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Rather than spend time typing another constructive reply to your acerbic bullet points, I will instead complement you for your fine example of argumentum ad verecundiam.

Actually that would be a simple fallacy ... Division

This is like shooting fish in a barrel. It is just a shame that so many people are too brainwashed to see this for the silliness that it is.

Basically it sounds like they are saying that I should not be exchanging information from my peers

Yeah, um, nice equivocation.

"But this begs the question..."

no it doesn't. it raises the question. the phrase "begging the question" means something else entirely.

This illustrates the logical fallacy of exclusive premises. No conclusion can be drawn from two negative premises.

"It begs the question of irony."

no it doesn't. please acquaint yourself with the actual meaning of "begging the question".

I think this http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/toc.php should be something you should take a gander at.

Any comparison between physical property and intellectual property will fail.

wow, so words are in fact defined by the dictionary, rather than the speech community that uses them?

The problem here is that there are in fact two communities using these terms: there are the professional cybergeek types, who actually know something about the field, and there are the unwashed masses of the general public, who are blissfully ignorant. The Geeks distinguish between hacking and cracking; the great unwashed, however, could care less about the subtle-or-not distinction, and use one term for both.

The term "hacker" started out in the computer community a LONG time back-- I recall reading history pieces that date the term to the 60s. It predates the Google USENET archive, anyway. However, the semantic distinction between hacker and cracker within the Geek community clearly does not predate that great repository of asbestos suppositories.

The earliest post archived at Google using both the terms "hacker" and "cracker" was on September 15, 1983. This was apparently in response to a news piece on CBS news on roughly Wednesday the 14th, although there is evidence of at least something being earlier. While I do not remember the CBS news piece, it was most likely prompted by a Hollywood turkey released around then.

When the news media presented this little petri-dish culture to the great Unwashed, they made one mistake. They heard, "someone who breaks into systems is a hacker", and reported "a hacker is someone who breaks into systems". It's a category error fallacy, or perhaps a definition fallacy, but who expects logical thought from a reporter?

Anyway, my point is: the hacker community did not make a clear semantic distinction of "cracking" until after the term "hacking" was exposed to the public, and that at the time "hacking" was still a correct term describing the activity, albeit one that included many other different activities as well.

wow, so words are in fact defined by the dictionary, rather than the speech community that uses them?

The problem here is that there are in fact two communities using these terms: there are the professional cybergeek types, who actually know something about the field, and there are the unwashed masses of the general public, who are blissfully ignorant. The Geeks distinguish between hacking and cracking; the great unwashed, however, could care less about the subtle-or-not distinction, and use one term for both.

The term "hacker" started out in the computer community a LONG time back-- I recall reading history pieces that date the term to the 60s. It predates the Google USENET archive, anyway. However, the semantic distinction between hacker and cracker within the Geek community clearly does not predate that great repository of asbestos suppositories.

The earliest post archived at Google using both the terms "hacker" and "cracker" was on September 15, 1983. This was apparently in response to a news piece on CBS news on roughly Wednesday the 14th, although there is evidence of at least something being earlier. While I do not remember the CBS news piece, it was most likely prompted by a Hollywood turkey released around then.

When the news media presented this little petri-dish culture to the great Unwashed, they made one mistake. They heard, "someone who breaks into systems is a hacker", and reported "a hacker is someone who breaks into systems". It's a category error fallacy, or perhaps a definition fallacy, but who expects logical thought from a reporter?

Anyway, my point is: the hacker community did not make a clear semantic distinction of "cracking" until after the term "hacking" was exposed to the public, and that at the time "hacking" was still a correct term describing the activity, albeit one that included many other different activities as well.

Ob /. language nitpick: Actually, it just "raises the question." To "beg the question" means to assume the conclusion as one of your premises. Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies has a good description.

To have property rights and contract law you need a government, and that means political influence.

Law enforcement and justice are not political in nature. This is the whole point behind the separation of the different branches of government. Political favour should not influence justice.

In a pure capitalist system, a man with no money has no power: how is that universal suffrage?

No power? Universal suffrage is not about power, but about rights. To believe you have any power over anything but yourself is illusion. Money doesn't give you power over others beyond what they are willing to grant you in exchange. And as I said, money has no prejudice; anyone can use it.

