This is so silly. It's like saying "Sweet manufacturers all had the chance to sell the same sweets, and they blew it. So I just nick most sweets." Just say "I don't like paying for things and can get away with this, and my ethics only work in public or when I'm forced to obey them." And then we're done.
Are you saying I wouldn’t steal a car, or a handbag, or a television, or a dvd? So piracy is a crime?
Are you really making that argument in 2025? You must be very young.
Bittorrent didn’t become popular because no one wanted to pay for things. In fact people stopped when Netflix was good. I stopped, all my friends stopped. It was no longer a mainstream thing. We even put up with a few price hikes. Then 1 service became whatever and people started torrenting and streaming sites started popping up.
Everyone was willing to pay for convenience. No ones wants to pay even more for in convenience.
You’ll note music piracy is not really a thing anymore. Thanks Spotify.
I'm not very young, but that meme doesn't hold up. I agree piracy isn't the same as theft, but it's extremely close still. If an author works on a book for 10 years and then the publisher copies it and sells it without paying them, is that okay because copying isn't technically theft? Murder isn't theft either, but it's still bad.
I agree that streaming services quieted piracy, but that doesn't somehow make piracy okay.
This argument has always confused me. Yes, it's true that a digital copy of a video can be duplicated endlessly in a way a physical item cannot. But... so?
It's an item available for purchase at a price. If you take it without paying that price then the seller is out money they would otherwise have received. If everyone pirated Netflix's output then they would have to shut down, just the same as a grocery store would if everyone stole their produce. The only reason that doesn't happen is because piracy is a minority activity.
Seriously how old are some of the people responding? An entire generation already went through this.
Bootleg DVDs, pirated files were common place. I could literally go out whenever and spend change on a VCD. Or a friend would have a copy of whatever movie on their HD. I’d go to anime screenings where people would bring their RAID arrays full of fan subbed anime. Music was pirated all over the place. Digital players just made music piracy more common. Everyone used BitTorrent. Everyone. People got sued. ISPs used to send out letters saying “we think you’re torrenting. Please stop or we’ll cancel your service”.
You know what didn’t happen? The entertainment industry didn’t collapse. You know why? Because none of these people were never going to spend money on entertainment. You know what I did if I couldn’t afford to see a movie or get a new CD in college? Something else.
When Netflix started streaming, they fixed all this. We all stopped BitTorrenting because Netflix was easier. They know how to fix it and they fixed it for a while. Sell us convenience. But I’m not paying and managing 5 subscriptions.
By acquiring a duplicate of the original, you're no longer depriving someone of property in the way you would be with theft. If you steal an apple, that's one less apple that the store has to sell to someone who is willing to pay for an apple, and the store will still owe the orchard the cost of the apple you took. In contrast, pirating a movie doesn't remove any physical copies from shelves.
The problem comes down to what you believe the cost of piracy actually is, and who bears that cost, which gets complicated in the case of digital goods and subscription models. If the argument is that piracy lowers demand in general, then you'd have to account for the effect of libraries, the secondhand market, and competition from other media.
The practical evidence that pirates are outnumbered by paying customers suggests that on the balance, the system is capable of supporting some freeloaders without collapsing. To extend the apple analogy, it would be similar to people coming to the orchard after the harvest and gleaning the leftover apples instead of buying them from the store. Can you argue this diminishes apple sales? of course. Is it theft? yes, and the orchard owners have their right to insist it's a crime and all apples must be paid for, but if the apples were going to rot anyways the harm is minimal. Would it completely destroy the apple market and leave all apple growers destitute? I don't think so.
Personally, I can pay for media, so I believe it's ethical that I do. If someone in my position chooses not to pay, there's a pretty solid argument that the media company is out money they could have had otherwise.
However, not everyone who pirates something was ever going to buy it in the first place. A huge portion of the world lives in sufficiently deep poverty that the option was either: have the thing for free or not have it at all. These folks don't represent lost sales.
Luckily though, "price" is not the same thing as "cost". If they watch for free, it doesn't cost us anything.
