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I agree completely about the purpose of copyright.

Absent copyright

I never sugegsted eliminiating copyright, therefore your argument does not apply to what I said.

Last post said explictly reffered to copyright EXPIRING twice. I explicitly mentioned derivative works gaining fresh copyright protection. Those statements make absolutely no sense in context of copyright not existing.

You are arguing a combination of fallacy #41: Strawman argument and #24: False dillema. Straw man: I never suggest eliminating copyright. False dillema: We are not forced to choose between (a) revoking copyright and (b)increasingly oppressive copyright law.

I was arguing in favor of copyright. - but it was the copyright we had before they passed AHRA, NET, DMCA, and Sony Bono in the 1990's. I guess I'd also like to reach WAAYYYY back into the 1980's and yank the law mandating Macrovision in all video equipment. Copyright law has absolutely no business crippling perfectly legal products.

You yourself said copyright duration is excessive. I merely argued that the public domain is a valuable resource when copyright duration excessive. I pointed out that even a 5-10 year term would be enough to preserve a rich network of commercial information distribution. I said that not to argue for that term, but highlight the fact that the original 14 years extendable to 28 years was CLEARLY more than adaquate. Life+70 is pure abuse, it is a legalized theft from the public.

About my most controvercial point was that before the new INCREASES in copyright law P2P did not legally fall under the definition of infringement, and that that was ok. The RIAA could have done quite well under those rules had they initiated pro-customer internet sales six years ago when they were hit over the head with the fact that it was possible and that there was a demand for it. I think they could still manage it now, though they put themselves in a very bad position with that six year delay. Hell, their current anti-consumer offerings are getting thousands of customers.

And even if the internet causes the "destruction" of certain peices of the network of commercial information distribution, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Every new disruptive technology causes some businesses to vanish and others to spring up. The law does not exist to ensure that specific companies continue to make a profit just because they made a profit in the past. Those sorts of laws were passed when the automobile appeared - laws to protect the tens of thousands of jobs sweeping horse-shit out of the streets.

Ordinary copyright law is exceedingly effective at dealing with the commercial exploitation of a work. That is exactly how copyright law was designed to work. Ordinary copyright law is perfectly fine for the job of encouraging new creative works. I'm not arging against copyright. I'm arguing against the New-and-Improved abusive copyright law changes.

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>Did you even read the article?

I read every single word of the article, and it read very nearly like every single word of every single other article that he's ever written.

He sheds no specific insight on this case, he doesn't "cut through the FUD", he just evangelises his own position, in exactly the same way he always does, while admitting that he has no idea what SCO's position is, except that whatever it is, it's probably wrong. This is not an article about SCO, it's just YARMSAA (Yet Another RMS Autobiographical Article).

By the way, it's ad hominem, not "ad homonem". You humourless dingbat.

Agreed, christurkel needs to look up the meaning of ad hominem.

There have been a number of good responses to my original post, so far, and fortunately none of them (yet) simply say, âoeStop whining!â, which was the prevalent response for people advocating an upgrade fee for Jaguar from Puma.

I do see a few people relying on âstraw manâ(TM) variants of what I said, though, so let me interject one thing to head off further remarks along that thread. For those of you who are making arguments that it is something that should be paid for: listen, Iâ(TM)m not opposing that statement. Apple puts way too much stuff in it for it to be free. (Although sometimes companies are just generous.)

Iâ(TM)m merely stating that there should be a slightly lessened amount for people who are not buying it new. Is Apple really going to get financially hurt from giving a discount of at least $30 (preferably $40-45) to existing users? I honestly donâ(TM)t think so, and in fact, I think itâ(TM)d help. Stuff over $100 is a much harder sell than stuff below $100 ⦠even if the upgrade fee brought it down to $99.95, itâ(TM)d probably sell disproportionately better.

And I very much suspect that if they continue this full-price scheme, theyâ(TM)re going to find their percentages of OS adoption will suffer in a few versions. Itâ(TM)s definitely not a foregone conclusion that Iâ(TM)ll be buying Panther, and if they pull this same stunt again with Ocelot, Bobcat, and PuddyTat ⦠well, my opinion (entirely that of a layman) is that their sales will suffer.

