Maybe, but for the silent majority it's pretty straightforward: 1) we view information as fundamentally different from currency, goods, and services; 2)
we don't want to pay for information if we don't have to and we're not going to get caught.
The gymnastics are mostly about just trying to figure out whether we're bad people or not - because everyone else's favorite game is Shame the Pirate - but once you realize you're not a bad person and that you're okay with doing something illegal then it all just sort of fades into the background.
On the contrary, I think the people who know whether an action is right or wrong don't spend a lot of time arguing either way, they just go ahead and do what they think is right. It's the people who don't know whether an action is right or wrong that get all worked up trying to handle their conflicted feelings about it.
This isn't about whats legal though. Its about you taking advantage of someone else's hard work. Its theft in the moral sense, and its that what makes you a bad person.
That said, its still a grey area moralistically.
I do not see a small indie developer and a large corporation in the same light as the corporation is taking advantage of the hard work of its employees to make a profit.
Hey mate! Helping homeless is illegal in my city, as well as collecting wild berries, tenting in forest. Just because law is not realistic and doesn't protect anyone and was made only for profits from tickets doesn't make it a good law and me a bad person. I have a 100GB seedbox where I seed old books that are unavailable on paper in my country and scientific zip. How bad am I?
The main problem I have with the prevalence of adblockers is that now you have to "block" the meta-advertising people in discussion forums that criticize you or attempt to make you feel guilty for blocking ads on your own property any time the subject comes up, and it's a lot harder since the messages are usually targeted, handwritten, interspersed with useful content, and overall difficult to detect automatically.
Oh. Reminds me of that one time, where some jerk went all wise on me, by picking individual words from my post then responding "strong words".
On the surface, I was the angry stampede, and he was the voice of reason. Except he didn't seem to notice that my "strong words" tended to cancel each other (some of the words he cited actually restricted the scope of the others).
It's like the tone is more important than the message. Can't people read, before they take offence to surface details? I hope this is a loud minority problem.
Lesson learned: thou shalt not use strong words, even to express a fair and balanced position. What a mess.
Dramatic is the right tone here. We are seeing the collapse of intellectual freedom and openness in the places where it was supposed to be valued most. This does not bode well for our civilization. My generation, the millennials, holds free speech in much lower regard than previous generations. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millen... . Everyone who values freedom should be very alarmed.
Millenials didn't invent video game ratings, movie ratings, the seven 'dirty' words, the hays code, or blacklists.
If your generation targets something that's actually harmful, you're ahead of the game.
Consider a space that becasue all speech is allowed, is dominated by speech that marginalizes some subset of the population. Is that 'free'?
I think that if you want a place of intellectual exploration, excluding people is as dangerous as excluding certain ideas. And there seems to be a trade-off.
I very recently graduated from a college where these activists were very active. I can assure you, that there is not some epidemic of racism or any other kind of discrimination that this is a legitimate reaction to. It's nothing short of a political power-grab and an attempt to shut down any discussion by people that they don't agree with. They have successfully created a climate of fear. The reaction among all of the different institutions--different academic and administrative departments, student groups, greek organizations, alumni groups, etc.--is nothing short of race to capitulate the fastest.
Inch / foot / yard / mile is a really small range compared to what metric can handle (anything), so in practice most science is done with metric units.
Wide ranges of values are handled exactly the same way in imperial units as in metric: multipliers. You write "0.00023 inches" or "5.48e4 miles", etc. It's just not as pretty.
What are the pros and cons of Silicon Valley being the VC capital of the world? How do you feel about it on the whole? Do you guys ever talk about diversifying, either inside the US or out?
Sometimes people cross their arms because it's a comfortable resting position. It's common in overweight men, the arms rest on the belly quite naturally. Often people will lean back against the chair or wall at the same time.
The gymnastics are mostly about just trying to figure out whether we're bad people or not - because everyone else's favorite game is Shame the Pirate - but once you realize you're not a bad person and that you're okay with doing something illegal then it all just sort of fades into the background.