Perhaps he can sell his labour, but he can't negotiate the price.

Why not?

With no money coming in he can never improve his situation, so he will remain a slave for the rest of his life.

This is an appeal to consequences fallacy. Firstly, slavery is a separate issue from economic status. Just because you have no money, does not mean you are a slave. The Constitution ensures "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It does not guarantee happiness, it does not guarantee financial comfort. What it does guarantee, is the freedom to pursue those ends.

Practically speaking, people will adapt to survive and thrive in almost any particular environment; some scenarios are simply more conducive to growth than others. You have not pointed out how these poor people would all of a sudden be stripped of what they own, but let's assume that they have nothing to begin with. Labour is indeed the source of all value for those with no property of their own. But, you then assert that they have no viable negotiating position and will thus be "exploited". In fact, unions were started to address these very issues. If an employer does not treat his employees fairly, then a union is the only viable alternative.

There is nothing here that violates the principles of free market capitalism: a man voluntarily exchanges his labour for food and lodging, that is all.

And yet, economically speaking it would almost never make sense to provide lodgings and food instead of money. It is economically more efficient to deal with money; that is the driving force behind its widespread use. Your point is moot.

Even wage-slaves can use their votes to influence the law, perhaps to provide them with food and lodging so that they can demand money for their labour.

Law by majority vote (ie. democracy) is a terrible idea and often results in socialism. Perhaps you can explain why they are entitled to said food and lodgings without providing anything in exhange.

Yes, providing food and lodging will mean using the evil coercive power of government to steal somebody else's property, but that's the social cost of avoiding slavery.

Government is indeed a cost of avoiding slavery. Stealing someone else's property is not among the costs though. Preventing others from stealing property is one way to avoid slavery.

Perhaps you think it's nobler for each man to stand on his own two feet, in which case I say why not abolish property rights and contract law as well, and fight it out with our teeth and fingernails?

Since non-coercion is a fundamental tenet of libertarians, I'm not sure why they would support a deevolution to a coercive state.

Only if you have "votes" to cast. In a democracy you can spend your last dollar but you can't spend your right to vote.

In fact you can. You spend it on an election, and then you're stuck with your (or rather, everyone else's) choice for an entire term with no "out". A free market has a constant feedback, and response is near-immediate (compared to politics anyway). And you can't spend your last resource in capitalism either as long as you can provide something of value to another.

Uh no. You don't get to know who this corporate lawyer is, because we paid him to give his opinion to us, and I for one would hate to see him get a pile of hate mail from people who don't properly understand his area of expertise.

You seem quite skilled at committing argumentative fallacies.

Dynamic linking still puts chunks of the LGPL'd code into the executable.

Yes. Section 5 addresses and permits this without invoking section 6.

So why, again, is it that the OS is to blame during the runtime linking of your "./maya" command, when you were the one who issued the command to begin with?

Because *I* didn't write maya. But maya is going to get dynamically linked with glibc when I type "./maya", regardless of what header and development library files were used when it was built. You are saying that maya is now subject to reverse engineering because I, who had no hand in creation of the software, ran it on a Linux system. The OS linked maya and glibc when I typed "./maya".

The fact is that CD ripping works just fine, but if you've damaged a CD then yes, you may need specialist software.

b. cd ripping doesn't work fine, it's dependent on your computer usage.

c. this isn't a problem recognized solely by geeky Linux users. see Exact Audio Copy for Windows.

Is there an OS X build of CD Paranoia, then I will give it a try.

The original poster was talking about jitter (and got his terminology wrong) and then posted a pile of gobbledegook that he said meant that it was nigh on impossible to rip a CD accurately.

That doesn't seem to be the case. I've never had pops or clicks from a CD I've ripped myself.

I understand your position and I think the country we live in today is more likly to do what you mention, but your argument suffers from being a Slippery Slope.

If we are going to want someone or something like the government to do somehting we need to start to appeal to logical understandable arguments which would hold up to a decent level of scrutiny. Becuase in the end it might have to in a court of law.