Begging the question is a form of logical fallacy. The phrase "begs the question" is not equivalent to the phrase "raises the question."

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html
http://skepdic.com/begging.html
http://www.roomours.co.uk/ryder3.htm
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-t he-question.html

Next time you choose to assume an indignant and self-righteous tone, please make sure you know something about the subject in question. Thank you.

Love,
AC

No, the funniest thing is the guy with the ZyklonB variant for a nick making snide remarks about "right wing in the USA".

The microsoft link you provided does NOT recommend it, as you so desperately try to put it.

You're frustrated. I understand. You've been posting as an Anonymous Coward, and just hoping that everyone would defer to your authority on the topic. But you provide no sources to lend credence to your claims, while over the course of six or seven posts, I've provided many sources to support my position. If the one I provided isn't perfect, that's fine. I disagree, and I can read for myself where that article said a secure solution to the authentication problem is to (and I quote) "Host IIS and SQL Server on the Same Machine." But whatever. If we throw that citation out and keep the rest, we've still got quite a compelling case that the world of databases is far bigger than your narrowminded viewpoint would suggest. I'm happy to let Slashdotters read this long, crazy thread and decide for themselves.

Amazing how people go looking for any information, however unrelated, when trying to make their point.

Amusing that you've provided no information, however unrelated, to backup your point.

Looking at all your other posts on the subject I get the distinct impression you've never even worked on another database besides MySQL.

Then you would be wrong.

MySQL has it's place, but your posts are pretty blatant trolls that try to push MySQL as the answer for everything.

I never said that. You are diverting with a classic straw man argument, but it's poorly executed. You probably didn't even know you were doing it.

Oops, the "slippery slope" argument is often a fallacy as described here.

Slippery slope, meet Visaris. Visaris, this is slippery slope. He's a logical fallacy

Just to argue the other side here, what you're describing is a "slippery slope". Unfortunately, this like a logical fallacy. For a particularly applicable example, see example four on that page.

Ignoring the numerous ad hominem attacks (I've linked to its definition in case you're not as familiar with its definition as its use) in your largely off-topic ("about me" rather than "about the issues") post, I'll respond just to the meager substance that remains and will save any defense of myself and any credentials I might have for some forum where that's of interest to more people than just yourself...

You have companies that comercilize Linux and whose costs in doing so are not zero.

If you think of capitalism as an engine that grinds out better versions of whatever is competing, then what you are saying is that you are not competing on product. You have costs for the product, but you are choosing to make back that money (and hence, to compete) in another arena.

Sun does this, for example, by making back their Java money on unrelated projects that make enough excess to support it--like hardware and consulting sales. This makes the price of Java cheap, but it also means that other companies who just want to provide a programming language implementation (compilers,libraries) but who don't have hardware and teams of consultants to provide them with extra capital, cannot compete because the competition is not about "the reasonable price of the product (Java)". The cost of Java has been hidden, just as the cost of Linux has been hidden.

The problem that comes by doing this transformation, though, is that the 'responsiveness' that capitalism cranks out is in the support domain, not in the original product domain. There is no economic incentive to improve the product. You may think that people will improve the product out of good will or self interest, but if that were enough to make the world better, it would have run like that from the start. People eventually get lazy, and the drive to make money keeps them motivated. If the money is not being made on product, but on support, capitalism will only cause them to stay non-lazy on support. Since no money is to be made on product, it will not head off laze surrounding the original product.

If you consider in the picture Debian they are selling nothing. They are a group of enthusiasts that [are] not bent in commercially competing with anybody but in solving a need they have, namely to ensure free access to a stable computer platform.

Perhaps because you are so quick to attack me personally, you confuse my criticism of their chosen busines model with a criticism of these people personally, and so you feel a need to defend them. I did not criticize their motive.

