361–370 of 482 posts
This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.
They pass stupid laws with impunity here in America. Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.
Oh hi HN, I'm one of the folks behind https://hayahora.futbol , we monitor the blocks via a varying set of homelab infrastructure to at least try to make a bit more transparent when they occur and what gets blocked (which isn't public, and we have to guess). Feel free to AMA!
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They wrote them out. And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too. If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
> They wrote them out. Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights. > there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy. There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission. The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zer…
I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.
Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.
Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.
Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.
Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.
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I've always wondered if a hybrid system could work. You'd need a lot of voting infrastructure, and you need online voting, which means you need a reliable and quick method of online identification. Scandinavian countries fill those prerequisites, perhaps other places do too. The idea is basically that you give a politician a mandate to use your vote. Whatever your chosen politician votes for will count as their and y…
That's pretty much Switzerland. Indirect democracy for most things, but if enough people disagree with what the government does or they feel strongly about something the government isn't doing they can call a referendum.
If you know Spain, you know this makes total sense: - Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway. - There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN" - Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours. - There's not really huge internet companies there that…
> they're watching the match Isn't that part of the problem? Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters. There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.
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If they pass laws “with impunity” you can’t blame the voters that hard.
the voters don't vote on issues, and there are no consequences for breaking campaign promises. and direct democracy is le bad, of course (since Brexit).
Even a slightly higher threshold than majority vote would be good for direct democracy. And constitutional amendments should either have a higher bar, or should automatically expire after X years unless there's a second vote to verify that the change should actually stay in effect.
I tend to vote no on all ballot propositions automatically due to the bad effects of permanent changes being far too easy with too little substantive information provide to voters.
Assuming that "piracy is a service problem, not a pricing problem" is still the prevailing wisdom, what is Spain / La Liga doing wrong that sports piracy is so prevalent as to warrant this? It seems like a no-brainer to expand stream availability and charge appropriately for it vs. scheduling daily kneecaps of other economic activity.
This seems like they are aiming to increase profit margins instead of increasing the supply and decreasing the price. Considering that increasing the supply is trivial in digital products, maybe they are competing in a saturated market? Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to stea…
Uh... Huh? How is EUR 20 * 20 approximately EUR 100?
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> Every new service is a colossal headache to set up payment, remember to cancel payment if you only wanted to see the single event and have no need for the service the rest of the year, find what's playing on what when I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game. This feel…
My opinion is the original 99 cent app, then followed free apps and services caused a public devaluation of software costs. Use Youtube as an example. It tickles me hearing people complain about the cost of a YouTube subscription. In my head, I’m well aware of the colossal amount of costs that go into the hardware and software that allows for such a service to exist in the first place. Yet it’s a bloody outrage to sp…
YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that.
A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about.
Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.
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Yes, I’m a huge proponent of global unification. It’s ridiculous that we have different cultures, languages and laws based on between which imaginary lines on a map you live. Countries make no sense to me. Look at the current situation in Iran. Everyone on the planet is affected by the actions of a president we didn’t vote for. Earth should be a single country.
What a sad world where we all have the same culture and language. There's many concepts that don't translate from one language to the next, they form a way of looking at the world. What about foods, and stories and music, nah, sounds terrible. I also want one big world for all but definitely not a single culture or language
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> they're watching the match Isn't that part of the problem? Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters. There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.
Foot egg? I thought we were talking about soccer.