on the idea that OMG, unless your city is blowing its whole budget on their snake oil, come next year all car traffic will halt, airplanes will come crashing down from the sky, and apparently grocery stores will stay closed because everyone is too stupid to figure they still need to go to work if their electronic watch locks up in 2000. It was stuff that wasn't going to get "fixed", not just because it wasn't broken in the first place, but also because nobody was rich AND retarded enough to yank out and replace every single streetlight control module like that. The hype just kept people's fears high, and even tried to amplify them some more, just in case it results in some sale anyway, although chances were 99% that it wouldn't.

The shameless snake oil vendors and the idiots who helped them spread the panic, were NOT actually doing anyone any problem. In fact if it were a just world, we'd put that kind of parasites out of our collective misery and be better off for it.