But as to the effect of what they have done: they have thwarted competition. I do not want Linux, but the competitive engine being broken, I cannot exercise the one right that a consumer normally has under capitalism--to take my money elsewhere and thereby insure that someone who is paying attention to what I want will succeed at your expense, causing you to have to play catchup.

In a hypotetical world in which Linux was the only game in town you will have far many more advantages as a user of computer infrastructure.

Only if I want something largely similar to Linux and can use its pieces to build what I want. Because the likelihood that anyone will give me funding to make something radically different is low. They will probably say "Linux is good enough. And it's free." They always like to say "it's free". And if you understand what a hill-climbing problem is, you'll understand what I mean when I say I'll be stuck on the Linux hill with nowhere to go.

(The rest of your message was a set of interesting topics about Linux goals, but was not a response either to the original article nor to my criticism of the article, so I'm going to decline to respond just to save space here. Further, this will be my last post to you on this subthread, so go ahead and make your best reply--I'll let you have the last word for now. There will be other days and other forums.)

The area of a sphere is 4pi r^2, where r is the radius and pi is 3.14159 etc etc. Electromagnetic radiation, broadcast uniformly in all directions makes a sphere. Double the radius of your sphere and you increase its area by 2^2 or 4. It's still the same amount of electromagnetic radiation, just spread out over 4x the area so its only 1/4 as dense. Tada, the "inverse square law" that pervades gravity, electricity, magnetism, and, you guessed it, electromagnetism.

That's why SETI is so difficult unless alien signals were directed directly at us; by the time you've crossed 10 light years of distance, your signal has spread out over 10^2 or 100 light years in distance. Converted to miles, 100 light years * 5,865,696,000,000 miles (the number of light years in a mile) is 586,569,600,000,000 or 5.86 x 10^14 miles in distance. A signal designed to propigate from surface to surface on a terrestrial planet like ours (and thus our TV and radio signals) would probably not be modulated for anything greater than a fixed point on the planet to any point on the planet so for a planet of 8,000 miles in diameter for earth that's pi d or pi*8000mi or about 25,000 miles. Figuring out how many times the signal strength for a given area of space drops for every time that's doubled I leave up to you (hint, its not going to power your walkman).

As for your banter about the One And Only Truth, I reccomend you read up a little on debating, especially an ad hominem attack and why it makes you look like a fool. I reccomend the rest of the site too.

I'm not saying either way, I'm just saying that neither of you did any more than a crapshot job of trying to convince one another.

Blah, Blah, Blah.

I bow before your mighty intellect. You claimed I had NO valid arguments against DRM and with those three words have thoroughly refuted the other TWELVE objections I listed.

With those TWELVE points out of the way we can now proceed to the ONE point which you did address...

You don't know shit about the DMCA.

Sec. 1201. - Circumvention of copyright protection systems
(a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures. -
(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title...

(3) As used in this subsection -
(A)to ''circumvent a technological measure'' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure ''effectively controls access to a work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Apparently you are the one who "don't know shit about the DMCA." The above text proves that you can violate the law merely by sitting motionless and thinking. You merely apply the descrambling process in your head and you've violated the law. As I said, circumvention is "thought crime". Five years in prison, $500,000 fine. For thinking.

You obviously have only read Michaels assertions on the DMCA

Yeah, real obvious [sarcasm].
I have no idea who "Michaels" is, but even if I have read whatever he's written it certainly isn't "all I know about the DMCA" because I've been reading the DMCA itself.

Don't redistribute your tools for modifying someones copyrighted work and you are fine.

You are obviously ignorant of what the DMCA actually says. As I showed above, the DMCA outlaws "circumvention", amongst other things. The DMCA has dozens of sections and hundreds of clauses. FULL TEXT of the DMCA.

You can even distribute your work as long as it's purposes extend beyond circumventing copyright.

There is no such thing as "circumventing copyright". I'll have to assume you meant violating copyright. You violate copyright, you circumvent a "technological protection measure".