Just out of curiosity, how certain are you that "piracy is a minority activity"?
I agree overall, but it is a lot different when each further thievery requires no additional work (since you're not streaming from them). It'd be more like paying someone each time you walk in your door, for the lifetime of the door. In this case they can also take the door off anytime they want, put ads on it, or do pretty much whatever they want.
You can see the layer lines in the part. WTF? I don’t build aircraft parts. But I sure as hell wont use thermoplastics in this situation. I don’t even 3D print parts for mildly hot environments where failure is just annoyance.
This is an uncertified experimental aircraft. At least in the US, it is up to the operator of an experimental to ensure that parts are fit for purpose.
I've printed and used intake manifolds for (automotive) engines in the past, without issue. Obviously that's not the same stakes as an aircraft, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to do safely.
I’m not necessarily saying it can’t be done. But these are plastics that fail under heat. I’d test part for non critical applications and I’m just a nobody amateur.
These guys are messing with planes and don’t test enough? Is there an explanation these people aren’t just incompetent?
Not that I can think of, honestly. I'd be extremely hesitant to use a part I printed on an aircraft. If I had to, I'd make very sure to test multiple copies to destruction.
> All materials ultimately succomb when exposed long enough at some high enough temperature.
I'm not a material scientist, but I don't believe that to be true. Metals don't to my knowledge; they suffer oxidation, which is allayed by the presence of oil.
If you mean plastics in particular, then PEEK would be ideal to my knowledge - it's suitable for immersion in gasoline and similar solvents, and I've used it in the past for a fuel pump mounting bracket that sits inside the fuel tank of a (gasoline) vehicle. I checked it after a year and it doesn't seem to be any worse for wear.
It's just a huge pain to print!
> What is the temperature range to match here?
I'm not sure, and likely couldn't be sure without a fair amount of research. If I had to print this for a plane, I'd want to do that and measure temperature in use and under high load and destructively test several drafts to ensure performance.
From what I've seen in this instance though, the failed part showed a Tg (glass transition temperature) of 55ºC - basically exactly that of PLA-CF. The pilot believed it was ABS-CF, which has a Tg of ~100ºC. If we assume that 100ºC was at least higher than the expected operating temperature, PEEK (Tg: 143ºC) would have given a ~50% safety margin.
What would be a better solution? Do other package managers reliably restrict access to the host system beyond the scope of the project folder?
Many quirks come from abilities that were once deemed useful, such as compiling code in other languages after package install.
Sure, today, I can disable install scripts if I want but it doesn't change much when I eventually run code from the package anyway.
But even restricting access to the file system to the project's root folder would leave many doors open, with or without foreign languages: Node is designed as a general purpose JS runtime, including server-side and build-time usage.
The utility of node.js was initially to provide a JS API that, unlike the web platform, is not sandboxed. And npm is the default package manager.
This not only allows server-side usage, but also is essential to many early dev scenarios. Back in the days, it might have been SCSS builds using node-gyp (wouldn't recommend). Today it's things like Golang TypeScript or SSGs.
So, long story short: as many people before me already said, it's an ecosystem/cultural problem.
One thing against npm in this regard was/is its broken lock-file handling until I think version 12 or 16. That led to unintended transitive dependency version changes, breaking any reproducibility.
Same for compiling foreign languages.
These problems are solved today / not different from other package managers and -registries, as far as I know.
The culture of taking breaking changes and dependency bloat lightly has not changed as much, I think, although it's improved.
This most important point seems to be related to 3 reasons IMO:
- junior developers without experience in library development reaching large audiences
- specs, languages, runtime, and the package managers itself going through disruptions and evolutions
- rapidly releasing breaking majors, often caused by the above factors
The combination of these plus the role of the project lead/team who actually decides about the dependencies.
There are probably also many projects with unclear roles and many people who can push manifest changes, coupled with habitual access to CI/CD pipelines.
Maybe that's another indication of something wrong - the NPM ecosystem granularity being so high there is not enough humans alive to safely maintain all the packages ? And some rethinking might be needed even there.
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