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throx writes: I am a person. I would use smart tags if I got to control what filters were enabled and what wasn't.

You just narrowed the group of people that you talk about from "everyone" to "throx". The narrower statement is a whole lot truer than People want to be able to enrich their web surfing, the statement that I did quibble with. I quibbled with it because it was a huge overgeneralization.

throx goes on to write: You're implying I'm not a person? No indeed. I merely pointed out that there's a difference between "everyone" and "throx". But when you wrote People want to be able to enrich their web surfing, you implied that I wasn't a person, because I wouldn't use Smart Tags, as near as I can tell from press descriptions of Smart Tags.

And no, my quibbling with your original statement was not a strawman argument. Your original statement was a counter-factual overgeneralization. Deal with it, rather than accuse me of your own logical fallacies.

Do you know any artists? DO you have an ounce of talent?

This is sloppy logic and pointless. Some of us may be musicians, and some may not. For the record, I note that I have been playing the guitar for eighteen years. I have been there and done all that and have subsisted on the meager givings a musician at the bottom of the rung can make. Whether I have or not is not the point. We are not arguing about who is a musician here.

LAst time I checked a small time musician on the road spends there day as follows. . . all for less than $100,

Ah, the pity. It's a sad day when you can't sympathize with someone's arguments because of how ragged their clothing is. But we aren't arguing about that hypothetical situation either.

In other posts you have pretty much followed the slippery-slope-leads-to-hell and pity-us-poverty-stricken-musician threads to their bitter, terrible ends, and yet I have somehow failed to bite. Let's examine why:

If you're a working musician who makes your money solely from touring and have yet to cut a CD deal, it's not likely you have anxious teenagers picking it out and posting the tab online.

If you are a published songwriter or author, where exactly do you publish tablature? The last time I went into a music store, I found lots of sheet music, printed on traditional staves. I didn't find much in the way of tablature. Remember that tablature is printed by people who by and large cannot read traditional five-line staves of music. The only place I've found genuine tablature is in guitar magazines, and if your music is popular enough that it's getting transcribed in Guitar World, you aren't exactly salivating over the 0.03 royalty check that comes from each sale thereof.

If you are are selling CD's, only then do you have enough fan-level interest to start seeing tabs of your material show up on the internet. At that point, you have already sold a $12-$20 CD to most of the people listening to your songs. In order to make the tab useful (remember, there is no rhythmic notation in the tab beyond the bare mention of the bar lines) they have to get a copy of the song. That is a transaction you can benefit from.

So from where I sit, tablature is not competing with anything musicians are selling today anyway. This activity that we now see on the internet has been going on for years and years anyway. I know, because remember I have been doing this for eighteen years, long before there was a world wide web. I traded tabs with dozens of guitar-playing friends at school. None of us intended to starve the poor members of Led Zepplin or Rush with our tabs, and even if we were, the transaction we were performing was invisible and untraceable, and therefore any law against it was completely unenforcable.

Finally, you fail to address the primary point of this all anyway, which is that the users and creators of this tablature feel that it is perfectly justifiable fair use. Copyright draws a boundary between the private ownership of IP and the public's use of it, and as copyrights have been increased in an effort to nickel-and-dime the consumer out of as much cash as possible, the public's benefit from these works (the entire reason copyrights are granted in the first place) has diminished. In this case it is the very concrete loss of the right to learn from and imitate art and one's culture. All art is imitation. Every artist in every era has imitated the work of his predecessors. If artists of today are so unwilling to share their work with students, they may derive from this greed an unexpected effect:

If they (or their handlers) are unwilling to grant the modicum of freedom with their works that is fair use, quotation, and educational, they may find themselves omitted from historical record. The medium on which most music is recorded, nowdays, is CD. Once the CD stops becoming popular (i.e., the kids who listened to it grow up) the only way to preserve it is to start copying it. But if it's illegal (and indeed impossible) to copy the CD, it won't make its way into educational materials, won't be studied as a period in music history, and in a hundred years or so, it will all but vanish from our culture. So the artists who want their kids and great grand kids and great great grandkids to be the only ones allowed to copy their material: think carefully before you wish for that. Your material is already, in my opinion, in grave danger of vanishing from the face of the earth altogether.

Finally, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the surest indication of success. If no one imitates your songs, they probably aren't that popular. And if no band ever tries to clone your act (by first learning your songs, then imitating them), you probably won't make it into anyone's hall of fame, either.

http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/straw.htm

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man .html

http://www.google.com/search?q=straw+man+fallacy

Um, basics of logic? Correlation is not causation? Aren't scientists of all people supposed to know these things?

Maybe it is?

a

The Nizkor Project"The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position..... This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person."

Stephen's Guide"The author attacks an argument which is different from, and usually weaker than, the opposition's best argument. "

and finally, A Prof's Website"Straw Man occurs when an opponent takes the original argument of his/her adversary and then offers a close imitation, or straw man, version of the original argument; "knocks down" the straw man version of the argument (because the straw man, as its name implies, is a much easier target to hit, undermine, etc.) -- and thereby gives the appearance of having successfully countered/overcome/answered the original argument."

How I do love strawmen, but I'm off to find the wizard, the wonderful wizard of OZ, a wonderful wiz, if ever there iz, the wonderful wizard of Oz.

