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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
...are we not on the same page here? I'm talking about inflation, if that's not clear. Inflation is a tax from people who don't hold assets to pay people who do.
Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about.
But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
Almost all community help forums (for commercial and open source software) suffer from what I like to call "HaveYouTrieditis". You post a question, and without any root cause analysis or even a description of why it might work, people start posting "Have you tried X?" and "Have you tried Y?" and "You should try Z." These kinds of responses are almost always unhelpful.
I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.
Do you really think that in a high stress situation you’re going to make the best decisions?
Do you really think health workers are all concerned about legalities first?
Not moving a patient unless you explicitly know how is probably right the vast majority of the time. Sometimes that’s wrong, but how are you going to get the entire public to understand what the right situation is?
It’s so easy looking at a single case in hindsight. May we all have the ability to make the right choices all the time.
It's not that health workers are always thinking about legality; it's that they're following policies either written by people thinking about legality or re-written by people in response to legality, i.e. they got sued and changed the policy in light of that.
> Do you really think health workers are all concerned about legalities first?
100%. Legal issues are a huge deal in healthcare. This is a snippet from a study [1] on the topic, just to get an idea of the scale (which I think most do not realize at all):
---
Each year during the study period, 7.4% of all physicians had a malpractice claim, with 1.6% having a claim leading to a payment (i.e., 78% of all claims did not result in payments to claimants). The proportion of physicians facing a claim each year ranged from 19.1% in neurosurgery, 18.9% in thoracic–cardiovascular surgery, and 15.3% in general surgery to 5.2% in family medicine, 3.1% in pediatrics, and 2.6% in psychiatry. The mean indemnity payment was $274,887, and the median was $111,749. Mean payments ranged from $117,832 for dermatology to $520,923 for pediatrics. It was estimated that by the age of 65 years, 75% of physicians in low-risk specialties had faced a malpractice claim, as compared with 99% of physicians in high-risk specialties.
---
I can give a very specific example of how legal issues play directly into behavior, and how it leads to antibiotic over-prescription. Antibiotics are obviously useless against viral infections but many, if not most, doctors will habitually describe them for viral infections anyhow. Why? Because a viral infection tends to leave your body more susceptible to bacterial infections. For instance a flu (viral) can very rarely lead to pneumonia (bacterial). And that person who then gets very sick from pneumonia can sue for malpractice. It's not malpractice because in the average case antibiotic prescription is not, at all, justified by the cost:benefit, but doctors do it anyhow to try to protect themselves from lawsuits.
There have been studies demonstratively showing this as well, in that doctors who live in areas with less rampant malpractice lawsuits are less likely to prescribe antibiotics unless deemed necessary. Or if you have a friend/family in medicine you can simply ask them about this - it's not some fringe thing.
I get that in some societies there is a quick journey from something bad, to someone-to-blame. In litigious societies this means a quick trip to sue someone, anyone...
What's interesting to me is that in societies not prone to blame, or lawsuits, it can be much easier to have human interactions without being inhibited by legal fear.
Accepting that people make mistakes makes progress simpler. I recently had a medical issue which would have turned out simpler had he run a specific test earlier. I'm not the litigious sort (and I'm not in a society that is litigious) so I can now go back to him and we can discuss the mistake so he doesn't make it in the future.
I accept he's not perfect. I seek his development not his censure.
This is outside the US. No doubt inside the US fear of lawsuits would make this feedback untenable.
My vent: I have very mild cerebral palsy- it affects my left hand and left foot slightly. But properly conditioned, I’ve run half marathons and ended up in the middle of the pack and I’ve been a gym rat and in above average shape all of my adult life.
That being said, anytime I’m looking on the web doing research, the first thing you find are lawyers looking to sue doctors. I absolutely hate that’s the first thing parents think about to blame doctors. Some times things just happen.
> Do you really think that in a high stress situation you’re going to make the best decisions?
I mean that statement could be used to excuse any mistake in any project/system ever made, and is mostly a cop out. Yes, the system is definitely designed to minimize legal risk for the health-workers/hospitals. A system is only as good as what it's' design objectives are, and if "save a life at all cost" was the objective the system might as well look entirely different.
If you trained when you were younger, you’ll know this is complete BS. My performance as I age is on a steady downward slope. Recovery is noticeably worse, diet is becoming more important to maintaining a stable weight.
Don’t leave getting fit to your thirties or later. Start now.
Technically you're probably right, but I think this feeling affects people who trained to be competitive at something when they were very young, then stopped and stagnated, and then tried to pick it back up after their divorce or letting themselves get a beer gut or something. The feeling of not being the same as they were in high school or whatever.
I was reasonably athletic, but never tried to "train" or got even close to what peak might have meant, and then continued skateboarding and doing other athletic things throughout my twenties, always being in pretty good shape. Now in my thirties, I'm in my best shape and continuing, it doesn't really matter what my peak hypothetically could have been or where I was at earlier, past is the past, let the good memories stick around, let the bad ones disappear, be present and keep pushing into the future.
Maybe I consider it a blessing that I never tried that hard in my early years, because now I'm not concerned about any ceiling. I let the enjoyment and ambition guide me, not the numbers, who cares.
I've had a concept 2 rowing machine for almost 20 years, so I (automatically) have a detailed record of every workout for two decades. N=1, but for me at least, I have clear evidence that the same level of effort does not produce the same result as you get older. onsistent effort does produce results at any age (that I've reached at least).
They all had their chance. They blew it.
reply