I'm sorry, but Lyons' portrayal of himself as an ordinary Joe who made a reasonable evaluation of the case which just happened to be wrong because SCO was keeping its deception so well-hidden is just plain wrong. There was at least one red flag which Lyons has no excuse for not catching.
That red flag was when SCO presented their excuse for not showing anyone (except under draconian NDAs) what the alleged copyright infringement actually consisted of. They didn't want that information getting to the Linux crew, they said, because that would allow them to remove the offending code.
That there is all you need to know to call "BS". It is your obligation to notify someone you suspect of infringing your copyright of just how you think they are infringing your copyright so that they can remedy the wrong. You cannot say "I would rather let them continue to infringe my copyright so I can soak them for more damages"; despite what SCO might have you believe, that is not the purpose of copyright law. As for the idea that the offending code would be scrubbed from the record in order to hide the evidence of past infringement, again, that's BS. If there was copied code in the kernel, as SCO assured us there was, SCO could have downloaded copies of the kernel twice a day to have a historical record of the violation.
Lyons still refers to "amateur sleuths" as though he's some kind of professional. What sort of "professional" doesn't investigate the most glaring contradiction between what someone claims they want and what they're actually trying to arrange?
"Probably not as there are many conspiring men who have their hearts set on addicting as many [to porn] as they can"
Ah yes. Because the fact that human beings are sexual creatures and derive immense pleasure from sexual stimuli is simply ''not enough'' to explain why pornography is prevalent. There ''has to be'' a conspiracy. I suppose, like that nutcase woman who babbles about non-existent "erotoxins", you also dub your version of the conspiracy "Big Porn"?
I wonder what other conspiracies are proved to exist by the self-same logic. Wait a minute... what about cartoons? People read cartoons nearly everywhere, everyday... they stick them with magnets to their refrigerators... they even give their kids cartoons, for the love of God! And then if you sit down and read the cartoons, oftentimes they aren't actually all that funny... so how come people are still reading them, hunh?! The answer is frightening but inescapable -- they're addicted, courtesy of those conspiring men of "Big Cartoon"!
Mind you, e-mail support isn't always bad, but Netflix's was immensely frustrating, for some reason. You could explain the problem in very plain English and you'd still get a "solution" that wasn't one. For example, I requested a particular Mexican horror movie that the online guide said was published by Something Weird. When it arrived, it was the right movie, but it wasn't the Something Weird version, with all the extras that were promised; it was a no-frills version from a publisher notorious for putting out DVDs that are cheap -- in both senses of the word. I wasn't pleased, because I always look forward to Something Weird's extras, so I e-mailed to complain.
I got a cheery, perky note back explaining that to access the extras, I had to use the "extras" menu.
I e-mailed back again, stressing that there WAS no extras menu.
I got a cheery, perky note back explaining that this was only one disc in a two-disc set (not the truth) and that I would have to request the other disc to see the extras.
The only good thing is that if the information was collected by Daniel Brandt, it's probably worthless. The guy is famous for being easily fooled -- my favorite is when someone sent him an anonymous e-mail, claiming to be an ex-business partner and enemy of administrator "XYZ", and claiming that administrator XYZ's real name was "Daniel Atta Benzona". Brandt published it on his website, without any attempt to check it. Well, he may have made some unsuccessful attempt to check it, but one thing we can be sure he didn't do is try to check it with anyone who spoke Hebrew, or he would have found out that "Daniel Atta Benzona" means "Daniel, you are a son of a whore."
I am just guessing, but my hunch is that the people who wrote up the article didn't really understand what the drug did. They wrote that it "blocks or deletes" bad memories, but nothing in the article seems to support that claim.
My guess as to what we would find out the drug actually does, if we got a more accurate and precise description, is that it interrupts a biochemical-emotional feedback loop. The memory triggers feelings of anxiety and fear; the anxiety and fear trigger a rush of adrenalin; the adrenalin triggers feelings of anxiety and fear; so on, and so on... If the drug makes it possible in a therapeutic environment to face and adjust to the memory itself, instead of always to the linked combination of memory and physiological turmoil, then in future the memory can be faced with a greater range of emotional options.
