Really? I thought the purpose of trademarks was to allow you to build a brand identity without people freeloading off of your good name - for example, if you create a new drink and call it, oh, "Coca-Cola", then others aren't allowed to create cheap/inferior versions and also calling them "Coca-Cola" in order to trick people into thinking that what they're buying is your product, thus hurting your business when those people are dissatisfied with the drink's quality.
Of course that doesn't mean that advertising competing products when people search for trademarked names should be illegal (in fact, the very idea that it should be is so whacky that I'm not surprised that this is from Utah of all places), but I don't think being able to advertise competing products is the *purpose* of trademarks or the reason why they were created.
In partial response, O'Reilly and others have proposed a code of conduct which could include restrictions like the outlawing of anonymous accounts."
From TFA:
5. We encourage anonymous comments.
Apparently, this was only recently added by an anonymous prankster, but it shows why it's important to link to the specific revision of a wiki page you're discussing in addition to the "latest trunk"...
In any case, I'm not sure how requiring the use of a valid email address is going to help. Anyone who wants to make a threatening or otherwise comment will just use dodgeit or a similar service to do so - you could ban them, I suppose, but good luck to you finding them all. And even if you do manage to, trolls will just create hotmail.com addresses; sure, you could ban hotmail as well (although you'd probably already be hurting some legitimate contributors that way), but then, trolls would use simply move to other free services. Do you need an alternate email address to sign up for Google Mail, Yahoo or so? I'm not sure, but even if you do, a troll could just use a hotmail.com address (or, for that matter, a dodgeit address or so) to create a GMail address, for instance. Ultimately, requiring valid email addresses (and I'm assuming you actually mean working ones, not just well-formed addresses, as some sites do) will not hurt trolls; it will make their job more difficult, but anybody who's already wasting his life on something as idiotic, useless and unproductive as trolling likely won't care much.
Of course, this is symptomatic of a bigger problem: a code of conduct, by definition, is a convention that is voluntarily followed - but those that agree to follow it are precisely those who're not a problem, anyway, and for whom a code of conduct is wholly unnecessary. The trolls, on the other hand, will simply disregard any aspect of it that is not guarded by technological measures.
If you really want to weed out trolling, the best idea is to a) delete obvious troll comments; b) possibly require approval for comments prior to them being published (I personally don't think that this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but it would solve the problem, at least); or c) implement a moderation system like Slashdot's - if you have a sufficient userbase where the trolls are outnumbered by the "good" folks, it should work quite well. Oh yeah, and in any case, d) grow a thicker skin, stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. Stop running around like headless chickens after some troll managed to scare you - calm down and think sensibly and move beyond fear.
Anyone who actually registers can change their default comment treshold, you know - if you want to read 0-rated comments by default (or even those that are at -1), just sign up for an account, save your prefs, and voila! There you go.
Of course, that doesn't mean everyone else wants to do the same thing, but I frankly don't see why you berate people for that. Everyone's got their own preferences, and what's good for the goose is not automatically good for the gander. I, for one, do not have the time to read 400 comments rated +1 or 0 for every story I check out - and even if I had the time, I really wouldn't want to. I trust that nuggets of wisdom will, generally speaking, get modded up until I see them, and I'm willing to accept that I might miss some that escaped the moderators' attention. C'est la vie.
And if you don't like the way comments are moderated, BTW, feel free to get an account and be active until you get mod points, too. Until you try to do what you can to change the things you complain about, you're really just a crybaby, and an anonymous one for that matter.
There's lots of bad things that can be (and have been) said about Slashdot, but the comment system is one of the things that actually seems to work well. Shit happens on occasion, with troll comments getting modded up or legitimate (if controversial) ones getting modded down, but it's my impression that this is relatively rare and that metamoderation is taking care of it; and of course, nobody and nothing is perfect, anyway, so the fact that there are *some* errors *occasionally* doesn't mean that Slashdot's comment system isn't working.
And as others have remarked already, a good amount of the comments on Slashdot really *are* insightful, interesting, informative or funny, too. I, too, read Slashdot mostly just for the comments - if those didn't exist, I really wouldn't care much about the site, or at least not more than I care about any other news aggregation site.
Oh for the days when universities were places for teaching and not little more than businesses and when professors were more focussed on teaching than making a quick buck by ripping off their students' work.
Just out of curiosity, how can states "hire out" law enforcement tasks etc., anyway - that is, what legal basis is there for that? The police has the right to do certain things like detain people and lock them up (under certain circumstances, anyway) etc. by virtue of being the police, but a private agency doesn't; a mall security guard, for example, might ask me to leave the mall (which is legal, since it's private property), but he couldn't arrest me - he'd have to call an actual cop for that (right?).
For me, the question of whether the limits on government power apply to private agencies doesn't seem to make much sense, since the ultimate limit is already in place: private agencies don't have the government's powers to do these things *at all*.
I'm not from the USA, of course, though, so it would be great if someone could explain this to me.:) But still, I just don't see why a state (or any government or government agency, no matter on which level) should be able to declare private entities/agencies/individuals to be above the law.
They would like the legislation to exempt anyone who owns a copyright, patent, trademark, or trade secret from restrictions against pretexting.
Is there *anyone* who does not "own" the copyright to anything? Anyone who's ever written a letter or an email certainly does, for example, so if this exception was to be granted, you could just as well throw out the entire bill, since *literally everyone* would suddenly be exempt from it.
(On a side note, I'm a bit troubled by the word "own", too, since that implies that copyrights, patents, trademarks and so on are property, which they're not, but I can't think of a better term. Does anyone have any ideas, especially for the case of copyrights?
I believe that America is the greatest country on Earth. [...] Why are we getting beaten by Japan, France, and England? Why aren't we on top?
Um... are you really so stupid that you can't see that you're *NOT* the greatest country on Earth[1]? No country is; they're all just temporary and (even compared to human history) comparatively short-lived apparitions, and while they're certainly useful, they're not per se "great" - ever.
It's important to understand this so you can understand that there is no entitlement (and I mean absolutely NONE) to anything for any country, ever. You want to be the first, the best, the greatest? Work on it! Stop spouting bullshit like "we're the greatest country on Earth, we deserve to be the first in everything" and admit that you have a problem, since if you don't do that, you can't fix it.
And FWIW, stop believing that you're special, too. There's more than 200 countries on Earth (and a bunch existed in the past that don't anymore), and *none* ever had a slogan along the lines of "we're the second greatest country in the world, after the USA, who naturally are greater than us foreign pigs".
Seriously, people like you are what's wrong with the USA (and other countries, too, naturally; the USA do not have a monopoly on idiocy, but since you're apparently from the USA, I'm focussing on that particular country). You just want to make me puke.
Not to mention the fact that "America" is a continent, not a country: the country is called "the USA". My friends in Brazil and Colombia would probably not be thrilled if you told them that they're not from America, for instance; it'd be like the UK calling themselves "Europe" and then saying that the French, or the Italians, or the Germans, or the Swedes or whoever aren't.)
I suppose from their point of view, that actually makes sense. The illegal sites are always going to be around, and they know that; there's not really much they can do about them, since even if they manage to crack down on some, new ones will just spring up instead.
But sites that arguably should be legal and that have new business models that threaten theirs... that's different. If they manage to sue those into oblivion, they're not only crushing a potential competitor, they're also making sure that noone else will dare compete with them the same way - it's a way of ensuring that they retain a monopoly.
Of course, they still have to fight the illegal sites every now and then as well to make sure that they don't grow too large, but those are not an all-or-nothing problem: they just need to be kept below the point where the legal expenses for fighting them start being less than the extra profit that can be made by shutting them down (actually, in reality, it's a bit more complicated, since the RIAA doesn't directly care about profits only - they also have to prove to the labels that they're useful and that they're "doing something" etc., but the basic idea remains the same if you apply a more generous definition of "expenses" and "profit").
New business models that actually are or should be legal, on the other hand, need to be crushed at any cost, lest they threaten the entire business model of the RIAA and its members. For them, it's the difference between some parasites (annoying but ultimately harmless) and a predator that will kill you once it's big enough.
(FWIW, I'm not saying I'm on their side, BTW, not at all; I just think it's important to understand that what they're doing makes some twisted sort of sense.)