I'm not saying that the Internet improves people -- makes them more critical, more involved, more interested in learning, better judges of argument

I think that the Internet does all of those things. Once a person leaves school, unless that person becomes a professional writer, he or she will probably never have the opportunity or desire to write a critical essay again. Since I started posting to BITNET groups, mailing lists, and now internet sites like Slashdot, I've posted hundreds of messages here and on other groups, and enjoyed countless interesting postings, while wading through thousands of postings containing logical fallacies. Reents says that, ... on the Internet a message transplanted from "traditional media" doesn't look right to most Internet users. He's right, and I think that the reason is mostly because on a group like slashdot, you just can't get away with the sort of logical fallacies that are the foundation of most political speech.

Try this. If you've never seen the list, go to the link above and study all of the different kinds of logical fallacies and errors. Next time you hear a political speech, by any candidate, pick out all of the fallacies. You'll be amazed by how many you'll find. Political speech, as it is practiced through the mass media, is not the art of producing rational, coherent arguments. Political speech, as practiced through the mass media, is about creating a vague, content-free comforting image. That doesn't translate well to the internet. On the internet, if someone uses those sorts of arguments on a newsgroup, their arguments are quickly ripped to shreds by followup posts and are discredited ... which is the main difference between a forum like Slashdot, and a forum like a televised debate, where the candidates are deferred to and allowed to change the subject, make fallacious arguments, and ignore the questions, without ever being questioned.

No one is immune to it. One of my recent posts had a really poorly thought out transition into an unrelated topic. Someone called me on it, and he was right. I've called other people on things like that. There's nothing that makes you want to be a better writer then having your posting roundly ripped to shreds by someone with a better sense of argument then you. It's a learning experience, and the Internet is the only place I've found this learning experience to be available. When you write a class essay, only the teacher and you read your work. Only the internet provides a large enough audience for a non-professional writer to be truly humiliated in front of his or her peers ... a valuable, if painful learning experience.

On the internet, either your ideas are sound, or they are not. If you are writing like an idiot, people will tell you.

• False Dilemna: several instances, including the comparison of "Stallman's world" vs. the O.K. corral.
• Slippery Slope: all over the place
• Prejudicial Language. (Not, of course, that Meyer is the only practitioner of this one!)
• Illicit Minor: Not all free software proponents are RMS or ESR.
• Attacking the Person: both ESR and RMS. (An interesting one-two combination here: attack the people, then extrapolate their characteristics to the entire group.)

I don't necessarily disagree with everything Meyer said, but he's just so sloppy...

In argumentation, begging the question usually refers to a statement in which "the truth of the conclusion is assumed by the premises" (Stephen's Guide to Logical Fallacies -- Begging the Question).

For example, stating "I hate school because it sucks" is begging the question.

Kythe
(Remove "x"'s from

"I think as soon as you buy a gun your being pretty iresponsible." Why? Because they are capable of killing people, and some people use them irresponsibly? The same can be said about automobiles, which kill an order of magnitude more people each year. It is important to realise that some objects--be they guns, automobiles or baseball bats--are capable of causing great harm if used improperly. The irresposibility arises in not being careful when using these potentially dangerous objects, and in failing to keep them away from people who do not know how to safely use them. If you say, "having a gun in the house endangers the children in that house," what you are really saying is that the parents are irresponsible in their storage and handling of those guns.

"Using a gun to stop an armed robbery is a weak argument." Is it really? Yes, if the armed robber is pointing his gun right at you and yours is still in the holster, you do whatever he says. But if you're in your house in the middle of the night and someone breaks in downstairs, you call the police, and shoot anybody without a badge that comes up the stairs.

Just the fact that there are people willing and capable of doing this keeps the number of these incidents down. For example, look at Australia, which banned handguns and made it impossible for law abiding citizens to defend themselves like this. The Prime Minister said, "self-defense is not a reason for owning a firearm." Armed robberies with firearms had been decreasing steadily for 25 years. In the space of 12 months, armed robberies increased 44%. Homicides with firearms had also been decreasing for 25 years. After one year of the ban, homicides were up 3.2%. Break-ins and assaults on the elderly had increased dramatically.

But England's safer, right? After all, they've had a gun ban for longer. From the site linked below: "In Great Britain, handguns are outlawed, and possession of long guns is severely restricted. Yet, despite strict gun control, as of 1995, rates for robbery, assault, burglary, and motor vehicle theft in England and Wales had surpassed those here in the States. On average, for all 4 crimes, English rates were double U.S. rates." Hmmmm...

Before you start going and thinking that these are anomalies, think about where the highly publicized shootings occur in the United States. Schools, where it is illegal for law-abiding people to carry weapons. Work, where most employers don't allow their empolyees to carry weapons. In the Jewish Community Center shooting in California, the shooter had even said that he had scoped out a couple of other locations, but thought it was too likely there might be armed resistance there. Why do we never hear about shootings at gun ranges, where everybody is armed? Why do the locations with the highest gun violence rates exactly correspond with those locations where it is most difficult for a law-abiding citizen to carry a gun (i.e. schools, Washington D.C., Chicago...)? I don't think that it's because of lack of police.

The plain and simple truth of the matter is that criminals don't want to be killed any more than you or I do. If somewhere in the mix of citizens there are armed citizens who can and will put an end the the criminals' acts, we'll have a lot fewer people willing to commit these crimes in the first place.

If you're not afraid to face facts and possibly change your mind, you might check out some pages such as this one, which I just found on a quick web-search. I point this one out because it has sources cited for all its statistics. I like places that are not afraid to let you check their numbers. I encourage you to do your own research, and not to just depend upon what I or anybody else has told you, and keep an open mind. Question all the figures, from both sides. Remember that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy; ask "did action A cause result B, or did result B simply happen after action A?" If you have some other sites, such as Handgun Control, Inc. that might present the other side of the picture, feel free to share them.