The second he says that "scientific consensus" must designate the minority position he is wrong. Under his logic the Earth must not be round, since nearly every scientist would announce loudly that it is if asked.
There's a difference between a theory which involves a conspiracy, and a "conspiracy theory". The former suggests that the acts of a conspiracy can be inferred from the evidence. The latter suggests that the existence of a conspiracy should be presumed in order to explain why the acts supposedly committed by the conspiracy ''cannot'' be inferred from the evidence.
Classic example is the supposed Satanist conspiracy of the 1980s. <Nutjobs> There's a huge international network of Satanists committing ritual murders and torture and child pornography at daycare centers! <FBI> We can't find any evidence whatsoever for the existence of this conspiracy. <Nutjobs> There's a huge international network of Satanists committing ritual murders and torture and child pornography at daycare centers, and it's infiltrated the FBI!
I'm a bit confused by your post. you write "they electric and natural gas cars" -- what verb was supposed to go after the "they"? And if the "they" in question is the current United States administration, I'm not sure what the relevance of a government page from Singapore is...
Hmm, so there's a shitbag working for Microsoft, which automatically allows us to draw conclusions X, Y, and Z about the entire company. Allllrightythen....*sigh*. Slow news day I guess.
Yes, there is a shitbag working for Microsoft, who was observed in the wild engaged in the act of shitbagging, whose job title is "Chief Executive Shitbag In Charge Of Extorting Sales Through Falsified Accusations Of Wrongdoing", who got the job no doubt because she answered an ad in the classifieds reading "SHITBAGS WANTED! If you're a motivated, self-starting shitbag, you can make GOOD MONEY by accusing our own customers of things you have no evidence of and ignoring the evidence they send you so you can keep making accusations, to create the fear that the customer needs to buy more licenses to avoid legal harassment whether there's any truth to it or not!"
Yes, I read the first line describing it as "a joke exchange" too. I also read the second line which specifically claimed it was "based on an actual radio conversation" involving a named Navy vessel in a named area in a named month of a named year. I also read the third line which claimed that a particular US official had released the information on one specific date. If you are thinking that, despite all those very specific (if false) details included as if the story was actually verifiable and true, that anyone should have known it wasn't true because the word "joke" appeared in there somewhere, I suggest you're full of it.
Frankly, Timothy Zahn's books are not the example I would hope they'd take for how to do the new series -- though I suppose they will anyways. Zahn's Dark Fleet Trilogy would be fine -- if it wasn't in the Star Wars universe. He takes a series whose fundamental principle is mysticism and makes it mechanical. The Force is no longer a mystical force flowing through every living thing -- now it's an energy flowing through every living thing except for this one species of jungle lizard which not only does without it, but evolves the ability to surpress it in a sphere around itself. Luke's vision in the cave on Dagobah is no longer a warning to him of the danger posed by his own dark side -- now it's a precognition that -- spoiler -- he's got a crazy clone out there. This was just the wrong way to go and unfortunately it's the road Lucas himself took with the whole "midichlorians" bit.
Oh joy! This is exactly what I've been waiting for! See, we know who Luke Skywalker is at the beginning of Star Wars (the movie's title is not A New Hope, thank you) -- he's a naive farmboy whose life on a backwater desert planet is so deadly dull that a trip into town to pick up power converters is a major treat for him. But what happened before that? I mean, besides "nothing"? Finally, the answer will be revealed! One hundred episodes detailing that deadly dull farmboy life! My lightsaber quivers just thinking about it.
What is new? That's easy. Instead of using engines that run on alternative fuels which are renewable, these researchers changed gasoline from a fuel with a limited supply which could never be replenished into a renewable fuel.
Are other alternative fuels much more renewable? Yes. Is it in our best interests to switch to those alternative fuels ASAP? Probably. But ASAP stands for "As Soon As Possible"; how soon is it possible to switch over? When will it actually happen? The potential to create gasoline from a renewable resource means we no longer face the spectre of running permanently out of the fuel that powers our current infrastructure before we can get a new infrastructure built around a better fuel into place.
