{"id":199468,"date":"2007-07-25T17:18:00","date_gmt":"2007-07-25T22:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/25\/why-you-should-run-numbers-on-stories-like-this\/"},"modified":"2007-07-25T17:18:00","modified_gmt":"2007-07-25T22:18:00","slug":"why-you-should-run-numbers-on-stories-like-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2007\/07\/25\/why-you-should-run-numbers-on-stories-like-this\/","title":{"rendered":"Why You Should Run Numbers on Stories Like This"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Typical headline, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2007\/07\/24\/microsoft_fbi_bust_counterfeit\/\">Microsoft, Feds, and Chinese authorities seize $2bn in pirated software<\/a>. It&#8217;s a typical lie.  One that could be revealed in 10 minutes with paper and pencil, 5 minutes with a calculator.<\/p>\n<p>Both software and drug busts suffer from the same inflated reporting.  <\/p>\n<p>Assuming Microsoft products have a value of $500 each, which is generous considering discounts, site licenses, bulk discounts, etc, that would say that they seized 4 million, that&#8217;s right 4 followed by 6 zeros copies of their software.<\/p>\n<p>A CD is about 1-\u00bd mm thick, 4 million would stack over 3-\u00bd <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">miles<\/span> high.<\/p>\n<p>My guess is that they are using the bogus $50-100K\/copy number that comes up in copyright cases.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like those drug busts during my college days, they would quote a street value for the pot that was 10-20x what I paid retail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Typical headline, Microsoft, Feds, and Chinese authorities seize $2bn in pirated software. It&#8217;s a typical lie. One that could be revealed in 10 minutes with paper and pencil, 5 minutes with a calculator. Both software and drug busts suffer from the same inflated reporting. Assuming Microsoft products have a value of $500 each, which is &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199468"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}