I mean come on, if as geeks/computer programmers we demand good code, can't we demand good thinking and good logic minus all the hysteria.

Ted Tschopp

The report starts off a section by saying, "Myth: Linux Will Be Less Expensive." The author then shows one situation in which Linux is the same price. "Therefore," implies the article, "it is a myth that Linux will be less expensive." It's an obvious non-sequitur. I wonder if Gartner's clients are paying for that sort of thing, or if it just got added in the summary.

More importantly, the article misses the big difference with Linux, that it puts the customer in the driving seat. If you want to run NT 4 after it is out of support, you won't get security fixes and the like. With Linux, the source code is all out there, so you can keep patching yourself if you want to. Assuming that you aren't running loads of services, that would be a reasonably straightforward thing to do.

This is the reason why Linux is a "paradigm shift" and not just another product which happens to be 10% cheaper.

The study - funded by NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the American Petroleum Institute - will be published in the Energy and Environment journal.
(from the Harvard article)

That said, I agree that bandwagon environmentalism is a bad trend. It does not seem, however, that the current US administration is in danger of subverting our economy with overzealous environmental regulation.

One final comment on substance, though, because others may read this, and it occurs to me that I haven't been perfectly clear about why TCPA is a good thing:

All the misinformation and "oooh, look it can be used for security" put out by the whores at IBM/Microsoft/Intel/You doesn't change that

I'm a professional security engineer, and I can tell you there are hundreds of fundamentally hard problems in computer security (and I'm talking about protecting what the user wants protected) that all arise because we currently do all of our work on completely untrustworthy platforms. You want to use digital signatures for purely electronic contracts? There is absolutely no way to do this securely on a PC. You want to secure your company's confidential data on your laptop, in case it gets stolen? Can't be done. You want to create a secure network connection between your machine and your company's servers, over the open Internet? Impossible. Want to strongly authenticate the user to any system, using, say a fingerprint scan? Insecure on a PC.

Even with TCPA, none of the above can be done if the bad guy gets prior access to the hardware, but without TCPA any of the security you try to build can be defeated remotely, with purely software attacks. Any cryptographic protocol can be trivially defeated if it's in software where it can be modified, the keys can be snooped, etc.

Regarding the "whores", I think it's useful to understand their various motivations. Blindly lumping them together is stupid, just like conflating TCPA and Palladium.

IBM doesn't care about DRM. IBM doesn't sell to consumers, doesn't sell "content" and doesn't give a shit about piracy, since it's not really a problem for them. IBM's customers are *businesses*, and they have security requirements that simply cannot be met without something like TCPA. The flip side is that those same businesses have no use for DRM. It doesn't solve any problem they want to solve (except for the content publishers, of course, but those are consumer machines, not IBM's market).

MS is a slightly different story. They don't really care about DRM, but they do see DRM as a way to justify legislating their OSS competition out of existence. Plus DRM might help them fight their own piracy problem. Of course, whether they realize it or not, if MS can kill software piracy but doesn't manage to get DRM legislated in a form that kills OSS, their anti-piracy systems will be their death warrant. Keep in mind that IBM, Intel and most of the other players have no interest in killing OSS and IBM in particular has chosen to base much of their business strategy around OSS.

Intel, on the other hand is merely trying to avoid government regulation, because they're afraid it will kill their market. Like many industries, they think the way to avoid regulation is to "self-police". They're afraid the RIAA/MPAA and their ilk are going to succeed in forcing government-mandated DRM down our throats. I think they're silly.

As for me, my goal is to build secure systems, mainly in business contexts, and mainly on OSS platforms (I work for IBM). Currently I focus on smart cards to provide the needed secure computing environment, but they have tremendous limitations. IBM's TCPA chip also has limitations, but it's a vast improvement.

is defined as: The author attacks an argument which is different from, and usually weaker than, the opposition's best argument.

Solaris was just enough of a curve ball to miss the deadline. It is not like they were not qualified, the tools were just a bit different.