I understand that at this time, it's more of a "could we do this if we had to, and what would we need in order to do it?" than a "let's do it now!" thing. However, I hope that if there ever is a need to do something like this, that they look into the advantages of using Pykrete strategically. The properties of Pykrete are frequently exaggerated, but it is provably stronger and more resistant to melting than regular ice, which could be valuable.
The much more common flip side of this is the limousine liberal who loudly demands higher taxes on "the rich", but pays only the minimum required by law-- e.g. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. It's their business and theirs alone -- again, except while running for office.
That's a rather poor analogy. The person you describe is arguing that the rules should be changed, but following the rules as they are until such time as they are changed. That disparity is certainly open to criticism, but it's not on the order of what Meehan did, which was to publicly promise what set of rules he himself would follow, and then break that promise.
I'm not even sure I follow you, but if I am, I think you've missed the point. If someone wins a lawsuit because they could afford to spend $2M on prosecuting it and the defendant could only afford to spend $20,000 fighting it, that doesn't translate to the plaintiff is 100 times more legally right because that money might have gone to making sure the legal foundation of the case was actually solid and fair. It is far more probable that it went to things like filing unnecessary motions that the defendant had to waste his limited time and money to answer and dragging out the cases so that the defendant can no longer afford to defend even if they're in the right.
On Wikipedia it's similar; some people are very good at gaming the system so that they look to any casual examination like they're trying to abide by policy. "I'm just applying the policies on Neutral Point of View!" they cry when you catch them inserting discredited pseudoscience as fact. "Some people out there believe these things so I'm just making sure their viewpoint is represented!"
"I'm just applying the policies on verifiability!" they cry when you catch them removing descriptions of points of view they disagree with. "These claims aren't cited to the Nth degree and so I'm removing them!" In theory there's procedures for dealing with such people but they are time-intensive and energy-intensive and the whole mess is complicated by an unfortunate part of Wikipedia culture called "Assume good faith" -- unfortunate because too often it's interpreted as "keep on assuming good faith even after it's become clear that you're dealing with a slimy little weasel." Even when you can point to an iron-clad pattern of double standards you're almost sure to be hit yourself with accusations that you're "failing to assume good faith" or that you're targeting that person for persecution because you're prejudiced against the point of view (and not because of the means by which they're pushing it.)
That's a good point. Millions of people believe that Native Americans never scalped a single European until after Europeans had introduced them to the practice by scalping Native Americans. They believe this because they believe it's the debunking of a false myth spread by Westerns that portraying the Native Americans as scalping their enemies.
There's only one problem. Most of the evidence we have for what tribal life was like before Europeans started settling the North American continent comes from the tribes' oral traditions: songs that celebrated their rituals, their traditions, and their ways of life. These include songs about scalping. They don't include songs about other practices that the Native Americans adopted from the European settlers. So, at the very least, the "Native Americans only learned scalping from the Europeans" story is severely implausible.
Ironically, the "corrected" belief is now steadily growing. I remember a few years back watching the premiere of a much-ballyhooed new Saturday morning cartoon, a Western with a female hero. It turned out to be atrocious in many respects, not least of which was that when "Jane" (yes, it was a revisionist Calamity Jane) rode into a new town and heard reports from the townsfolks of settlers being scalped by the "Injuns", Jane decided then and there that it was a lie -- because, she announced, "Indians don't scalp people... Only white men do that."
Minor correction: They can indeed sometimes produce such excellence, but one of the problems with the current model (not that I think Digital Universe's model is necessarily the fix for this) is that even if a perfect article gets written -- by which I mean one that fully discusses all the major points of view and provides well-referenced evidence for the pros and cons of each, the next person along can turn it into complete shit -- and if they're persistent and ethics-free enough, they can keep it in a fecal state, simply by stubbornness and deception.
Wow, what a great rant that's completely founded on a point of complete ignorance.
Wikipedia is for factual and notable information.
