BSA Claims Half of PC Users Are Pirates 585
judgecorp writes "Despite continued pressure on business users to buy legitimate software, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) reports that the campaign seems to be failing. Well over half (57%) of users surveyed in a global survey admit to using pirated software. That's a big increase from the same survey last year — when 43% admitted to using pirated software. The BSA surveyed 15,000 people in 33 countries."
Re:The BSA should sue the BSA (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
Re:Phrasing (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, this reminds me of an episode on Yes Prime Minister where Sir Humphrey Appleby discusses this very thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA [youtube.com]
Re:Phrasing (Score:2, Informative)
From the Report:
By a wide 71-percent to 29-percent margin, respondents aligned themselves with the idea that “it is important for people who create new products or technologies to be paid for them, because it provides an incentive to produce more innovations. That is good for society because it drives technological progress and economic growth.”
Computer users around the world rejected the alternative proposition: “No company or individual should be allowed to control a product or technology that could benefit the rest of society. Laws like that limit the free flow of ideas, stifle innovation, and give too much power to too few people.”
Looking at the beginning of the statements, the tone for the Pro IP statement is very positive - "it is important" - where as the Against IP starts off very negatively "No". People are more likely to agree with a positive statement. I would assume the rest of the questions have a similar tone imbalance
Re:Underestimation? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:And 43% of those surveyed... (Score:5, Informative)
In case anyone is wondering, here is a nice interview [cnet.com] that covers the story pretty much start to finish.
Re:Underestimation? (Score:3, Informative)
I dual boot win7 and Ubuntu and there is still no comparison.
There in lies the problem "dual booting". If you are serious about running a Linux desktop you have to have your favourite Linux distro as your only OS and for those who still need their Microsoft fix then run the MS OS in a virtual machine otherwise you may just as well forget it and run a Microsoft OS. As for getting "more work done in Win 7" are you talking about MS Office or something else and have you or your work paid for it. I have been using a pure Linux (Fedora) distribution for a few years now in the corporate sector and have not had any major issues with collaborating with customers and colleagues who are running a Microsoft OS and Office.
Re:Underestimation? (Score:2, Informative)
Wow! you must be a professional troll.. I work in a dual shop, and deal with Linux and Windows on a daily basis.. My Linux servers take 15 min to deploy. One reboot, and they are fully updated. My windows machines take several hours.. Countless updates, reboots, etc.. (wtf do I have to install 4 updates, reboot, find 12 more, reboot, then 3, reboot, then 17, wash, lather, repeat). If its a laptop, I get to deal with either taking the factory image, and removing all the crapware (dear god, why does MS let hp put so much slow crap on their machines!) Or, I can spend hours building a master windows image. At least with windows 7, the hardware drivers are getting better, and a single image can work on more computer..Not as good as Linux, but getting closer. I still have to update every single freaking application, because for some reason, they all have separate update tools... so each time I update the master image, we have to test like crazy. Then, maintaining these tools, if its windows, and we need to remove/upgrade drivers, its kind of a crapshoot.. from my experience, (and my business doesn't buy cheap hardware, or the stuff that just came out today) Linux actually provides more drivers that work better than windows. Does your 4 year old scanner have 64 bit windows 7 drivers? Doubt it.. most of them just work with Linux.
Re:Today is different (Score:4, Informative)
Global warming *is* happening. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record [wikipedia.org]
We've been measuring the global average temperature for 150 years, and the graph in the top right tells the story of what's been happening to global averages. Only an idiot looks at that graph and says that the temperature is actually going down.
What may or may not be in question is how much of an impact we're actually having on it, and how much of it is a natural trend. They argue that there was actually a mini ice age in the middle ages, and that this is a natural warming of the world as a result of coming out of it. They point to what the Vikings called Vineland, and remind us that they used to grow grapes for wine in Greenland. What they forget is that this mini ice age was caused by the Romans deforesting Europe, and that most of those trees have not grown back... there has to be another reason that the global cooling they caused has been reversing itself.
Beyond that, the thing that's particularly annoying about climate change deniers is that we know that these hydrocarbons (which most climate change scientists are saying is the root cause) are not good for human health. They have been linked to several types of cancers, and are a contributing factor to other quality-of-life diseases like asthma. We also know that exposure to smog has detrimental effects on the local flora and fauna. (well, some plants it's like super fertilizer, but it kills others). Knowing these detrimental effects exist, what surprises me is that some climate change deniers are actively campaigning against change, because they believe global warming to be a myth. Even if we can't agree whether humankind is responsible for the climate change, can we at least agree that reducing hydrocarbon emissions is a good thing to be trying to do regardless on its impact on the global average temperature?