Talking about straw men, you are equating the ease of use of a Macintosh with the ease of use of a Solaris. My 74 yo, life-time housewife mother-in-law bought an iMac because she wanted to see what this internet thing was all about. She had it up and running without any help. I wonder how she'd do with a Solaris. You are also comparing the ease of operating the same program (Photoshop) on two different platforems with the ease of manipulating the same database on two platforms. What client did you use on both platforms? Was it the same? Was it command line? If so, do you believe that comparing Photoshop with Photoshop is the same as comparing the command line environments of unix with that of NT?

Photoshop on a laptop, it is easier and faster than most of the alternatives ? but it is different ? menu behavior specifically

If you extend this logic, this means that if the entire army is not on the same version of Excel a replacement who is use to Excel 2000 on NT won't be able to do his job on Excel XP on a faster computer. Back to the software at hand, I am sure the amount of time it would take to find the Adjust Levels menu item on a Mac when you are used to finding the command on a PC will be negated by the speed difference. In the past, I have had no difficulty using PC versions of Mac software when it's required. I'm reasonably certain that professional users of PC technology can make the transition.

I suspect your CO would also have you peeling potatoes if you swapped personal equipment for older gear 'because it would save lives'.

Ummm...no. He would have had me do extra duty if I made modifications he didn't allow. We are talking about a rear echelon office analyst who has traded a chair in some Brigade or Division headquarters for a stool in a tent with a little more sand around it. You honestly think this Major snuck the Powerbook overseas? At that level, things are much more flexible than at the infantry squad level. Hell even our Batallion Admin office was a mixed platform environment. BTW There was a healthy mix of technology at all levels of RATT operations from Batallion level all the way up to Command level. We were expected to know how to use all of it. Some units still used Korean war era technology with Vietnam era encryption. The problem is, you are thinking about this as if you knew what you were talking about, and you don't.

In an environment where you have to work with a fluid team, you cannot always select what you consider the perfect tool for the job.

But he did, and his superiors let him because they saw merit in his logic, and the people who work with him are not as dumb as you think. You are acting like he's using Filemaker while everyone else is using Foxpro, when he's actually using two versions of the same program, a situation you can easily find on identical hardware.

This post is a terrific example of a straw man argument, which is a logical fallacy. In the real world, it's just not this simple - all IT people don't think that end-users are morons, and a computer is not the same as a simple tool to get work done even if you think of it that way (because it's a very sophisticated tool compared to most tools).

And I think, also, that sometimes we have a third party to blame. If we have to compete in the Microsoft industry, we have to do things a way that Microsoft wants. If we have a time crunch on our development of internal software, we might require the end-user to do something that a 40 line script could do (like typing in the name and location of their workstation) - that would be boss dictated.

To put another angle on the problem, in every program I have made there is a tradeoff between ease of use and development time - I can make it easier, and easier, but at the expense of time I spend working on it. Conversely, I could sometimes spend 3 minutes showing the end-user that I had to get rid of button "X" (because it had feature "Z" which conflicted with some new aspect of the program that I was ordered to include). Sure, it might make the end users feel bad for a bit, but in the end it might save the company more money to have them learn the new way than to have me make the new program like the old.

Working with end-users have taught me one thing: they often start VERY inflexible in the way they think - only able to do things one way - but, just like everyone else, they CAN generalize if given enough practice. So while the first change in UI might be confusing, the fifth one isn't for those who are learning.

Ah yes, "proof by attacking the person".

If you don't know what this is, refer to this site that explains this fallacy: here.

My point should have been written like this:

"I'm sure he loved hearing about the quality of his apps while they were in development by guys who had written CLI editors ten years back if they made their points by trashing him in public forums."

More productive than you'll ever be.

You're attacking my point that negative criticism is not productive by saying that I'm not productive? How does my lack of productivity affect this point? Please see this part of the ad hominim page:

ad hominem (circumstantial): instead of attacking an assertion the author points to the relationship between the person making the assertion and the person's circumstances.

Please attack my points and not me. I'm interested in what you have to say, but I don't care what you think about me as a person.

Put it this way, if there was some higher conscience out there, something so advanced that humans and other animals would appear equally primitive, what do humans have that would make them a less likely target for experimentation?

1. MS donates computers/software to 3rd world countries
2. "What good is Microsoft's computer aid to children who don't have food, etc?"
3. The implication (attack) is MS doesn't provide aid in these areas

Goddamnit people, can't anyone use the phrase "begging the question" correctly anymore?
Educate yourself regarding idioms.