And you are wrong. The DMCA does not abide by the supreme court Betamax decision which set the standard as "substantial non-infringing use". In the DeCSS case there were innumerable non-infringing uses. Fair, legitimate, and perfectly legal use is not a defense against the DMCA.

The DMCA outlaws things with perfectly legal and valid purposes because DRM becomes completely worthless if permit even a single way to defeat it.

You are an ill-informed, FUD spreading idiot with no knowledge of the actual law.

I have backed up every statement, I even provided the text of the law itself.

Instead you spew filth you read on Slashdot as if it is some salatious information, to which you alone are akin to. You don't know shit about it, kid. Go educate yourself before you give yourself an aneurysm.

You just "spewed filth". You haven't presented a single factual statement. Your entire argument amounts to nothing more than insulting me personally. That is known as an "ad hominem attack". It is an invalid argument. You can't attack my arguments or my facts, so you attack me. It's like being in an argument with a ten year old, you may as well say my mother dresses me funny. It doesn't make you right.

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Quoth you, basically:

I can't believe you're telling me I live in a shack (caves and loincloths, etc.) in order to survive in my profession.

I believe that's called a "Straw Man" argument.

Generally, when people talk about "excessive consumerism," they're not talking aobut living normally, or even about having nice things. They're talking about people doing stupid things like getting into enormous debt to "keep up with the Joneses." My sister, for example, has a well-paying IT job. She could easily have money put away and not be in debt, except that she thinks she's got to have a Dodge Durango to fit in in the area she's living. (At least she's buying instead of leasing this time. Ack.)

Everybody has the ability to not do that, and nearly everybody (those above the average salary, especially) has the ability to put some cash away for a rainy day.

"Living in caves and wearing a loincloth." Sheesh.

You seem hot to sign up, so if there is no such agreement, go sign up and tell me so already.

You are the one making claims about what is in the license agreement. The burden of proof is on you.

"You have to pay for access to this content but then you can give it for free to all your friends and also put up your own web page of everything and make local copies of it" is not a commonly working business model, certainly not for comics.

Did I suggest giving all of the content out? No. Did I suggest putting all of the content (or even any of it) on a web page? No. That's what we refer to as a Straw Man argument.

And just in case your intellectual superiority misses it (I'm banking on that actually)

Don't. You'll lose money.

, I'm talking about the entire body of work here. If you haven't copied the entire thing, my point that if they go out of business you lose access still stands.

So why wouldn't you copy the entire thing? I, and others, seem to get that.

It is one thing to say "because they took away liberty X, they will eventually take away liberty Y". It is quite another to say "Observe that liberties A,B,C, and D, have been taken, we should be concerned that it will continue for liberties E, F and G."

The first is a slippery-slope fallacy (asserting a possibility as a fact), the second is a legitimate argument for policy based on historical evidence and trends.

Frob.

There is no sliperly slope, but you sure did make yourself a nice Straw Man.

Slipperly slope requires a chain of deductive arguments where a conclusion is made by skipping a large number of those arguments:
if A then B
if B then C
if C then ....Theta

The post wasn't even an argument. It was a number of facts and a single question.

Facts:
1. PA is forcing ISPs to block child porn sites.
2. PA ordered ISPs may need to block legitimate sites to acomplish the goals.

Questions:
1. Will ISPs be libal if they don't succeed in blocking all sites sucessfuly.

That certainly is a slippery slope. Unfortunately, slippery slope arguments are completely fallacious.

That certainly is a slippery slope. Unfortunately, slippery slope arguments are completely fallacious.

1) Yeah, I know something that Sun doesn't. I'm a Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future when hardware allows primarily Sun was originally too cheap to make a non-SCSI version of Solaris in '93 and had poor 3rd party vendor support in '97.

If you make technology decisions based on what companies were doing five to ten years ago, I pity your employer.

The "non-SCSI" version of Solaris that you wanted a decade ago ('93): I guess you never considered that Sun's decision to only release only a SCSI version might have been based on market demand, engineering costs, and performance, did you? You say that they were "too cheap." Well, bucko, they are in business to make money. Did you expect them to lose money on a charity version of the software just for you?

But you still didn't answer my question: Do you know something about Sun's costs and marketing studies that the rest of us do not? Your earlier statements imply that you do.

2) Irrelevant. Let others distribute it.
[referring to bandwidth and ISO collectors]

You don't know what you are talking about. To download the software, you have to provide Sun with valuable marketing information, including your name, e-mail address, mailing address, job description and company name (if applicable), phone number, etc. You have to request licenses for the number of systems on which you will use it. If Sun released their software to mirrors, they could not collect that information. You also have no idea as to whether their attorneys consider the pre-download, click-through license to be necessary to protect their intellectual property.

3) Irrelevant. I've witnessed firsthand as corps deployed Solaris x86 over Linux for no other reason than it was completely free for small scale commercial use. Corprate+Free will always trump Hippie+Free to suits.

Not irrelevent -- and you've just created a straw man argument. I never claimed that "suits" would not prefer "Corporate+Free" software to "Hippie+Free" software. Nice try.

4) Redundant. Also blatantly false.
[Referrung to my comment: 4. The kiddie factor: Ask for a credit card and you eliminate lots of downloads by kids -- who are, by and large, not potential customers for Sun hardware and software.]

What was false? Do you think that kids generally have credit cards to buy software? Do you think that most kids are "potential customers for Sun hardware and software"?

I previously left one comment you made unanswered:
It's as if you were asleep for the last 10 years of Linux market penetration.

Sun is in business to make money, not to give away software to people too cheap to spend $20. Mandrake tried developing software and giving it away for a free download. Despite having one of the most popular Linux distros, Mandrake's business model failed and they are bankrupt. Market penetration isn't worth shit if your company goes bankrupt.

Summary: You've got a chip on your shoulder about Sun. You have whined about everything from the current measly $20 download fee to Solaris requiring SCSI a decade ago. This isn't about Solaris. It's about your transparent attempts to promote Linux. You had no interest in this release of Solaris x86 from the beginning. Your initial comments about a hypothetical "proof of concept system" were just a smoke screen. You have gone out of your way to criticize Solaris at every turn while praising Linux. You said it yourself. You are a "Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future."

Please don't respond. Your bias has been exposed and you are just going to dig yourself a deeper hole if you reply.

It doen NOT beg any damn question. The claim may suggest a question, or raise a question or perhaps.

Does any-fucking-body know the meaning of "begging the question"? I don't believe I've heard correct use of the phrase even once in the past year.

</peeve>

First off, the opinion of one "critic" is not enough to base your entire argument on. That's an "appeal to authority," and is a fallacy.

I fail to see how work being in the public domain could reduce the amount of work created. It is common sense that if a scriptwriter can derivate from a public domain work without having to pay royalties, he is more likely to do so then if he has to pay.

Your comparison of nerve gas and copying a snippet from a DVD is alarmist, misleading and over the top. Do you genuinely think it would be in the public interest to prevent people copying from a DVD? The proposed suggestion would make it illegal to even quote from a book. How would you feel if one of your books sunk into obscurity because it was illegal to read it?

Lastly, it has been argued that no work is truly original. This is definitely the case for a large quantity of Disney's work, which legally makes use of the public domain to create derivative works. By your logic, Disney should be prevented from doing this, because the work was "created" by someone else. Thinking of it like this, it would very quickly lead to nothing being able to be produced without payment of license fees.

This would not help creativity in the slightest. The only sensible way of thinking of it is to imagine everything belonging to the public domain by default, and copyrights temporarily carving out a piece until it is returned to the public domain. Everyone benefits, people are still free to put what they have created, sub-created, discovered or derived back into the public domain, and people don't go to prison for making backups.

Much fairer.

Does anyone know the name for the logical fallacy of incorrectly attributing a logical fallacy to an argument as a counter argument?

The poster was not making an argument, so this cannot be a fallacy. It's just a simple failure to use the language properly.

If he were making an argument, it would probably fall under Factual Error.

Capitalism has worked incredibly well for hundreds of years, all across the world. Some geeks modifying a videocard is not going to bring the system to a crashing halt.

I do not recall stating that modifying video cards would bring capitalism to a "crashing halt." Could you please quote the passage where you believe that I made that claim?

Likewise, if you think ATI needs your charity, you are gravely mistaken.

I do not believe that paying for what you want is charity. I did not buy a low tier of DirecTV service and then "mod" my DirecTV receiver to get premium channels without paying for them.

If you feel the need to reply, please address the points that I made in the parent post rather than creating straw man arguments.

check out this link:

fallacies

keep an eye out for how many of those show up on TV talk shows, etc. .. great fun

In his comments, Klawans makes reference to old Jazz 78 rpm records that he has transfered to CD, AND which he says record companies will not reissue because they are not profitable.

This argument is strongly flawed. First, the preservation of art form has little to do with profitability and everything to do with art lover's willingness to preserve those forms. History is full of examples of obscure books, art, and music that have been preserved while more popular (profitable) works fell by the wayside.

500 year old books can be read and can last for another 500 years. 200 year old pictures can be seen and will probably last that much longer. 100 year old films have deteriorated to the point where most are unviewable and need to be TRANSFERRED to be viewed and preserved. The same will deterioration will happen to CD's eventually. If you couldn't make copies of your CD's, how will your children listen to them if they didn't have any working CD players? What if they didn't know the format that the CD's are in? What if it were illegal for them to fix CD players, figure out how CD players work, and if the CD format were a "trade secret?". The DMCA makes all of that legal for media companies to do.

Putting these recordings on P2P networks for anyone to download just denies descendants of the original artists of those recordings their rightful royalties.

Unsanctioned distribution of works under copyright is illegal and not neccessary to exercise fair use. Can you say straw man.?

As long as you mention descendants, let me rant on that subject for a short moment: <rant>just because the decendants of Edgar Rice Burroughs et al, are still making millions off of what their grandparents created, doesn't mean that that is what our founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" clause into Article I of the Constitution. Note that it says "limited Times" and "Authors and Inventors" and not "forever" and "Authors, Inventors, their heirs and their investors"</rant>

EnkiduEOT

Are you aware of the term "Ad Hominem"?

Are you aware of the term "Appeal to Authority?"

it doesn't matter that Ben Stein hosts a game show

It does matter, quite a bit, actually. Not to the necessary truth or falsehood of his ideas, but to the size of their audience and the likelihood that people will support them.

there hasn't been a single valid rebuttal on this thread

Are you expecting a single, reasonably concise rebuttal for all of the hundreds of disparate potshots he takes in his 1,000-word diatribe? It would take too long to enumerate every instance in which I disagree with Mr. Stein.

The points are still strong

In general, the points toe a very predictable conservative line, and do not offer any new insight that I can see. But he's a popular game show host, so +5 Insightful for you.

Are you aware of the term "Ad Hominem"? If you are, then you will know that attempting to discredit this argument based on irrelevant facts about Ben Stein doesn't hold much water.

I'm not trying to pick on this single post, because there hasn't been a single valid rebuttal on this thread, actually. It doesn't matter that I copied and pasted the post and it doesn't matter that Ben Stein hosts a game show. The points are still strong, and nobody seems to want to actually deal with the issues head on. That's exactly what prevents innovation -- lack of desire or ability to solve problems.

A more accurate one is that it is like telling Jews that it was perfectly just for the Nazis to steal Jewish property, businesses, homes, etc., and to sell lampshades and soaps made from the bodies of massacred Jews. After all, what was that other than "spoils of war"?

Well, even though there were limited experiments making soap from human fat, and at least one lamp shade survived the war, it's a stretch to claim that those items were mass produced and sold to the general public. Nizkor is a good source in these matters. (That the soap legend was widely believed during the war is another matter).

The reason that I pick these nits is that they're one of the inroads that the holocaust deniers have used to further their own agenda, i.e. setting up the straw man that "many people believed this, and it's wrong, so that must mean that everything else they're saying is wrong as well." The Nazi crimes don't really need any embelishment, the truth is both quite sufficient and necessary.

Not that I disagree in any way with your original point; "because we can" is only very seldom a morally justifiable defense.

Any more than requiring a parade permit infringes on the right to peaceably assemble.

Confiscating guns would infringe on the right to bear arms, so you don't have to worry that licensing will lead to confiscating. Remember slippery slope is a logical fallacy.

You are misusing the term "begging the question". It means to use circular reasoning. You mean, "raises the question".

Every piece of software known to man has at least one security flaw.

Yep, there's a bug in your logical reasoning software: hasty generalization.

ok, I'll bite.

> Apart from the known issues with IE, outlook, and IIS, what is insecure in Windows?

The "known issues" are numerous and quite serious, and just thinking about what might be lurking in the depths of Windows & Co. makes me feel queasy. The Microsoft empire was built on stacking new features on existing code, with little or no regard to security issues, and it shows. Judging from their mid- to long-term solution (Palladium), they have all but given up on ever delivering an acceptably secure implementation based on their current designs (not that I think for a second that Palladium will be significantly more secure, mind you).

> And as far as IIS goes, Apache hasn't had a spotless security record.

This is true, but unfortunately doesn't make your argument valid. It's a well known logical fallacy ("Ad Hominem / Tu Quoque"). Basically it's like saying "OK, I stole the cookies from the kitchen jar, but so did my brother last week!" - true, but irrelevant, and it won't deter your mother from giving you a good whack.

Which revisionist historians have been persecuted by anti-discrimination laws? The only cases that I can think of that come close are David Irving and Robert Faurisson.

Irving ran afoul of British libel law, not hate speech law, and Faurisson (1) can hardly be called a historian and (2) was in no way merely attempting to "correct errors in the historical record.".

I personally agree that anti-hate-speech laws are misguided (especially the bizarre French law under which Faurisson was prosecuted), and that the answer to bad speech is more speech. But I do have some empathy for the European's strong feelings on this issue given the genocides they've seen first-hand during living memory.

Which revisionist historians have been persecuted by anti-discrimination laws? The only cases that I can think of that come close are David Irving and Robert Faurisson.

Irving ran afoul of British libel law, not hate speech law, and Faurisson (1) can hardly be called a historian and (2) was in no way merely attempting to "correct errors in the historical record.".

I personally agree that anti-hate-speech laws are misguided (especially the bizarre French law under which Faurisson was prosecuted), and that the answer to bad speech is more speech. But I do have some empathy for the European's strong feelings on this issue given the genocides they've seen first-hand during living memory.

Which revisionist historians have been persecuted by anti-discrimination laws? The only cases that I can think of that come close are David Irving and Robert Faurisson.

Irving ran afoul of British libel law, not hate speech law, and Faurisson (1) can hardly be called a historian and (2) was in no way merely attempting to "correct errors in the historical record.".

I personally agree that anti-hate-speech laws are misguided (especially the bizarre French law under which Faurisson was prosecuted), and that the answer to bad speech is more speech. But I do have some empathy for the European's strong feelings on this issue given the genocides they've seen first-hand during living memory.

Which revisionist historians have been persecuted by anti-discrimination laws? The only cases that I can think of that come close are David Irving and Robert Faurisson.

Irving ran afoul of British libel law, not hate speech law, and Faurisson (1) can hardly be called a historian and (2) was in no way merely attempting to "correct errors in the historical record.".

I personally agree that anti-hate-speech laws are misguided (especially the bizarre French law under which Faurisson was prosecuted), and that the answer to bad speech is more speech. But I do have some empathy for the European's strong feelings on this issue given the genocides they've seen first-hand during living memory.

An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting). This type of argument has the following form:

1. Person A makes claim X.
2. Person B makes an attack on person A.
3. Therefore A's claim is false.

The reason why an Ad Hominem (of any kind) is a fallacy is that the character, circumstances, or actions of a person do not (in most cases) have a bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim being made (or the quality of the argument being made).