As much scorn as you can heap on He-Man and Pokemon, they are very notable (known world-wide) and the descriptions of the series and their contents is factual. (i.e., the games Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red both contain monsters X, Y, and Z.)
What Tycho is describing here is that he said "Hey! Wiki editing is really cool! I think I'll use Wikipedia for my new original fiction project!" And though I can't check because of course the article was removed, I strongly suspect that he wrote it as "these are events that actually happened" rather than "this is part of the backstory of a fictional world"; it's a mistake commonly made by those who don't understand the purpose of Wikipedia and why they have the power to edit these pages.
See, he's right that Wikipedia's interface is cool; he says "I liked the way their software went about things". I'm a writer too, and I plan to install MediaWiki on my next computer just for holding my own writing. But here's the difference: I'll be using my own resources.
Well, you're conflating two different things. If all tests were 100% accurate (which they aren't, of course, but just to illustrate the difference) then what makes the African prostitutes notable is that, under circumstances where probability would seem to make it almost a certainty that they would contract the virus, they never did. What makes this man different, and of interest, is that he apparently did contract the disease -- and then fought it off, something no other person has ever been alleged to do.
Now, unfortunately, by far the most probable explanations are that the 2002 tests were false positives or that the 2003 tests were false negatives. However, the third explanation, that his immune system did after all entirely eliminate the disease, is very exciting, and while we should not get our hopes up too high we should definitely be learning anything we can from this man's case.
Because it's Tokyopop. Tokyopop is constantly engaged in a no-holds-barred, life-and-death struggle to change the meaning of manga to "comics drawn entirely by Americans who base their art on their perception of Japanese manga", because then they can't be sued for falsely advertising all the stuff they've already sold as "manga".
It's a logical position if I look at the net effects.
Suppose I rip a Gentle Giant album to MP3 and put it up on KaZaA. Suppose that ten people download those MP3s. Suppose that only one in ten of those people are honest enough to pay for the things they download, once they discover that yes, they are enjoyable and will be a good purchase.
Net effect: The record label sells another album it wouldn't have otherwise.
Now let's look at the effect of a GPL violation: Scambag Software steals code from free software project YATLA and sells it as a commercial product, denying its origin. Scambag's customers are unlikely to be aware that the people who actually deserve to be compensated for the use of the code are the YATLA developers, or that the compensation requested is simply compliance with the terms of the GPL.
Net effect: Scambag takes money, none of which they deserve. The YATLA developers get ripped off. Even assuming that each and every one of Scambag's customers is an honest sort who would pay the real developers the real cost even if it wasn't much cheaper -- they don't get the chance.
Those of us who are okay with filesharing music and movies usually are because we believe that most people are basically honest (we know there are exceptions) and that allowing people to try a free sample before they buy is a sound strategy even for products like music and movies where classical theory assumes that no one will ever legally purchase an item they already possess unless the one they possess can wear out or be used up. But when the GPL is violated and the credit is stolen, any innate honesty people have has no effect.
Most people think that any time a law enforcement agency participates in any way in the performance of a crime, it's "entrapment". This is not the case. Entrapment only occurs when the argument can be made that the parties at trial would not have committed this crime except for the actions of law enforcement.
Which means that if you are driving along in a car in an area where prostitutes are known to congregate and you slow down next to a woman dressed like a prostitute and she says "50 bucks for a date; you buying?" and you say "Yeah" and she says "Too bad; I'm Vice Squad" then good luck telling a jury that it's entrapment. You clearly went there looking for some prostitute; the police did not create that crime by putting out an undercover officer pretending to be a prostitute.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but Lyons' portrayal of himself as an ordinary Joe who made a reasonable evaluation of the case which just happened to be wrong because SCO was keeping its deception so well-hidden is just plain wrong. There was at least one red flag which Lyons has no excuse for not catching.
That red flag was when SCO presented their excuse for not showing anyone (except under draconian NDAs) what the alleged copyright infringement actually consisted of. They didn't want that information getting to the Linux crew, they said, because that would allow them to remove the offending code.
