I love Taleb, I've been following his advice for a few years now and have found that absolutely nothing in my life has changed except having a lot more free time and a lot less stress.
The consumers can and do. We collectively decided that a .99 cents for a song or $15 for a physical album isn't worth it. Equilibrium will eventually happen, the smart artists are already making money in the new music industry.
Yes and no. The pirating situation isn't that simple. I used to pirate a lot of games, but then Steam came along and I've pretty much not pirated anything since. Pirating was, for me, not just about being free in cost, but also a way to get the games via the internet without having to go into a shop and see if they had it, then possibly wait until they ordered it in. There was also the pain of license keys when they didn't work - it only takes a couple to start making you gun-shy.
Admittedly it's not music and I'm not familiar with the pirating in that arena, but it seems to me that pirating is a more complex beast than most people paint it.
In the words of a good friend of mine:
"You wouldn't download a car? Man if I could download a car off the internet for free, you bet your sweet ass I would!"
You're right. You probably won't need to take any courses to learn all this stuff - this stuff can be easily accessed online. It's definitely crucial for all software developers to have this sort of CS background.
The site was cool but I found it funny how every person on the most wanted list was hispanic or black. But at least only one was because of drugs, the others committed legitimate crimes.
Very cool! Thanks for the info, that was exactly the type of advice I was looking for. I've only used postgres as a backend for metasploit so my background is limited. I'll definitely do some research and learn more about databases.