This, my friends, is the fallacy commonly known as "appeal to autority". Tell your family and colleagues! It's fun.

"...your assumption that PPC is automagically more powerful than Intel architectures is a clear indication that you are severiously under-informed..."

That is classic Ad Hominem to those that know logic and critical thinking class material. Attack this guys point, not him as a person ... it's a fallacy.

Of course, your entire statement is wrong because your name start with a Z. ;-)

YAHOO! Anyone who doesn't agree with me must be an idiot.

Never mind that the Times is run by the Unification Church and is a mouthpiece for the right.

I just love these reasoned arguments.

I don't doubt that the Detroit News would run a piece like this,
Cool! Another green ad hominem attack. I love 'em.

I find it interesting that you mention this explicitly. You may know that this is a logical fallacy; the only question that remains is whether you didn't know this, or whether you knew this and were trolling. I'm betting on the latter, judging from the title of your post and words like "it is only a matter of time before you..." which are the mainstays of such arguments.

I hate to be the one who spoils your fun, but this is a very well-constructed and successful troll.

A practically invisible cluster of stem cells is not a human being. It's the same old "pro-life" nonsense all over again!

slippery slope

You sound smart enough a guy not to resort to a slippery slope logical fallacy.

This argument basically relies on the slippery slope fallacy:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery- slope.html

In other words, using cars as bait for criminals does not lead to the logical conclusion that the police will engage in entrapment using high cash payments as bait.

Lets see:

Reference to Hitler? Check
Slippery slope fallacy? Check
Utterly unsupported reference to "logic"? Check

You sir, are a troll.

False Dilemma

Besides that, the existance of black holes have nothing to do with creationism. Creationism usually does not dispute the current laws of physics, because that would be silly.

Whoah, slow down there. let's not start using logic known as slippery slope . The fundamental premise of google's 'censorship' of xenu.net is different than your purported chevy censorship. Google removed links based upon the threat of the DMCA and their interpretation of it.

From what I've read, xenu.net was considered copyright infringement upon the CoS. Unless your 'Chevy Avalanche Review' is reproducing chevy's copyrighted text verbatim (without giving credit), the two issues are entirely different.

I think there's a strong case to be made for free software, but this ain't it. Bruce Perens touts the money saved by not buying MS software, but completely ignores the much more significant expenditures on people to administer all this software. Does it cost more to administer sendmail than Exchange? Apache vs. IIS? Is in-house development with VB cheaper to get the same results as Java on Linux?

This is actually quite a bad argument to put forward, because it commits the fallacy of composition. IIS is an administratively-intensive Web server--or at least many would argue that it is--but IIS is not necessarily representative of closed source software in general, or even of Microsoft software.

Moreover, TCO is not a solid basis for comparison because TCO is not solely dependent on the software itself. A shop with lots of MCSEs with no *nix experience is probably going to be a lot more efficient running Win/IIS than Linux/Apache. For certain applications, maintenance cost differences may be negligable. In any case, absent a specific context, it is very easy to spin the TCO argument to make it look like either option is better.

The best way to encourage the use of OSS is to point to solid, hard-to-dispute advantages of OSS and solid, hard-to-dispute disadvantages of proprietary software. License fees are one. These are insignificant in some cases, but can be deal-breakers in others. The other is, as Perens correctly points out, freedom from vendor tyrrany. I suspect that anyone who has been on the receiving end of a BSA shakedown would be especially receptive to this idea, but it should be easy to make most people understand the benefit of being able to switch support and service vendors at your pleasure, to upgrade when it makes sense for them, and to be able to contract out to a multitude of developers to modify your existing software base, rather than have to rely on the willingness of the vendor of a proprietary system to make the changes you want.

Remember that the idea is not to promote specific packages, such as Apache over IIS or Linux over NT, but to argue that open source, in and of itself, confers distinct advantages that proprietary software cannot.

I've seen better explanations of this term, but this one should do. Just because the consequences of global warming are potentially catastrophic is no validation of the theory.