I go to the second largest undergraduate university in the country. Within the last year, both record (CDs) stores near our campus have closed. The one that closed last week had a sign on the door that said
"to all the people that download music, if you think you are only hurting big companies you are wrong. There are two working people with families who no longer have jobs because of music piracy."
Who knows whether that's actually true, though. If you had a record store and if yours went bankrupt, what would you do - would you say "it's all my own fault, I fscked it up because I didn't know a thing about how to run a successful store, because I couldn't adapt to what my customers wanted, and because I failed to carve out a niche for myself or provide an incentive for people to actually come back and buy from ME instead of the nearest CD mega-mart", or would you say "I didn't do anything wrong, it's all due to those pirates"?
It's always convenient to have scapegoats, but that doesn't mean they're more than that. And while there is a chance that this store actually WAS affected by copyright infringement, well... even if that IS true, it just shows that the store failed to provide extra service that you just don't get when you download an unauthorised mp3. The store owner failed to create an incentive for his customers to return to his store, and he failed to attract new customers; therefore, he went bankrupt; and while I feel sorry for him to an extent, that's the way capitalism works. And the fact that the competing offers in this case are not actually legal doesn't matter for this purpose: you can complain about reality being unfair all you want, but that's not going to change it. Adapt or die - it's your choice.
On another side note, it's also interesting to note that he initially only talks about downloading music without specifying that he's referring to illegal downloading. Would he feel better if all of his customers had migrated to iTunes instead? I doubt it, but it would've been much harder to vilify iTunes and get people riled up over that.
I love it when people refer to us skeptics as global warming "deniers". Makes a real nice emotional correlation to HOLOCAUST deniers, doesn't it?
BZZZT! Reverse Godwin. You lose.
Your list of "poisons" is pretty long. Couldn't it be possible that at least a few of them are true? Who's being close-minded now?
Do you honestly believe that just because a list of statements is "pretty long", some have to be true? That's the most ridiculous assertion I've seen here on this site today.
Forgive my ignorance, but... can someone who's actually from the USA explain why the RIAA would get *anyone's* computer at all? Even if there is a reason why it should be inspected at all, shouldn't that be done by a (hopefully) neutral third party, like the police? It seems like a bad idea to me to give someone who's got a vested interest in finding evidence against you an opportunity to plant it.
While it's expected that advertisers lie, there is a difference between lying about hard facts and more, well, ephemeral claims. If an advertiser says "our laundry detergent is great", that's an ephemeral claim; you may dispute it, but there is no objective interpretation of what "great" means, so the advertiser is off the hook.
FWIW, GSK probably could've gotten off the hook if there had been *some* vitamin C in the drink, too - "high in vitamin C" is also a rather ephemeral claim insofar as that it's not clear what "high" means. However, there also is a factual claim in there: namely, the claim that the drink contains at least *some* vitamin C, and that's what GSK apparently got in trouble for.
In other words: if I sell you a computer "with a big hard disk", you can't complain if it's only a 40 GB drive, since I can reasonably argue that that's "big" (how can 40 *billion* bytes not be big?). But if the computer doesn't have any HD, you do have a case, since "a big hard disk" implies that there *is* a hard disk to begin with.
[...] compounded by the fact that the ARPANet was invented and fleshed out here in the U.S.
And the car was invented and fleshed out in Germany. What's your point? Do you think that Germany should be granted control over the global car industry because of this?
Or how about another example that's more related to computer: the web was invented and fleshed out in Switzerland. Does that mean Switzerland should control the web?
That's absolutely NOT the same. Anyone can break into your house and steal your stuff by smashing the windows, but that's not the same as donning a perfect costume that makes them look like your wife (to the point where you are literally unable to tell the difference, and where you don't even suspect that the person you're dealing with might NOT be your wife) and using a perfect copy of your wife's key to enter your house.
And now imagine that this isn't taking place just once, but that it could happen at ANY time; your wife knows about it, too, but she's not interested in telling you about it and thus doesn't. So ANY time your wife enters your house, it just might be someone else. And of course, she can enter even when you're not there (automatic updates); and no matter whether you're there or not, you don't know what she's actually doing or what kind of information she's leaving with. Oh, sure, you'd notice if she took half of the documents in your office (windows updates can't just download your entire HD or even your "My Documents" directory), but that's only a limit on the quantity of information she can carry, not the quality.
A 0-day exploit, on the other hand, is more like a new way to smash windows (no pun intended!) that noone thought of before; sure, your wife (that is, the person appearing to be your wife) just might find one of those, too, but: a) why would she smash windows when she can just enter through the door? and b) thieves would find out about it sooner or later, too, so sooner or later, you'd fix your windows so that this new way of smashing them doesn't work anymore.
I'm surprised the US Government is doing this; I'd have expected them to obtain the key through back channels rather than out-and-out demanding it.
Maybe they are. Just think about it: they openly demand the keys, there's a cry of outrage on Slashdot (and a cry of indifference in the mainstream media), they cancel their plans (without a big announcement, but openly enough so that that story will appear on Slashdot, too), and people on Slashdot pat themselves on the shoulder and say "the internet is safe again - we sure showed 'em", all the while they obtain the keys, anyway, this time in secret.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's not like it hasn't happened before. "Total Information Awareness", for example, was killed by Congress in 2003, but still exists today - the only difference is that it's classified now.
"Neutral" doesn't mean "treats everyone fairly"; it means "doesn't treat anyone *more* unfairly than everyone else".
In other words, it's perfectly possible to be neutral *and* an asshole. I'm not saying Switzerland is either (I haven't read up on this), but generally speaking, there is no contradiction between your claims and those of the GP.
This is further complicated because the body of scientific literature is massive and for every scientific field you can find crap science. Peer review is fallible.
I think that's a false dichotomy. Peer review isn't infallible, of course (what is?), but that doesn't mean it's totally worthless.
These people are being required to choose religion -- remember they have been in church since birth -- or science.
That, too, is a false dichotomy; you can certainly be religious without believing in all the bull that certain people are spouting and while still accepting science. What's more, this is a false dichotomy created by those who want to discredit science, and we should be pointing out that it is, indeed, a *false* dichotomy, not validate their propaganda.
Hey, at least we don't have a cloaca. Imagine how much fun life would be if our genitalia and waste disposal facilities were not just next to each other but in fact ONE AND THE SAME!:)
That's easy to explain, too. Just ask them if they have ever travelled to another city (/state/country), for example.
If they did (and who hasn't), then tell them that it's impossible; after all, at the start of their journey, they were in city A, and at the end, they were supposedly in city B, but you can't just teleport from one city to the other. If you do this, they will likely tell you that they, well, *travelled* from A to B; that they got into their car (for example), drove off, and spent a couple of hours on the road, slowly getting from their origin to their destination.
If they're smart, realisation should probably start to sink in by then. If not, you can always give it a nudge until it does.
No, it's not. The molecules in your brain form... well, a brain. Love may be an emergent product of the chemical/physical processes in the brain, but it's not made up of the molecules that form the brain. Claiming that is like saying that shininess is made from gold.
Challenging established theories is certainly an important part of the scientific method, but I think it *is* justified to say that certain things are actually *true*, even when they can't technically be completely proven.
Take gravity, for instance. Our understanding of gravity certainly has evolved (no pun intended; I think scientific progress itself is a perfect example of an evolutionary process), and we don't even HAVE a complete theory of gravity right now (IANAP, of course - I am not a physicist -, so please bear with me if I spout rubbish), but nobody would actually dispute that gravity exists, for example.
I think evolution is similar. Of course, evolution isn't a force of nature in the same way that gravity is, but the basic idea is so obviously correct that I don't see how anyone can reject it; and in fact, even the most rabid creationists do not seem to reject "microevolution", either (which conveniently allows them to benefit from new antibiotics, for example). (Of course, the distinction between "micro-" and macroevolution" is really artificial, so the only way I see how you can believe in one but not the other is to believe that the Earth is literally only a couple of thousands of years old, as some people apparently do. But then you've got other things that you need to account for, and ultimately, you end up with a fragile, artificial construct that only rests on a foundation of "it's like this because god made it this way". But I disgress.)
In any case, you're absolutely right that we should question our theories - even to the point of questioning evolution itself if data arises that provides some initial evidence that it might *possibly* not be happening. But that doesn't mean we can't still think of it as *true*.
How do you know? Or, more precisely, how would you be able to tell (without actually loading the page) if you didn't already know that toyota.com is the US page? The US page should be at toyota.us, not toyota.com.
That being said, I don't think that the generic TLDs are all irrelevant. Sure,.museum,.biz,.info and so on definitely are, and so are.gov,.edu. and.mil (those should be.gov.us,.edu.us and.mil.us); I suppose you could argue that.net is, to some extent, but that's mostly because its original purpose got watered down when tons of sites that don't really belong into that namespace cropped up there..com and.org certainly seem relevant for global organisations, and the distinction between.com and.org also makes sense to me.
The fact that this directive does not criminalise non-commercial copyright infringement (I'm sorry, but I refuse to call it "piracy" - let's reserve that term for seafaring murderers) does not mean that it'll actually be/become/stay legal. Things can be illegal without being a crime, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I thought the purpose of trademarks was to allow you to build a brand identity without people freeloading off of your good name - for example, if you create a new drink and call it, oh, "Coca-Cola", then others aren't allowed to create cheap/inferior versions and also calling them "Coca-Cola" in order to trick people into thinking that what they're buying is your product, thus hurting your business when those people are dissatisfied with the drink's quality.
Of course that doesn't mean that advertising competing products when people search for trademarked names should be illegal (in fact, the very idea that it should be is so whacky that I'm not surprised that this is from Utah of all places), but I don't think being able to advertise competing products is the *purpose* of trademarks or the reason why they were created.
From the slashdot summary:
From TFA:
Apparently, this was only recently added by an anonymous prankster, but it shows why it's important to link to the specific revision of a wiki page you're discussing in addition to the "latest trunk"...
In any case, I'm not sure how requiring the use of a valid email address is going to help. Anyone who wants to make a threatening or otherwise comment will just use dodgeit or a similar service to do so - you could ban them, I suppose, but good luck to you finding them all. And even if you do manage to, trolls will just create hotmail.com addresses; sure, you could ban hotmail as well (although you'd probably already be hurting some legitimate contributors that way), but then, trolls would use simply move to other free services. Do you need an alternate email address to sign up for Google Mail, Yahoo or so? I'm not sure, but even if you do, a troll could just use a hotmail.com address (or, for that matter, a dodgeit address or so) to create a GMail address, for instance. Ultimately, requiring valid email addresses (and I'm assuming you actually mean working ones, not just well-formed addresses, as some sites do) will not hurt trolls; it will make their job more difficult, but anybody who's already wasting his life on something as idiotic, useless and unproductive as trolling likely won't care much.
Of course, this is symptomatic of a bigger problem: a code of conduct, by definition, is a convention that is voluntarily followed - but those that agree to follow it are precisely those who're not a problem, anyway, and for whom a code of conduct is wholly unnecessary. The trolls, on the other hand, will simply disregard any aspect of it that is not guarded by technological measures.
If you really want to weed out trolling, the best idea is to a) delete obvious troll comments; b) possibly require approval for comments prior to them being published (I personally don't think that this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but it would solve the problem, at least); or c) implement a moderation system like Slashdot's - if you have a sufficient userbase where the trolls are outnumbered by the "good" folks, it should work quite well. Oh yeah, and in any case, d) grow a thicker skin, stop worrying and learn to love the bomb. Stop running around like headless chickens after some troll managed to scare you - calm down and think sensibly and move beyond fear.
Anyone who actually registers can change their default comment treshold, you know - if you want to read 0-rated comments by default (or even those that are at -1), just sign up for an account, save your prefs, and voila! There you go.
Of course, that doesn't mean everyone else wants to do the same thing, but I frankly don't see why you berate people for that. Everyone's got their own preferences, and what's good for the goose is not automatically good for the gander. I, for one, do not have the time to read 400 comments rated +1 or 0 for every story I check out - and even if I had the time, I really wouldn't want to. I trust that nuggets of wisdom will, generally speaking, get modded up until I see them, and I'm willing to accept that I might miss some that escaped the moderators' attention. C'est la vie.
And if you don't like the way comments are moderated, BTW, feel free to get an account and be active until you get mod points, too. Until you try to do what you can to change the things you complain about, you're really just a crybaby, and an anonymous one for that matter.
Hear, hear.
There's lots of bad things that can be (and have been) said about Slashdot, but the comment system is one of the things that actually seems to work well. Shit happens on occasion, with troll comments getting modded up or legitimate (if controversial) ones getting modded down, but it's my impression that this is relatively rare and that metamoderation is taking care of it; and of course, nobody and nothing is perfect, anyway, so the fact that there are *some* errors *occasionally* doesn't mean that Slashdot's comment system isn't working.
And as others have remarked already, a good amount of the comments on Slashdot really *are* insightful, interesting, informative or funny, too. I, too, read Slashdot mostly just for the comments - if those didn't exist, I really wouldn't care much about the site, or at least not more than I care about any other news aggregation site.
Oh for the days when universities were places for teaching and not little more than businesses and when professors were more focussed on teaching than making a quick buck by ripping off their students' work.
Just out of curiosity, how can states "hire out" law enforcement tasks etc., anyway - that is, what legal basis is there for that? The police has the right to do certain things like detain people and lock them up (under certain circumstances, anyway) etc. by virtue of being the police, but a private agency doesn't; a mall security guard, for example, might ask me to leave the mall (which is legal, since it's private property), but he couldn't arrest me - he'd have to call an actual cop for that (right?).
:) But still, I just don't see why a state (or any government or government agency, no matter on which level) should be able to declare private entities/agencies/individuals to be above the law.
For me, the question of whether the limits on government power apply to private agencies doesn't seem to make much sense, since the ultimate limit is already in place: private agencies don't have the government's powers to do these things *at all*.
I'm not from the USA, of course, though, so it would be great if someone could explain this to me.
Is there *anyone* who does not "own" the copyright to anything? Anyone who's ever written a letter or an email certainly does, for example, so if this exception was to be granted, you could just as well throw out the entire bill, since *literally everyone* would suddenly be exempt from it.
(On a side note, I'm a bit troubled by the word "own", too, since that implies that copyrights, patents, trademarks and so on are property, which they're not, but I can't think of a better term. Does anyone have any ideas, especially for the case of copyrights?
Um... are you really so stupid that you can't see that you're *NOT* the greatest country on Earth[1]? No country is; they're all just temporary and (even compared to human history) comparatively short-lived apparitions, and while they're certainly useful, they're not per se "great" - ever.
It's important to understand this so you can understand that there is no entitlement (and I mean absolutely NONE) to anything for any country, ever. You want to be the first, the best, the greatest? Work on it! Stop spouting bullshit like "we're the greatest country on Earth, we deserve to be the first in everything" and admit that you have a problem, since if you don't do that, you can't fix it.
And FWIW, stop believing that you're special, too. There's more than 200 countries on Earth (and a bunch existed in the past that don't anymore), and *none* ever had a slogan along the lines of "we're the second greatest country in the world, after the USA, who naturally are greater than us foreign pigs".
Seriously, people like you are what's wrong with the USA (and other countries, too, naturally; the USA do not have a monopoly on idiocy, but since you're apparently from the USA, I'm focussing on that particular country). You just want to make me puke.
Nice profit margin. ;)
I suppose from their point of view, that actually makes sense. The illegal sites are always going to be around, and they know that; there's not really much they can do about them, since even if they manage to crack down on some, new ones will just spring up instead.
But sites that arguably should be legal and that have new business models that threaten theirs... that's different. If they manage to sue those into oblivion, they're not only crushing a potential competitor, they're also making sure that noone else will dare compete with them the same way - it's a way of ensuring that they retain a monopoly.
Of course, they still have to fight the illegal sites every now and then as well to make sure that they don't grow too large, but those are not an all-or-nothing problem: they just need to be kept below the point where the legal expenses for fighting them start being less than the extra profit that can be made by shutting them down (actually, in reality, it's a bit more complicated, since the RIAA doesn't directly care about profits only - they also have to prove to the labels that they're useful and that they're "doing something" etc., but the basic idea remains the same if you apply a more generous definition of "expenses" and "profit").
New business models that actually are or should be legal, on the other hand, need to be crushed at any cost, lest they threaten the entire business model of the RIAA and its members. For them, it's the difference between some parasites (annoying but ultimately harmless) and a predator that will kill you once it's big enough.
(FWIW, I'm not saying I'm on their side, BTW, not at all; I just think it's important to understand that what they're doing makes some twisted sort of sense.)
Who knows whether that's actually true, though. If you had a record store and if yours went bankrupt, what would you do - would you say "it's all my own fault, I fscked it up because I didn't know a thing about how to run a successful store, because I couldn't adapt to what my customers wanted, and because I failed to carve out a niche for myself or provide an incentive for people to actually come back and buy from ME instead of the nearest CD mega-mart", or would you say "I didn't do anything wrong, it's all due to those pirates"?
It's always convenient to have scapegoats, but that doesn't mean they're more than that. And while there is a chance that this store actually WAS affected by copyright infringement, well... even if that IS true, it just shows that the store failed to provide extra service that you just don't get when you download an unauthorised mp3. The store owner failed to create an incentive for his customers to return to his store, and he failed to attract new customers; therefore, he went bankrupt; and while I feel sorry for him to an extent, that's the way capitalism works. And the fact that the competing offers in this case are not actually legal doesn't matter for this purpose: you can complain about reality being unfair all you want, but that's not going to change it. Adapt or die - it's your choice.
On another side note, it's also interesting to note that he initially only talks about downloading music without specifying that he's referring to illegal downloading. Would he feel better if all of his customers had migrated to iTunes instead? I doubt it, but it would've been much harder to vilify iTunes and get people riled up over that.
BZZZT! Reverse Godwin. You lose.
Do you honestly believe that just because a list of statements is "pretty long", some have to be true? That's the most ridiculous assertion I've seen here on this site today.
Forgive my ignorance, but... can someone who's actually from the USA explain why the RIAA would get *anyone's* computer at all? Even if there is a reason why it should be inspected at all, shouldn't that be done by a (hopefully) neutral third party, like the police? It seems like a bad idea to me to give someone who's got a vested interest in finding evidence against you an opportunity to plant it.
While it's expected that advertisers lie, there is a difference between lying about hard facts and more, well, ephemeral claims. If an advertiser says "our laundry detergent is great", that's an ephemeral claim; you may dispute it, but there is no objective interpretation of what "great" means, so the advertiser is off the hook.
FWIW, GSK probably could've gotten off the hook if there had been *some* vitamin C in the drink, too - "high in vitamin C" is also a rather ephemeral claim insofar as that it's not clear what "high" means. However, there also is a factual claim in there: namely, the claim that the drink contains at least *some* vitamin C, and that's what GSK apparently got in trouble for.
In other words: if I sell you a computer "with a big hard disk", you can't complain if it's only a 40 GB drive, since I can reasonably argue that that's "big" (how can 40 *billion* bytes not be big?). But if the computer doesn't have any HD, you do have a case, since "a big hard disk" implies that there *is* a hard disk to begin with.
And the car was invented and fleshed out in Germany. What's your point? Do you think that Germany should be granted control over the global car industry because of this?
Or how about another example that's more related to computer: the web was invented and fleshed out in Switzerland. Does that mean Switzerland should control the web?
That's absolutely NOT the same. Anyone can break into your house and steal your stuff by smashing the windows, but that's not the same as donning a perfect costume that makes them look like your wife (to the point where you are literally unable to tell the difference, and where you don't even suspect that the person you're dealing with might NOT be your wife) and using a perfect copy of your wife's key to enter your house.
And now imagine that this isn't taking place just once, but that it could happen at ANY time; your wife knows about it, too, but she's not interested in telling you about it and thus doesn't. So ANY time your wife enters your house, it just might be someone else. And of course, she can enter even when you're not there (automatic updates); and no matter whether you're there or not, you don't know what she's actually doing or what kind of information she's leaving with. Oh, sure, you'd notice if she took half of the documents in your office (windows updates can't just download your entire HD or even your "My Documents" directory), but that's only a limit on the quantity of information she can carry, not the quality.
A 0-day exploit, on the other hand, is more like a new way to smash windows (no pun intended!) that noone thought of before; sure, your wife (that is, the person appearing to be your wife) just might find one of those, too, but: a) why would she smash windows when she can just enter through the door? and b) thieves would find out about it sooner or later, too, so sooner or later, you'd fix your windows so that this new way of smashing them doesn't work anymore.
Maybe they are. Just think about it: they openly demand the keys, there's a cry of outrage on Slashdot (and a cry of indifference in the mainstream media), they cancel their plans (without a big announcement, but openly enough so that that story will appear on Slashdot, too), and people on Slashdot pat themselves on the shoulder and say "the internet is safe again - we sure showed 'em", all the while they obtain the keys, anyway, this time in secret.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but it's not like it hasn't happened before. "Total Information Awareness", for example, was killed by Congress in 2003, but still exists today - the only difference is that it's classified now.
"Neutral" doesn't mean "treats everyone fairly"; it means "doesn't treat anyone *more* unfairly than everyone else".
In other words, it's perfectly possible to be neutral *and* an asshole. I'm not saying Switzerland is either (I haven't read up on this), but generally speaking, there is no contradiction between your claims and those of the GP.
I think that's a false dichotomy. Peer review isn't infallible, of course (what is?), but that doesn't mean it's totally worthless.
That, too, is a false dichotomy; you can certainly be religious without believing in all the bull that certain people are spouting and while still accepting science. What's more, this is a false dichotomy created by those who want to discredit science, and we should be pointing out that it is, indeed, a *false* dichotomy, not validate their propaganda.
Hey, at least we don't have a cloaca. Imagine how much fun life would be if our genitalia and waste disposal facilities were not just next to each other but in fact ONE AND THE SAME! :)
That's easy to explain, too. Just ask them if they have ever travelled to another city (/state/country), for example.
If they did (and who hasn't), then tell them that it's impossible; after all, at the start of their journey, they were in city A, and at the end, they were supposedly in city B, but you can't just teleport from one city to the other. If you do this, they will likely tell you that they, well, *travelled* from A to B; that they got into their car (for example), drove off, and spent a couple of hours on the road, slowly getting from their origin to their destination.
If they're smart, realisation should probably start to sink in by then. If not, you can always give it a nudge until it does.
No, it's not. The molecules in your brain form... well, a brain. Love may be an emergent product of the chemical/physical processes in the brain, but it's not made up of the molecules that form the brain. Claiming that is like saying that shininess is made from gold.
Challenging established theories is certainly an important part of the scientific method, but I think it *is* justified to say that certain things are actually *true*, even when they can't technically be completely proven.
Take gravity, for instance. Our understanding of gravity certainly has evolved (no pun intended; I think scientific progress itself is a perfect example of an evolutionary process), and we don't even HAVE a complete theory of gravity right now (IANAP, of course - I am not a physicist -, so please bear with me if I spout rubbish), but nobody would actually dispute that gravity exists, for example.
I think evolution is similar. Of course, evolution isn't a force of nature in the same way that gravity is, but the basic idea is so obviously correct that I don't see how anyone can reject it; and in fact, even the most rabid creationists do not seem to reject "microevolution", either (which conveniently allows them to benefit from new antibiotics, for example). (Of course, the distinction between "micro-" and macroevolution" is really artificial, so the only way I see how you can believe in one but not the other is to believe that the Earth is literally only a couple of thousands of years old, as some people apparently do. But then you've got other things that you need to account for, and ultimately, you end up with a fragile, artificial construct that only rests on a foundation of "it's like this because god made it this way". But I disgress.)
In any case, you're absolutely right that we should question our theories - even to the point of questioning evolution itself if data arises that provides some initial evidence that it might *possibly* not be happening. But that doesn't mean we can't still think of it as *true*.
How do you know? Or, more precisely, how would you be able to tell (without actually loading the page) if you didn't already know that toyota.com is the US page? The US page should be at toyota.us, not toyota.com.
That being said, I don't think that the generic TLDs are all irrelevant. Sure, .museum, .biz, .info and so on definitely are, and so are .gov, .edu. and .mil (those should be .gov.us, .edu.us and .mil.us); I suppose you could argue that .net is, to some extent, but that's mostly because its original purpose got watered down when tons of sites that don't really belong into that namespace cropped up there. .com and .org certainly seem relevant for global organisations, and the distinction between .com and .org also makes sense to me.
The fact that this directive does not criminalise non-commercial copyright infringement (I'm sorry, but I refuse to call it "piracy" - let's reserve that term for seafaring murderers) does not mean that it'll actually be/become/stay legal. Things can be illegal without being a crime, too.