Slashdot troll #214: It doesn't beg the question, it raises the question.

Once we start using 'slppery slope' arguments, it just opens the door for ad-hominm attacks, arguments from ignorance, and all kinds of general idocy.

It must be the case that these things (the author points to his tinfoil hat) are indeed selling well. I can only guess that the market must be a bit flooded by the lead variety, soemone's obviously having their brain addled.

At any rate, this great example of a false dilemma fallacy may have a point to make, assuming that, the worth of a network lies in its connectivity and that restrictions on that connectivity invariably decrease the worth of the network. The article presents (at most) the one lucid point: The US is increasingly guilty of restricting the connectivity of this network.

Admittedly, this point could have been garnered in something like the first three lines of the article, and if you did so, considering the rest to be sub-literate, self-contridictory drivel, more power to you.

For the majority of /.'rs living in the US, the message is simple: Your Congress-critters, and other quasi-elected officials are making you look bad to such a degree that you're being disabused in bad prose from other countries. Well, let's get rid of the source of the problem asap.

Rest assured, I know, and I understand.

Undistributed Middle
All Russians were revolutionists, and all anarchists were revolutionist, therefore, all anarchists were Russians.

Of course an egg or sperm cannot, on it's own, become human. But, your definition of human (which, incidentally, is a circular definition - it doesn't really define what a human is) only asks that it have the capability to become human. And an egg or sperm does have that capability, although it requires a specific event (combining with a sperm or egg, respectivly) to occur before that capability can be realised.
Of course, arguing over semantics can seem utterly pointless, but there are two flaws in your definition of human - firstly that it seems to require that eggs and sperm be classed as human, and secondly that it is a circular definition - by extending it, we can get that a human is what has the capability of forming what has the capability of forming what has the capability of forming what has the capability of forming.......... ad infinitum (or at least until it seg faults or something - hey, this is slashdot, the occasional geek joke is obligitory, and it's 3:10am, so it doesn't have to be a funny joke :-) )

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

Everyone knows what they really are...All of you know...

Argumentum ad populum

Embryos are humans whether you want to admit it or not.

Argumentum ad baculum

Saying that an infant is not a human 5 seconds before "birth" and it IS a human 5 seconds after is semantical and stupid.

False dilemma and Argumentum ad Hominem

If you read the a biologist's definition of "living organism"

Anonymous authorities and Argumentum ad verecundiam ("Experts in the field disagree").

This argument can be extended to disabled or retarded people as well.

Appeal to consequences

Perhaps we should kill all the mentally retarded individuals too because they place a burden on society.

Strawman

This whole argument is rediculous.

Spelling error.

What exactly did they try? If you're talking about people who wrote free software and then put a 'donations' box on their website, that doesn't count. Silly dotBomb attempts like making their own distro or trying to provide generic tech support also don't count.

You seem to think that if someone is a Libertarian, then any criticism of a pro-government figure must be politically motivated. Sorry, but that's simply not logical.

I think that if:

a) Someone is a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian
and
b) Knows some of the best technical sources,
but
c) Ignores them, and derides them, in favor of political sources which state exactly what a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian wants to hear

THEN, inductively, they are politically motivated.

Indeed, this seems like a sound chain of inductive logical reasoning to me.

Please do not reply with trivial counter-arguments, such as the idea that we can never fully know the contents of a person's mind, and thus no statement about their motivations can ever be proved in an absolute sense.

[Combining replies]

It implies that McCullagh's motivations are not political, but career-oriented ("yellow journalism", as the poster said it).

Correction: It implies for that LiViD article series, his motivations were, etc. You've incorrectly imputed to me the logical fallacy of hasty generalization.

Look, can I point out you haven't made one focused rebuttal? That is, every response is either to something I didn't say (a straw man, or imputed hasty generalization), or the trivial objection that an induction can't be absolute like a deduction.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

You seem to think that if someone is a Libertarian, then any criticism of a pro-government figure must be politically motivated. Sorry, but that's simply not logical.