That there is all you need to know to call "BS". It is your obligation to notify someone you suspect of infringing your copyright of just how you think they are infringing your copyright so that they can remedy the wrong. You cannot say "I would rather let them continue to infringe my copyright so I can soak them for more damages"; despite what SCO might have you believe, that is not the purpose of copyright law. As for the idea that the offending code would be scrubbed from the record in order to hide the evidence of past infringement, again, that's BS. If there was copied code in the kernel, as SCO assured us there was, SCO could have downloaded copies of the kernel twice a day to have a historical record of the violation.
Lyons still refers to "amateur sleuths" as though he's some kind of professional. What sort of "professional" doesn't investigate the most glaring contradiction between what someone claims they want and what they're actually trying to arrange?
I wonder what other conspiracies are proved to exist by the self-same logic. Wait a minute... what about cartoons? People read cartoons nearly everywhere, everyday... they stick them with magnets to their refrigerators... they even give their kids cartoons, for the love of God! And then if you sit down and read the cartoons, oftentimes they aren't actually all that funny
Mind you, e-mail support isn't always bad, but Netflix's was immensely frustrating, for some reason. You could explain the problem in very plain English and you'd still get a "solution" that wasn't one. For example, I requested a particular Mexican horror movie that the online guide said was published by Something Weird. When it arrived, it was the right movie, but it wasn't the Something Weird version, with all the extras that were promised; it was a no-frills version from a publisher notorious for putting out DVDs that are cheap -- in both senses of the word. I wasn't pleased, because I always look forward to Something Weird's extras, so I e-mailed to complain.
I got a cheery, perky note back explaining that to access the extras, I had to use the "extras" menu.
I e-mailed back again, stressing that there WAS no extras menu.
I got a cheery, perky note back explaining that this was only one disc in a two-disc set (not the truth) and that I would have to request the other disc to see the extras.
The only good thing is that if the information was collected by Daniel Brandt, it's probably worthless. The guy is famous for being easily fooled -- my favorite is when someone sent him an anonymous e-mail, claiming to be an ex-business partner and enemy of administrator "XYZ", and claiming that administrator XYZ's real name was "Daniel Atta Benzona". Brandt published it on his website, without any attempt to check it. Well, he may have made some unsuccessful attempt to check it, but one thing we can be sure he didn't do is try to check it with anyone who spoke Hebrew, or he would have found out that "Daniel Atta Benzona" means "Daniel, you are a son of a whore."
I am just guessing, but my hunch is that the people who wrote up the article didn't really understand what the drug did. They wrote that it "blocks or deletes" bad memories, but nothing in the article seems to support that claim.
My guess as to what we would find out the drug actually does, if we got a more accurate and precise description, is that it interrupts a biochemical-emotional feedback loop. The memory triggers feelings of anxiety and fear; the anxiety and fear trigger a rush of adrenalin; the adrenalin triggers feelings of anxiety and fear; so on, and so on... If the drug makes it possible in a therapeutic environment to face and adjust to the memory itself, instead of always to the linked combination of memory and physiological turmoil, then in future the memory can be faced with a greater range of emotional options.
The second he says that "scientific consensus" must designate the minority position he is wrong. Under his logic the Earth must not be round, since nearly every scientist would announce loudly that it is if asked.
There's a difference between a theory which involves a conspiracy, and a "conspiracy theory". The former suggests that the acts of a conspiracy can be inferred from the evidence. The latter suggests that the existence of a conspiracy should be presumed in order to explain why the acts supposedly committed by the conspiracy ''cannot'' be inferred from the evidence.
Classic example is the supposed Satanist conspiracy of the 1980s. <Nutjobs> There's a huge international network of Satanists committing ritual murders and torture and child pornography at daycare centers! <FBI> We can't find any evidence whatsoever for the existence of this conspiracy. <Nutjobs> There's a huge international network of Satanists committing ritual murders and torture and child pornography at daycare centers, and it's infiltrated the FBI!
I'm a bit confused by your post. you write "they electric and natural gas cars" -- what verb was supposed to go after the "they"? And if the "they" in question is the current United States administration, I'm not sure what the relevance of a government page from Singapore is...
Yes, I read the first line describing it as "a joke exchange" too. I also read the second line which specifically claimed it was "based on an actual radio conversation" involving a named Navy vessel in a named area in a named month of a named year. I also read the third line which claimed that a particular US official had released the information on one specific date. If you are thinking that, despite all those very specific (if false) details included as if the story was actually verifiable and true, that anyone should have known it wasn't true because the word "joke" appeared in there somewhere, I suggest you're full of it.
Frankly, Timothy Zahn's books are not the example I would hope they'd take for how to do the new series -- though I suppose they will anyways. Zahn's Dark Fleet Trilogy would be fine -- if it wasn't in the Star Wars universe. He takes a series whose fundamental principle is mysticism and makes it mechanical. The Force is no longer a mystical force flowing through every living thing -- now it's an energy flowing through every living thing except for this one species of jungle lizard which not only does without it, but evolves the ability to surpress it in a sphere around itself. Luke's vision in the cave on Dagobah is no longer a warning to him of the danger posed by his own dark side -- now it's a precognition that -- spoiler -- he's got a crazy clone out there. This was just the wrong way to go and unfortunately it's the road Lucas himself took with the whole "midichlorians" bit.
Oh joy! This is exactly what I've been waiting for! See, we know who Luke Skywalker is at the beginning of Star Wars (the movie's title is not A New Hope, thank you) -- he's a naive farmboy whose life on a backwater desert planet is so deadly dull that a trip into town to pick up power converters is a major treat for him. But what happened before that? I mean, besides "nothing"? Finally, the answer will be revealed! One hundred episodes detailing that deadly dull farmboy life! My lightsaber quivers just thinking about it.
Are other alternative fuels much more renewable? Yes. Is it in our best interests to switch to those alternative fuels ASAP? Probably. But ASAP stands for "As Soon As Possible"; how soon is it possible to switch over? When will it actually happen? The potential to create gasoline from a renewable resource means we no longer face the spectre of running permanently out of the fuel that powers our current infrastructure before we can get a new infrastructure built around a better fuel into place.
I understand that at this time, it's more of a "could we do this if we had to, and what would we need in order to do it?" than a "let's do it now!" thing. However, I hope that if there ever is a need to do something like this, that they look into the advantages of using Pykrete strategically. The properties of Pykrete are frequently exaggerated, but it is provably stronger and more resistant to melting than regular ice, which could be valuable.
On Wikipedia it's similar; some people are very good at gaming the system so that they look to any casual examination like they're trying to abide by policy. "I'm just applying the policies on Neutral Point of View!" they cry when you catch them inserting discredited pseudoscience as fact. "Some people out there believe these things so I'm just making sure their viewpoint is represented!" "I'm just applying the policies on verifiability!" they cry when you catch them removing descriptions of points of view they disagree with. "These claims aren't cited to the Nth degree and so I'm removing them!" In theory there's procedures for dealing with such people but they are time-intensive and energy-intensive and the whole mess is complicated by an unfortunate part of Wikipedia culture called "Assume good faith" -- unfortunate because too often it's interpreted as "keep on assuming good faith even after it's become clear that you're dealing with a slimy little weasel." Even when you can point to an iron-clad pattern of double standards you're almost sure to be hit yourself with accusations that you're "failing to assume good faith" or that you're targeting that person for persecution because you're prejudiced against the point of view (and not because of the means by which they're pushing it.)
There's only one problem. Most of the evidence we have for what tribal life was like before Europeans started settling the North American continent comes from the tribes' oral traditions: songs that celebrated their rituals, their traditions, and their ways of life. These include songs about scalping. They don't include songs about other practices that the Native Americans adopted from the European settlers. So, at the very least, the "Native Americans only learned scalping from the Europeans" story is severely implausible.
Ironically, the "corrected" belief is now steadily growing. I remember a few years back watching the premiere of a much-ballyhooed new Saturday morning cartoon, a Western with a female hero. It turned out to be atrocious in many respects, not least of which was that when "Jane" (yes, it was a revisionist Calamity Jane) rode into a new town and heard reports from the townsfolks of settlers being scalped by the "Injuns", Jane decided then and there that it was a lie -- because, she announced, "Indians don't scalp people... Only white men do that."
Minor correction: They can indeed sometimes produce such excellence, but one of the problems with the current model (not that I think Digital Universe's model is necessarily the fix for this) is that even if a perfect article gets written -- by which I mean one that fully discusses all the major points of view and provides well-referenced evidence for the pros and cons of each, the next person along can turn it into complete shit -- and if they're persistent and ethics-free enough, they can keep it in a fecal state, simply by stubbornness and deception.
Wow, what a great rant that's completely founded on a point of complete ignorance.
Wikipedia is for factual and notable information.
As much scorn as you can heap on He-Man and Pokemon, they are very notable (known world-wide) and the descriptions of the series and their contents is factual. (i.e., the games Pokemon Blue and Pokemon Red both contain monsters X, Y, and Z.)
What Tycho is describing here is that he said "Hey! Wiki editing is really cool! I think I'll use Wikipedia for my new original fiction project!" And though I can't check because of course the article was removed, I strongly suspect that he wrote it as "these are events that actually happened" rather than "this is part of the backstory of a fictional world"; it's a mistake commonly made by those who don't understand the purpose of Wikipedia and why they have the power to edit these pages.
See, he's right that Wikipedia's interface is cool; he says "I liked the way their software went about things". I'm a writer too, and I plan to install MediaWiki on my next computer just for holding my own writing. But here's the difference: I'll be using my own resources.
Well, you're conflating two different things. If all tests were 100% accurate (which they aren't, of course, but just to illustrate the difference) then what makes the African prostitutes notable is that, under circumstances where probability would seem to make it almost a certainty that they would contract the virus, they never did. What makes this man different, and of interest, is that he apparently did contract the disease -- and then fought it off, something no other person has ever been alleged to do.
Now, unfortunately, by far the most probable explanations are that the 2002 tests were false positives or that the 2003 tests were false negatives. However, the third explanation, that his immune system did after all entirely eliminate the disease, is very exciting, and while we should not get our hopes up too high we should definitely be learning anything we can from this man's case.
Because it's Tokyopop. Tokyopop is constantly engaged in a no-holds-barred, life-and-death struggle to change the meaning of manga to "comics drawn entirely by Americans who base their art on their perception of Japanese manga", because then they can't be sued for falsely advertising all the stuff they've already sold as "manga".
Suppose I rip a Gentle Giant album to MP3 and put it up on KaZaA. Suppose that ten people download those MP3s. Suppose that only one in ten of those people are honest enough to pay for the things they download, once they discover that yes, they are enjoyable and will be a good purchase.
Net effect: The record label sells another album it wouldn't have otherwise.
Now let's look at the effect of a GPL violation: Scambag Software steals code from free software project YATLA and sells it as a commercial product, denying its origin. Scambag's customers are unlikely to be aware that the people who actually deserve to be compensated for the use of the code are the YATLA developers, or that the compensation requested is simply compliance with the terms of the GPL.
Net effect: Scambag takes money, none of which they deserve. The YATLA developers get ripped off. Even assuming that each and every one of Scambag's customers is an honest sort who would pay the real developers the real cost even if it wasn't much cheaper -- they don't get the chance.
Those of us who are okay with filesharing music and movies usually are because we believe that most people are basically honest (we know there are exceptions) and that allowing people to try a free sample before they buy is a sound strategy even for products like music and movies where classical theory assumes that no one will ever legally purchase an item they already possess unless the one they possess can wear out or be used up. But when the GPL is violated and the credit is stolen, any innate honesty people have has no effect.
Which means that if you are driving along in a car in an area where prostitutes are known to congregate and you slow down next to a woman dressed like a prostitute and she says "50 bucks for a date; you buying?" and you say "Yeah" and she says "Too bad; I'm Vice Squad" then good luck telling a jury that it's entrapment. You clearly went there looking for some prostitute; the police did not create that crime by putting out an undercover officer pretending to be a prostitute.