I think that if:

a) Someone is a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian
and
b) Knows some of the best technical sources,
but
c) Ignores them, and derides them, in favor of political sources which state exactly what a dogmatic, extreme, Libertarian wants to hear

THEN, inductively, they are politically motivated.

Indeed, this seems like a sound chain of inductive logical reasoning to me.

Please do not reply with trivial counter-arguments, such as the idea that we can never fully know the contents of a person's mind, and thus no statement about their motivations can ever be proved in an absolute sense.

[Combining replies]

It implies that McCullagh's motivations are not political, but career-oriented ("yellow journalism", as the poster said it).

Correction: It implies for that LiViD article series, his motivations were, etc. You've incorrectly imputed to me the logical fallacy of hasty generalization.

Look, can I point out you haven't made one focused rebuttal? That is, every response is either to something I didn't say (a straw man, or imputed hasty generalization), or the trivial objection that an induction can't be absolute like a deduction.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

No offense taken, but note what you've written is in fact much closer structurally to the true argument ad hominem. You've attempted to infer something about the truth of the statements from impolite aspects of them. That is, you've stated my some of my comments are "emotional words" or "political slant", etc. You haven't said they are false. Note the difference.

In fact, they are emotional, because I have very deep and complex associations here. It's a long story. But I'd defend what I wrote as accurate

Moreover, I would assert that a key part of the smear was that it was deliberate. It was not an innocent misquote. Declan McCullagh knows, e.g. Dave Farber. He (Declan) knows who he can ask for factual comments. Rather, the "story" was a deliberate fabrication, and Declan did his best to dismiss people who were "there" via published personal attacks.

Note the difference - Declan did not say that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn were wrong, AND that the motive for their defense was that they were "Friends of Al". Rather, he dismissed what they said BECAUSE of that, which is classical ad hominem.

Consider the two propositions
1) Declan McCullagh wrote a false story
2) Declan McCullagh wrote the story because he's a Libertarian proselytizer

You are correct to note that #1 can be argued independently from #2. However, it would be incorrect to argue #1 is false because of #2 being argued. And #2 is relevant in itself, and should stand or fall on its own merits.

There really isn't a nice way to say someone wrote a political hatchet-job. But I'd say refusing to discuss that aspect does history a disservice.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

No offense taken, but note what you've written is in fact much closer structurally to the true argument ad hominem. You've attempted to infer something about the truth of the statements from impolite aspects of them. That is, you've stated my some of my comments are "emotional words" or "political slant", etc. You haven't said they are false. Note the difference.

In fact, they are emotional, because I have very deep and complex associations here. It's a long story. But I'd defend what I wrote as accurate

Moreover, I would assert that a key part of the smear was that it was deliberate. It was not an innocent misquote. Declan McCullagh knows, e.g. Dave Farber. He (Declan) knows who he can ask for factual comments. Rather, the "story" was a deliberate fabrication, and Declan did his best to dismiss people who were "there" via published personal attacks.

Note the difference - Declan did not say that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn were wrong, AND that the motive for their defense was that they were "Friends of Al". Rather, he dismissed what they said BECAUSE of that, which is classical ad hominem.

Consider the two propositions
1) Declan McCullagh wrote a false story
2) Declan McCullagh wrote the story because he's a Libertarian proselytizer

You are correct to note that #1 can be argued independently from #2. However, it would be incorrect to argue #1 is false because of #2 being argued. And #2 is relevant in itself, and should stand or fall on its own merits.

There really isn't a nice way to say someone wrote a political hatchet-job. But I'd say refusing to discuss that aspect does history a disservice.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Katz established correlation (which he even said) but not causation. Even the dimmest debater knows that correlation does not necessarily amount to causation.

Post Hoc Ergo Proptor Hoc, anyone?

Oh you mean like in Europe and practically in every other western democracy?

Besides that's a "Slippery Slope" logical fallacy.

The poster was suggesting that MS was flooding the market on purpose by letting mass-piracy takes place. I'm saying, that's BS

Yeah, exactly

The American Government consciensiously and systematically adopt the advancement of an aristocracy of the mind with respect to equality before the law.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, the right to vote in America will some day have the prerequsite of correctly explaining the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent.