It's important to note that calling somebody a "former scientist" appears to be claim to present that person as an authority. That's all good and fine, but "former scientist" certainly is a questionable credential to use to claim authority. Questioning the person's credentials to act as an authority is a perfectly valid thing to do.
This would still be an ad hominem argument and, besides, it is a weak and deceptive position given the fact that he was directly employed in the field until at least a year or two ago and that it's unlikely that he's suddenly lost all his knowledge or stopped following the debate. What's more, the Guardian's information is likely outdated as he's listed as still being employed by University of Ottawa.
Science is supposed to be about science, i.e., the quality of the arguments, the math, and the data, not the number of credentials after a person's name. Talking about someone's credentials might be highly relevant if we're talking about something subjective like wine tasting or fashion, but it's a distraction in a real scientific debate and it's a good indication that the person making the argument feels insecure in their own position.
I disagree with your basic premise. I could as easily say that flat-earth or geocentrism are not getting a fair shake.
No, you could not. We can readily prove that the earth is round and that the earth is not the center of the universe. These theories are testable, readily observable, and backed by many years of sound science. The theory of global warming by contrast is unproven, cannot be directly observed, and has truly only gained traction over the past 10 or perhaps 20 years if you want to be generous. What's more, even if you accept the "theory", this still leaves the question of the degree/speed of warming due to human CO2 emissions and what its ultimate impact will be to actual people (e.g., sea level, food supply, etc).
You are listening to propaganda from the companies that will be financially impacted by policies to alleviate global warming.
No, I've actually talked to Professor Giegengack and done research on my own. You are too quick to gloss over the deficiencies in the theory. Please read the actual articles and do some of your own research.
Given the current state of affairs, a scientist could have a very lucrative career working for any of the numerous and well funded think tanks run by energy companies.
Name 100 scientists that are actually gainfully employed by such "institutes" (not to mention their long term job prospects). Even if such employment options were readily available to the scientist, they would essentially be walking away from their research careers and they'd be written off by their peers and by the media.
The fact that most choose to stick to real science in spite of the financial temptation to sell out speaks volumes for their character.
What proof do you have of this? Even if they're trying to do so-called "real science" and they're immune to all sorts of pressure, they can still be wrong. Published scientific research is overturned on a daily basis and it would not be the first time widely accepted theories have fallen out of favor in the scientific community.
Any scientist that could disprove global warming would be rich, famous, and (eventually) respected by his peers. It is every scientists dream to make a name for himself by overturning conventional thinking.
You're looking for a smoking gun where none is likely to be found. Despite tens of thousands of research grants and researchers looking into it they haven't "proven" the theory of global warming yet either. It is still just a theory, albeit a widely accepted one. What you utterly fail understand is that this is a fundamentally different pursuit than, say, "proving" Newton's theory of gravity. The earth is warming at the moment. The question is what is causing it (and to what degree/timing/etc). There exist so many different factors that it would be very difficult to accurately model. If someone could develop a computer model that could smoothly predict all fluxuations in temperature over the past several million years AND recent history (with better measurements) then they would probably turn the tide of scientific thought (WHICH NONE OF THE MODELS TO DATE HAVE DONE: none of them adequately explain the volatility, cooling trends in the last 60-70 years, several thousand years worth of proxy records, etc).
The trouble is that this is a herculean task and most scientific efforts are going to fall well short of this leaving the scientist a footnote at best (more likely: Joe Blow Phd found some evidence that further explained this one variable out of 3K) and that's assuming some perfect model is ever found. This is hardly an incentive to be contrary to something this heated when your career and popularity amongst your peers is on the line.
I wouldn't stake my life on being against global warming (i.e., do nothing), but if I were a betting man I'
This isn't about the science, this is about the public's perception of the science and the policy changes driven by that perception. What ExxonMobile is doing is despicable and in no way related to real scientific discovery. It's a publicity move to cover their ass and protect their profits, and the fact that people are defending them disgusts me.
Arguments that contradict the theory of global warming are not getting a fair shake in academia. Global warming is also over-hyped thanks to people like Al Gore making scary movies (and you're talking about bad science influencing people???). Scientists are human and prone to do things that promote their careers even sometimes at the expense of good science. A respected researcher may be very reluctant to promote an argument or show evidence that might seem to contradict the theory because it would tend to harm their careers given the current state of affairs right now, not to mention the fact that they are apt to recieve a lot more scrutiny than something that supports the theory (before publication and afterwards). Furthermore, this theory effects everyone. A researcher might find evidence that contradicts the theory or published models, but choose not to do it because they believe in the cause. Comments like yours are proof of this kind of thinking. "OH no, we can't publish this, because people are too stupid to think and *BIG OIL* will use it to advance their cause" It's a huge incentive to silence dissenters.
Though I would concede that paying for a specific set of results is not the ideal form of science, I also feel very strongly that the current state of affairs is stacked very much in the other direction and maybe, just maybe, an incentive for contrary research might help the debate. If this small payment provides enough of an incentive to publish strong research to the contrary, perhaps it will gain traction and encourage further study by other prominent scientists.
I personally believe that the earth is warming and that human CO2 emissions plays at least some small role. I also believe that given the uncertainties it would make sense to hedge our bets at least a little (what I disagree vehemently with is the panic and irrationality: we have BIGGER and more URGENT problems to deal with according to most of the main stream research even). That said, the science supporting global warming that which argues that human CO2 emissions are playing huge/exclusive role in warming and that the models that suggest that X more CO2 will cause Y increase in temperature is FAR FROM CLEAR. This kind of science is much more complex and is fundamentally different than, say, proving well established theories of the past. What we basically have is a theory that greenhouse gas helps warm the earth (which I'm sure is true) and some correlation in very recent history between CO2 and temperatures (though, even these fail to explain recent cooling periods). The rest is all pretty much just modeling and more theory. Unfortunately, unlike other well established theories we have virtually no way to test it, little data to work with (not, say, the entire universe), and a lot of other confounding data. There is also significantly good reason to doubt it. For instance, most of the research shows that the correlation between CO2 and global temperatures show almost no significant correlation over the history of the world (many millions of years... often times when CO2 levels were many times higher than they were today temperatures were even cooler) and a lack of ability of the supporters to adequately explain it.
This would not be the first time the large numbers of scientists have gotten something very wrong (especially something as hyped and politicized as this).
People around here use that term ad hominem a lot. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Well it does literally, but not in the context of logic and rhetoric. In order to have been making an ad hominem argument I would first have to be making an argument. The argument you inferred did not exist in my comment. I just wanted to know what the hell constituted a "former scientist."
I know exactly what it properly means and I know the term is commonly abused on slashdot and other internet forums (it is a pet peeve of mine). However, it is pretty clear that your intent was to discredit his argument purely by assaulting his character (hence the use of the word "essentially"). The fact that you did not go out and explicitly say that his criticisms are wrong because of the flaws that you tried to plant in the readers minds does not let you off the hook.
If anything I was criticizing the author of the article for making a vague and ridiculous characterization. My point was, in order to literally be a "former" scientist you would have to have done something ridiculously extreme. I do want to know how he got into civil engineering. He teaches it at Ottowa, which is a very reputable school.
It didn't seem that way to me. Not only did you question what "former scientist" meant, you planted the idea in the readers' minds that he possesses some bad qualities (which just coincidentally happen to match the stereotype of the skeptics). You then proceeded to question his credentials on a totally unrelated vein with the implication he's operating out of his area of expertise ("civil engineering") and that he's somehow sketchy ("who is this guy?").
If you were genuinely curious, you should have searched. The civil engineering department obviously employs professors that do research in areas that you may not view as traditionally being "civil engineering" (e.g., beach erosion, natural disaster mitigation, environmental engineering, etc). Someone expert in metereology and oceanography could probably be very useful in researching these things (e.g., how to build systems to save lifes during a tsunami).
Has he abandoned empiricism and scientific method in favor of rationalism? Disavowed science? Become an Objectivist? Had his degrees revoked for fraud? Who is this guy? And if his training is in oceanography, how did he get into civil engineering?
Second, he was formerly a researcher (employed by the Canadian government). The Guardian's staff apparently views the word "scientist" as just an occupation.
Third, this is basically an ad hominem argument... he's a "former scientist", and let's just assume he's an objectivist, commits fraud, etc so he couldn't possibly be right. Please.
FYI. You can find lots of info on him by starting here.
Tadepalli Satyanarayana Murty, known simply as Tad Murty, has worked with Canada and the US on the Pacific Ocean tsunami warning system. An expert on tsunamis, storm surges and tidal waves, he is vice-president of The Tsunami Society, Honolulu, which publishes the journal Science of Tsunami Hazards. Having served the Canadian Oceanographic Service for 27 years, he was also the director of Australia's National Tidal Facility for three years. Currently with the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Ottawa, Murty was involved with the preparation of the 'Indian Ocean Tsunami Travel Time Atlas', due to be published soon, which India has managed to produce ahead of Australia. Since the December 26, 2004 tsunami, Murty, originally from Guntur, has made seven trips to India. In his last visit to Chennai recently, as an invitee of FICCI, he spoke to Outlook at length on the various challenges that the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System poses and the need for coastal inundation maps.
So, do you think that if doctors don't know the alternatives, we should advertise to the patients?
Sometimes, yes. Not every appropriate customer is going to visit the doctor in the first place. They may have a chronic condition, but not visit the doctor because they don't feel that there is an appropriate treatment. Statins, for instance, have historically been way underprescribed despite tremendous evidence of their huge health benefits. It's fine and good to tell people that they need to lose weight/eat better/exercise more, but the fact remains that statins work and patients are far more likely to take them than change their lifestyle, i.e., it empirically saves lives both with and without lifestyle changes.
What exactly does a "pharmaceutical consulting group" do, anyway? Something good, like "Facilitate open communication between drug companies and doctors?" Or something bad like "Figure out how to push more drugs whether people need them or not?"
Why don't you listen to what doctors have to say? 41% of doctors surveyed said they thought it had benefits... Some doctors (just 18%) also see some harm (their biggest complaint: time spent correcting misperceptions), but to say that it's simply a matter of DTC ads being "bad" is too simplistic and wrong.
The fact is that virtually every industry, except for perhaps commodity industries, engages in some form of marketing that targets buyers, decisions makers, and their end-users. Even good and very important products need marketing (I say this with experience, having worked for many years for a medical devices company and with many connections in the med-tech area). While I agree, in principle, that prescribing drugs inappropriately is bad and is sometimes a real problem, the solution is not simple. The under-prescription of drugs not only harms those patients who are not prescribed the drugs, they drastically reduce the market for the drug companies and thus the incentive and the ability for the drug companies to recoup their costs (which are necessary to ensure the production of drugs in the first place). I won't say everything is peachy in the drug industry, but misguided attempts to regulate it are equally dangerous.
Also, as to your specific question about what pharma. consulting groups do, they can certainly play an important and beneficial role (one of my siblings worked for one for several years). A lot of what they do involves talking to doctors, managed care, hospitals, and sometimes patients to figure out what their problems and concerns area. There is often a lack of basic knowledge about drugs and/or misperceptions their side-effects. They are also frequently called upon to study uses for new drugs or new uses for existing drugs. By identifying what these are, the drug companies can then figure out how best to address them. Information is rarely so perfectly distributed on both sides that there can't be any benefits from further study. I won't say that they can't do anything harmful for society, but this is true for virtually everything under the sun.
Might be completely wrong, but isn't there some kind of stock market scam you could play with this. Take an open source company with an established name. Put it on the stock market, make some money from the sale and let it go bankrupt. noone owns the IP so there's no assets to sell off (e.g. nothing to lose for going bankrupt) and when it's all over you pick up the latest CVS and start again.
Probably massively over simplified, but there's gotta be something along those lines that you can do.
Interesting thought, but most of the MySQL-employed developers and senior management would have non-compete and non-hire contracts in place that would legally prevent them from doing this for several years (presuming they're half-way decently managed). Besides, senior people would benefit far more from growing the company into a much larger and more successful company than trying to start over again (even with the code....especially with a now damaged reputation).
Virtually everyone in the western world is doing much better than merely surviving. In point of fact, they're living much longer than at any other point in history. Survival has never been guaranteed, but thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of a great many individuals the overwhelming majority of us live quite comfortably.
All natural resources were originally shared by any who could use them.
Nonsense. People have been fighting over resources as long as mankind has existed for.
Before a person works land, they have no valid reason to call the land their own.
Nonsense, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that pre-agrarian society's were nearly uniformly fighting and killing each other very regularly. In fact, the records indicate that their homicide rates were several times higher in primitive societies than what we see in even the worst ghettos today. While it may be true that farming made particular plots of land far more valuable than others, this primarily only had the effect of concentrating the importance by boosting yield. Think about it: pre-agrarian societys had similar amounts of habitable land with much lower yield per acre and much less certainty over who had claim to what -- this would tend to bring competing groups and individuals into conflict in order to survive.
Groups are not limited without individuals, they are non-existant.
You miss the point. Groups are certainly comprised of individuals, this is a matter of definition, but the net output of groups also depends very much on the particular efforts of particular individuals. To say that every person's contribution is equal regardless of effort, ability/intelligence, education, type and quality of their work, etc is pure nonsense. A group that restrains the individual is a group that ultimately suffers.
Yet without groups, as I mentioned, individuals are at the mercy of forces beyond their control.
Individuals can choose to work with groups of people to protect rights out of enlightened self-interest. It doesn't necessarily have to be imposed on them against their own will. Whether you actually agree with this or not, you are conflating your argument and extending it to forcibly redistribute assets and such: a wholly different thing.
Society and the individual exist in mutual interdependence, which is a concept most individualists are VERY uncomfortable with, yet which forms the basis of society.
The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. One can be an individualist and believe in the tremendous importance of collective action without believing that they should need to sacrifice their own well being in ways that do not benefit them.
Most individualists are socially inept, uncomfortable with the messy reality of human interaction.
This is an ad hominem argument.
They want to reduce the complexity down to a few simple rules, and they create a make-believe Authority (Natural Law! Don't Question It!) to force people into accepting their simplified interpretation of rights.
Which is not terribly different than how you justify anything you wish to be in name of this il-defined "survival." You are reducing complexity of life down to some simple idealistic notion of collectivism despite the fact that such attempts have failed time and time again. The fact is that people are fundamentally selfish and just because you can redistribute stuff by force of law does not mean that you will not do more harm than good in absolute terms.
Naziism is not a form of collectivism.
Nonsense. It may not be your peculiar idealized form of collectivism (which FYI you have not defined),
As this is hardly an obscure reference on slashdot (it comes up almost as often as "give a man a fish and he is fed for a day...") would it really be that much effort to quote it accurately?
There is no "one" definitive original quote that anyone can point to and actually prove. The point it conveys is the same regardless.
Oh, and the original by Pastor Martin Niemöller is about the need for collective political action, and the need not to be inward-looking and selfish, so it's not exactly a defence of individualism in the deranged and hateful Ayn Rand way.
Nonsense. Whatever the original quote at the time he started making those speeches (many different variations of the same idea), he was very much opposed to the ideas of communism at the time. Although I have significant differences of opinion with Ayn Rand's ideas, it is a major distortion to say that she was opposed to idea of people coming together, even if out of enlightened self-interest, to secure the right's of another. Here is a relevant quote from Ayn Rand to a newspaper in 1939:
"No tyranny in history has ever been established overnight. The method of dictators has always been a slow, gradual, well-calculated series of measures, each one of them seemingly innocent enough, easily alibied and explained by the ruler as embodying the best intentions in the world, and not one of them clear, direct and sufficiently flagrant to make the entire people--every single man on the street--realize that it affects him personally.
Each measure is passed without great trouble or violent public opposition because the average man does not see at the time how it can possibly affect his own existence--the only thing he is really interested in. Then, one day, he awakens suddenly to realize all his rights and liberties are gone. He cannot say exactly how or when it happened. He sees only the cumulative effect of single measures he did not consider important at the time he accepted them. He may be horrified and he may want to scream in protest. But it is too late to protest.
The vast majority of Americans have not the slightest interest in politics. They think that whatever happens in Washington applies only to a vague entity called "the country" and perhaps to those vague arch-villians, the big corporations, but the worst effect it can possibly have on them, the private citizens personally, is the slight nuisance of increased taxes. They take their civil rights for granted and haven't the slightest idea of what makes these rights possible. Hasn't the time come to point out to them that they have no rights whatever, not even the right to remain alive, unless there exists some institution to protect and guarantee these rights to them?
If all the power in the country is centered in one hand--who is going to see that that hand exercises it correctly? And if those in power wish to take a citizen's life--who can stop them by pointing to the law, when they are the law? What good is a constitution when there is no one to see that it is observed? Russia has a liberal constitution too, yet Russian citizens can be executed without trial. Their constitution makers conveniently forgot to provide an independent organ to watch that the constitution be obeyed.
Germany has elections too, only there's no independent organization to check on the polls. Does everybody understand that a constitution is not written to protect the government from the people, but to protect the people from the government? A constitution is only a people's safeguard. And if this safeguard is left entirely at the mercy of those against whom it is supposed to guard--isn't it just as absurd and useless as a lock placed on a door against burglars, with the key entrusted to the burglars?"
Collectivism allows the individual to persue his goals. Without the support of others, people are very limited in what they can do. Without collectivism, we would each be at the mercy of the strong and amoral, as well as nature. There's an old African proverb that peaks to the reciprocal nature of individual freedom and social responsibility: Only free individuals can make a strong tribe. Only a strong tribe can make free individuals.
Individualism allows the group to pursue its goals. Without the hard work and insights of the individual, groups are very limited in what they can do. Without individualism, we would each be at the mercy of the collective. There's an old saying that goes something like: First they came for the X, I remained silent, I was not X. Then they came from Y, I remained silent, I was not a Y.... When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Another quote: Pure democracy is kind of like three wolves and two chickens voting on what to have for dinner.
Most of us can agree that it is proper and even critical role of government to secure basic freedom. However, to move from securing basic freedom to redistributing assets, excessively controlling consumer choice, etc is a very dangerous and slippery slope. You totally ignore that there are many collectivist organizations in 20th century that have done great harm to the individual (e.g., Naziism, Communist Russia, Communist China, etc). There is no guarantee that a simple majority vote, even an overwhelming ones, delivers justice or freedom.
If you don't believe in the wisdom of crowds you should throw all your money at the stock market, because if you have any brains whatsoever you can get rich. You should certainly be able to predict better than those stupid crowds whether the stock will go up or down.
Maybe the problem is that wikipedia, as it is currently designed, doesn't tap into that wisdom as effectively as a market does.
First, this is a non sequitur. One could be able to significantly out-predict the market, but rationally choose not to because they lack the funds, the time, the connections, and the risk tolerance to stomach it. Even once you remove the market's "wisdom" there is still a significant amount of risk or pure dumb luck that simply can't be predicted or even be known due to lack of total transparency. For instance, I might be able to far more accurately predict Pfizer's financial perfomance over the next 3 years, but still lose, say, because their 3 biggest blockbusters get pulled from the market (due to real newly discovered side-effects, regulatory, legal, media or other bs).
Second, the stock market is fundamentally different than Wikipedia and other internet-schemes which utilize the so-caled "wisdom of crowds".
A) The stock market recognizes that not everyone is equal. Better investors/managers (e.g., Warren Buffet, David Swensen, etc) are given much more influence (far more capital behind their decisions) than the average schmoe.
B) The vast majority of influencers in the stock market have a very real stake in the outcome of their investments (either their own fortures or their careers).
C) They can only spend their capital once (Ok, they can leverage it and engage other techniques... but these are limited and typically increase ones risk dramatically). The investor is forced to either put more of their money behind those things which they're more confident in or simply diversify and spread their money around equally.
D) Their "correctness" is ultimately judged based on actual objective outcomes that are fairly hard to refute. Ok, we can dispute the long term value of an enterprise at any point in time, but it's hard to dispute, say, that some company did not earn several billion more 3 years after the investment was made (the market might not react 100% predictably... but that's a different issue). Someone that is really able to accurately predict earnings will tend to profit greatly (and thus their influence will increase... see Warren Buffet).
Contrast this with something like Wikipedia. If you "vote" wrong, what do you lose? Nothing really (OK, maybe you might loose some geek cred... whatever). If you vote right, what do you gain? Nothing. If I'm uber-knowledgable in some area and super-confident that the current position is wrong, there's really no mechanism that would allow me to exert more influence than the other blathering idiots (in the stock market, say, I might dump half my capital into a position). If the majority of editing users have a certain philosophical take, there is nothing to stop them from effectively silencing critics, even if they have doubts about their own position, except for their own integrity and perhaps the editors.
I also do mean "publicly traded stock markets and related media frenzy" when I say "Stocks", as it is what I feel most people would refer to as the "Stock Market".
Well I'm referring primarily to public equities. "The stock market" can refer also to the trading of bonds (debt) which can further confuse the discussion.
But when I see people say things like "people would be silly to not be invested (somewhat) in stock" I start imagining the people for whom this means buying Apple because they announce a cool product.
This is definitely not what I mean when I refer to the stock market. Many millions of Americans, for instance, are invested in public equities through mutual and pension funds. These tend to be pretty good investments and they don't require a tremendous level of sophistication to use properly (it mainly just involves choosing the right funds and the right balance of them relative to your liquidty needs/risk tolerance). Most of the funds invested in the market are invested responsibily (either by institutional investors, professional money/fund managers, or sophisticated/wealthy individuals). The day trader types that respond purely to the latest press releases certainly do exist, but they're bit players in the grand scheme of things (especially post-bubble).
Stock payouts are quite volatile, many people go home with $0, or less. In housing you're likely to be able to recoup some of your purchase price, but are unlikely (in the long term) to make much. In stock you're more likely to make more, but more likely to lose it as well.
I agree that public equities are significantly more volatile than other investments, but if you diversify within them properly the odds of losing your shirt is close to zero (it would basically require a total market collapse... in which case everyone would have major problems). The biggest problem is short-term liquidity. If you need cash to pay the bills, then you may be forced to sell when the market is down and thus lose out. Of course, real estate isn't really very liquid either; the bank barely pays above inflation; CDs aren't much better;... if you want a decent rate of return you're going to expose yourself to some risk.
Even if you go upside down on your mortgage and are stuck with your crappy house for twenty years, you've still got a roof. If you invest in stocks in the way that 99% of people would (and aren't discouraged from by the other players) you will lose.
Only if all you're looking for is a roof. However, many people see their house as several year long investment (just look at your friends) and they play similarly speculative games whether they're aware of it or not. In fact, I'd argue that more people these days are taking significantly greater risks with their housing investments than they are in the stock market (which is worse, in many ways, because it's totally undiversified). The difference is that most people intuitively understand that there is risk on the stock market, whereas millions of people see real estate as a "safe investment" (having only seen the housing market in their area go up and up and up).
What do you think is supporting the huge boom in real-estate prices? They aren't producing much more money via rent... Cheap mortgages let anyone into the game and loose credit standards (as if this wasn't the goal) let people adopt way too much debt.
Most mortages aren't based on floating interest rates. Low fixed interest rates and readily available credit have fueled the boom, but so have rising house prices. It is a feedback loop. Rapid appreciation has made taking out loans for housing very attractive for consumers (they see it as an investment that pays off quickly) and, as long house pricing remains relatively stable or grows, the banks have little risk exposure. The general
I understand that there's risk in everything, but different risks. You're looking at a house as an asset, realize that it's also a roof. It may be decomposable into house_price - house_maintenance + rental_savings, and thus be comparable to stocks, but it's unlikely to go away simply through being owned, whereas a stock will.
My point is that you're overstating your case. The risk in housing in general is not as small as you'd like to think. Unless you assume that the individual is just buying the absolute minimum property/house they need to survive or that they couldn't have used those excess funds (by buying more house than they "need", making improvements, etc) better and that they never will need to sell the house to retire or cover other expenses, they are taking a very real risk. Most people in the US, at least, aren't so poor that they can only afford the minimum amount of shelter: they need somewhere else to invest their funds and much of that ends up in their house (which is more than they really "need") and necessarily in other places (e.g, t-bills, bank, bonds, various funds, etc). While I'd agree that there is greater volatility in stocks and a greater chance of losing your shirt, it'd be stupid to look housing as a relatively zero risk investment once you've gotten past a certain level of necessity (you also need to look at house pricing... sometimes you can buy too soon or in the wrong area and pay too big a premium).
I'm not saying stocks are random, really. I'm just saying that they're so different that almost all other types of investments that to the average Joe, they might as well be.
There is certainly more risk in equities than in most other investments, but you're stopping "other investments" at the someone's only and presumably very basic house so the apparent difference to you is much larger than it is in reality. Most people in the developed world can save and want to be able to cover costs from their savings eventually, so they need to invest somewhere so that they can spend later without losing out to inflation (at bare minimum) and hopefully appreciate. Almost none of these investments have such substantial inherent value that the average investor wouldn't need to worry if the market actually crashed. Having a roof over your head is important, but it alone won't pay for your education, retirement, taxes, etc.
If you just buy stocks that look good on any one metric you will lose money to more efficient and smarter players. You might play an index position, but that's just more stock to cover for the liabilities of stock...
I wouldn't say it's a certainty that you'd lose money, but you'd likely miss out on better investments. A decent index fund or mutual fund is more than just 1 more stock; they offer a great deal of diversification which dramatically reduces your risk and increases your liquidity.
You're playing the market in a general upward time. What if you invested in a DOW index fund in 1965 and wanted to cash out 20 years later? Or 1930 to 1990... See what I mean?
I'm not just talking about myself, but my parents and grandparents who have seen both boom and bust (although I did pretty well between 2000 & 2003). It'd be silly to invest wholly in an index that tries to mirror the DOW because of the lack of diversification (just 30 stocks and the way it is weighted).
As for your examples, they're not illustrative of your presumed point.
If you had invested in an index that mirrors the DJIA between 1930 and 1990 (a relative low), your investment would still have appreciated by roughly 1000% . In other words, if you had invested 10K in 1930, it would have been worth roughly 100K in 1990 and you would have received about 100K in dividends (avg dividend yield ~4-5%). What's more, if you had re-invested that cash back into the DJIA, those payouts would have been worth
Most major advances in science have come from government funding, either basic research which private companies never do because no one can say whether basic research will ever turn a profit, let alone when it might or how much; or through military research. But you are free to have your opinion, attempt to convince others, and even attempt to get the laws changed.
Government funding has certainly played a critical role in the advancement of the sciences, however it's equally folly to ignore the huge contribution of private industry. Bringing the technology out of the lab is typically not easy and it is not something which government is good at directing, funding, or managing. In addition, there are many examples of private industry technology coming back into the research community with huge benefits (see microprocessors, DNA chip, optical improvements, assorted lasers, etc).
Until that point, thankfully, freeloaders are forced to help pay for all the benefits they accrue (Such as the use of the Internet) through government funding of science. I love the fact that we have a system in which the selfish can not wriggle out of their share of the responsibility that comes with being a member of an interdependent civilized society. I hesitate to even speculate what kind of shithole we'd be living in if the selfish and ego oriented weren't such a minority compared to the cooperative types of the world.
I disagree. Simply breathing and paying "something" in taxes does not mean you're pulling your own weight. There are lazy people in this country that barely work and pay very little in taxes (and many more in some other countries which disincentivize hard work and incentivize people not to work) [and no, before you flame me, I'm not saying everyone that isn't working full time or earning a high salary is necessarily lazy]. Furthermore, I would argue that even if you're earning the (respectable) US median income and paying taxes accordingly your tax dollars truly aren't going to pay for less-immediate needs like basic research, but will instead go to more urgent needs (e.g., roads, police, sanitation, defense, etc). Most people are using more government resources than they're putting back in. While I wouldn't suggest that everyone should have to pay the same amount of taxes regardless of income, it's absurd to totally ignore the inherent agency problem with associated with government spending.
I don't believe that people can't learn to use the keyboard if the GUI isn't there. I remember learning wordPerfect 5.1 back in highschool, and everything could be done via the keyboard. There was a strip of paper that sat above the keyboard outlining which combination of shift, ctrl, alt, and F# key did which action. Every student I know had most of that memorized. I'm not just talking about the computer geeks either. This is just the way the software worked, and people learned to use it. I guess it would be kind of annoying to new users, or people who only used a program once every couple of weeks. However, those people would have a hard time anyway. Even with a GUI.
People can learn keystrokes for basic commands, but it's a much less friendly learning curve and even more so with less-used commands. I can do most basic documents in Word with just keystrokes, for instance, but trying to insert/modify a table, make varying levels of identation, add a picture (not from clipboard), etc... that's when the GUI comes in handy.
I grew up with WordStar in the mid-80s and used it regularly. Even then, I found certain funtions and modes were a pain if I wasn't used to using them. I imagine that I had a much eaiser time of it than most. Although I do find the bloat associated with GUIs to be a nuisance (less so these days) and the inability to perform certain tasks easily with a decent set of keystrokes very annoying, I think it's overall been a benefit for computing. I also think that having a common interface has grown increasingly more important now that most of us are using multiple applications (not to mention web apps). Forcing yourself to use different keystrokes to accomplish the same thing in different programs is problematic for most people--your muscle memory is very bad at switching like that.
Isn't this almost a step backwards? I mean, if you ask me, command line was always simpler and faster for me, but too many people were confused by "all that weird stuff you have to type."
So in came the GUIs and icons.
Now we're coming full circle and replacing GUIs and icons with command line again?
No. GUIs were necessary for the average person to be able to get their tasks done quickly. It's rather annoying if you're brand new to a program and you have to look up in a manual the keystrokes necessary to perform a simple task like underlining. The trouble with many of these GUIs is that they limited regular users' ability to perform tasks that they perform frequently with keystrokes. Microsoft has been including keystrokes for most functions in their Office Suite for years while at the same allowing users to simply navigate to them with their mouse (and the majority of the users do just that). There are many people, like myself, that use both the GUI and the keystroke shortcuts regularly.... when there's a command I don't do often or repeat several times in the same document, I'll typically fall back to the GUI. I think this hybrid approach is optimal (although I could whine about specific layouts and such). One area that has been neglected is the OS: launching, switching, closing, sending simple commands, etc.
That said, while I welcome this launching tool, I'm not blown away with it yet. Having to hold down the caps lock (or perform caps/alt switching) sucks (a little too dogmatic on the anti-modal thing) and I think they could do a lot more with it if they really focused themselves....
Very few companies aren't in debt, it's inefficient to be sitting on a lot of money.
Almost all companies have very positive net equity and, if they don't, that usually suggests that the lenders have tremendous confidence in the company's continuing operations. What's more, you fail to acknowledge that many assets are non-cash-equivalents that generate revenue (i.e., real estate, bank loans, etc). What's more, few companies keep cash per se, they have it invested in short term / highly liquid assets which generate interest and/or appreciate. While cash and cash equivalents are non-optimal investments, many companies justifiably keep a good chunk of cash&equivalents on hand so that they can quickly acquire companies/technology/assets without having to leverage themselves further.
That 10% of the assets will very rarely be worth the price you paid for 10% of the stock. When a company is this asset-rich it's an obvious buy, so the market corrects for capitalizations that are less than assets by the price rising. This means your average investor is very unlikely to find a stock that would be worth much after the bankruptcy of the parent company.
You're missing the point. The real market value of the companies net assets are not why investors buy stocks, they buy them for their future cash flows. Without these, there'd be no reason to buy the stock at its supposed liquidation value. What it does do it help set some floor on market price. Furthermore, you'd be wrong to buy stocks just based on price/book ratio (even discounted) as these stocks tend to under-perform the market.
You are right that there's risk everywhere, but usually there's just the risk that you might be stuck with something someone else wants. If you ignore being upside-down on a mortgage after the price drops, there's no real problem - you've still got the land. However, if your company tanks, your stock might get you nothing. Not just something nobody wants at that price, but nothing.
Nonsense. Most people aren't just buying for the property to live there forever; they want and need the asset to at least hold its value. Still owning your land if you're upside down isn't going to do you a lot of good if you want to move, build a bigger house, take out a loan to send your kids to college, pay medical bills, start a business, etc. Also, the land itself has some "risk", there could be a lein on your land (that you don't know about), pollution, fire, the neighboor could turn into a ghetto, the government could decide to build a freeway next to your house, etc.
Furthermore, people that don't live beyond their means need to put their money somewhere else after they've bought their house. If you want to save to pay for your kids' education, retirement, medical expenses, and other misc. expenses then you're going to have to find somewhere else to park your money: all of these expose you some degree of risk and merely saying that you can hold onto them is nonsense -- it won't pay the bills.
There's a place for stock, as the way to capitalize large industry.
Uh, stocks capitalize virtually all businesses, not just "large industry." (And even those few significant companies that aren't incorporated, i.e., sole proprietorships and partnerships, face the same kind of risks with respect to business risks, lenders, etc.) While startups, for instance, usually aren't listed on public stock exchanges, almost all of them (that really have a path to growth) are incorporated and have several groups of shareholders. If your beef is with public markets, you still can't just say it is only relevant to "large" industry as most early investors depend, whether directly or indirectly, on being able to sell to a public market to provide them liquidity and many startups depend on the infusion of cash from public equity markets to spur growth.
It would be hard to beat the stock market if valuations were random as well.
Valuations are not random. Clearly investors prefer revenue growth and earnings growth. If you were able to out predict actual performance (earnings/revenues) more accurately than the market over the long run, you would make a killing (presuming you have the funds and can diversify sufficiently). If it were totally random, we wouldn't need to make things like trading on insider information illegal.
Stocks are to ownership of company value, what gift-certificates are to ownership of a product. Strictly theoretical.
So is your paycheck and the cash in your wallet.
Until you've sold your share and have something tangible, it's only a promise to pay something at a later date. Unfortunately, your IOU is just one of millions, and in there with company debts, preferred IOUs, etc to be paid out. It's likely to be worth a lot less than you think all of a sudden.
All investments have some degree of risk involved if you ever plan on being able to exchange it for something else (e.g., cash) in the future. PERIOD. Yes, if certain companies were to be forced to cease operations the shareholders would have zero net equity, but this is not true of all stocks. It is more likely to happen with a stock (more risk), but you're not totally safe even if your park your money in a S&L account (or munipal bond... or even a t-bill -- though very unlikely to default).
If instead you actually went to a company, totaled up their assets, bought a 10% share in these assets (with forced buyout, etc) you would then own 10% of these, and would get this off the top if the company went belly up. Your 10% stock ownership though would put you in a huge pool all fighting for the each-other's money. You'd be lucky to get a tenth of the pre-bankruptcy value.
You can compute the actual value of your equity stake with a reasonable degree of accuracy. If you own 10% of the equity in a company with all common stock and no debt, then you do, in fact, own roughly 10% of the assets (and may actually be worth more once you've computed in IP, etc). I would be very happy to buy 10% of Microsoft's stock today for 3.5 billion even if the market value was there or lower (though I would not buy it at its current price). Yes, if you own 10% of a company with high debt, then actually own less than 10% of the assets and possibly even zilch. However, this value can be determined with some degree of accuracy if you know how to read the statements properly.
You can get rich in stocks, and baseball cards. To imply that this must prove their objective value is silly. Don't invest in a stock, invest in the market's valuation of a stock and keep an eye on your assumptions.
I'm not suggesting that you totally ignore the market, far from it. This same advice applies to any investment you would make though. If you're buying gold, you need to take into account the market value to unless your sole intent is to melt it down and make jewelry out of it (and even then....). The price you pay when you buy it factors in a certain speculative value and the price when you want to sell will as well. Of course the risk is higher with equity, but so is the potential/average payout. There is no such thing as absolutely no risk.
So please explain how "pump and dump" (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/21/20 29210) via spam will increase a company's stock value.
Did the spam somehow suddenly increase the value of the company's assets, liabiliies, and income?
Uh, these pump and dump schemes that the spammers orchestrated all targeted OTC/Pink Sheet stocks. In other words, the average price per share was only about 60 cents and the average number of shares traded in a day was only about 2K-3K. In other words, in a given day only about $1800 was trading hands with these stocks. All these spammers need to do is convince a very small number of unsophisticated people, a couple dozen tops or just %.001 of their spam recipients, to drive the stock price up. They could never work these in more expensive and non-thinly traded stocks. Similar scams are conducted all the time with physical goods and services as well.
Look at Enron. The day before the scandal happened the stock value was high. Not much after, it was worth less than a dollar. Did the actual value of the company's assets change in that short period? If the later price is "correct" then why was the price so high for so long? If the former price, then why did it drop so much?
Investors can be stupid and investors can be lied to. That does not make the entire pursuit worthless, nor does it mean that we have a better system. Hwang Woo-suk, the Korean scientist the forged his stem cell work, was payed very well, given a lot of funding, published in major journals, given academic support, and more.... up until the revelation that he was forging his work. So does this mean science is bad? No. It means that people are people and any human system is bound to have liars, frauds, crooks, etc. The trick is to pursue them to keep the great majority honest.
The financial markets, for all their high-paid analysts and smart people, are really fickle, ruled by the whim and fancy of investors and by herd mentality.
I wouldn't completely disagree with you here, but all institutions have the same kind of problems as they're staffed by people. We don't have a better alternative. It's better to allow people to under and over-react than to not allow them to react at all. In general the market prices things fairly efficiently -- the fact that it is very hard to beat the market consistently demonstrates this fact.
Not for a long time. Most do not pay dividends, and their value has little relation to any actual assets a company might have.
Most people aren't buying companies for their assets. A contract cleaning company, for instance, may have virtually no virtually assets what to speak of, but may well have 300M/year in earnings. What most investors care about are future (discounted) cash flows. You may think that certain stocks are over-valued, but that is a wholly different debate.
In any event, I would not want a company that I've invested in to pay dividends if they could re-invest that money at a higher rate of return than what I could otherwise obtain in the market (especially after taxes are taken into account). Most small cap, mid cap, and even many large cap firms can re-invest most of their earnings at a higher rate of return (relative to its risk).
Stocks are like baseball cards: pieces of paper with collector's value.
Everything is like baseball cards--there is no store of value that guarantees that you'll be able to buy a full basket of goods tomorrow. This is particularly true with US dollars and other currencies (we no longer have a "gold standard" or anything like it). A pound of gold 10 years from now may buy 1/2 as much bread as it did today. Ok, so perhaps you might argue that there is some inherent store of value if you own, say, a brick of gold (you could pound it into jewellery for family, use it for fillings, etc... pretty crummy), but its relative value is far from assured. The biggest difference is in the levels of volatility and liquidity.
What's more, the same argument can be made for most stocks. If I own 10% of Microsoft's common stock, then I own 3.5 billion dollars in cash at least (last I checked), 10% of their IP (whatever that might be worth), cash flow from contracts, etc. These are real values. Of course, if I purchased Microsoft's stock today I'd be paying a very significant premium for its percieved value in the future... but the same is basically true of every investment (albeit to a lesser degree). If you buy a plot of land, you are paying a premium for the lands' future value whether you know it or not...you're not just buying it for yourself and that's it. Ultimately you want to sell it. Even if you're hoping to, say, grow crops on the land, something bad could happen several years down the road....
I took that as being leveled against anyone who disagreed with you.
That's not what I said. Please learn to read.
Can we agree that wanting Fairplay opened does not make one anti-DRM and that being anti-DRM does not make one anti-IP?
That was not my argument from the beginning; I was simply pre-empting those in the anti-IP camp that would chime in. That said, the poster was clearly against _ALL_ DRM. Yes, someone can be against a specific form of DRM, e.g., FairPlay, and support DRM. However, I take the view that someone that asserts that DRM rights should not be allowed to exist as being against robust IP rights. Yes, it's possible that they might still support some notion of IP, but they do not support the notion that the IP owners should the have the right to set the price and the conditions of access and particularly reasonable conditions that have a very significant chance of impacting their ability to enforce their copyright (prevent rapant piracy). This does not mean that people need to actually like DRM in general or any specific set of rights, just that two consenting parties should be allowed to contract as they see fit.
Because it sounds like you are trying to say that anyone who wants Fairplay opened is an anti-IP slashdotter, which is the strawman I've been pointing out. Avoid bemoaning and arguing against your idea of prevailing slashdot opinion if you want your positions to even appear genuine.
I never said any such thing. You need to learn to read more carefully. There are many people on slashdot that are opposed to IP. I've been on slashdot for at least 8 years now and I've had plenty of conversations with these people; it is those people that I was addressing with my "anti-IP" comment. Note: this would also not be a strawman argument.
It was retaliatory;p
Nonsense. I never insulted you before then.
Nonetheless, that "security through obscurity fails" isn't a bad maxim to keep in mind. In this case, for example, two independant parties have reverse engineered the system, obscure though it remains.
It is always bad to blindly parrot that which you don't understand how to apply properly. You assert that two parties have reverse engineered it, but you ignore how long it took them to accomplish it with each iteration and that today we don't have a way to quickly crack Apple's DRM.
Would you mind elaborating on how specs for the scheme reveal the recipient key? (as opposed to, yet again, arguing against something nobody said)
The regulatory agency is not just asking Apple to reveal the "specs". They want interoperability to play already purchased iTunes music on other portable media players and to allow 3rd party applications to use the iTunes store. This necessarily means that they will have to share (both locally and over the internet) the decryption keys which would open a very significant hole in the effective security of the overall system. You can't just ignore this fact.
Furthermore, opening the code, even without the keys themselves, creates two problems. First, it makes it much easier for a hacker to create a hacking tool (the best they've come up with so far is forcing iTunes to do its bidding). Second, it has the effect of ossifying the algorithms which would restrict Apple's ability to respond to the next attack.
You keep saying that Fairplay DRM doesn't use encryption, but it's not true.
Please read what I actually said. I never said it wasn't employing crypto. I said it's "not simply encryption". In other words, the issue extends far beyond choice (and implementation) of the encryption algorithm. If there was any uncertainty in your head regarding my first sentence, then the second should have clarified the matter when I referred to "decryption" keys and the "decrypted" stream -- this necessarily means that the music was encrypted in the first place.
We are definitely talking about an application of asymmetric encryption - where the recipient's key is kept hidden from the recipient. The soundness of the DRM scheme rests upon the security of this key, as you rightly point out. Nonetheless, opening the DRM scheme does not reveal this key.
Uh, yes it does. The effective soundness of the scheme relies: on the security of the security of the keys, forcing many-would be hackers to re-implement the entire algorithm, and/or preventing the digital stream from being easily captured.
You're original argument, that those who wish to open up Fairplay are anti-IP, frames your opponent's position as strictly anti-IP. Sure, that's easy to refute - it's also not what your opponent advocates.
The word that you're looking for is "your" -- not "you're." In any event, my original argument was that the government agency was making a mistake and I addressed it on its own merits.
The comment regarding people being "anti-IP" came much later and was leveled at the original poster and at many on slashdot. There can be no disputing that this is precisely the position of a large part of the community on slashdot. As for the OP, he said that they are "rightly saying that DRM is unfair to the people".... I take such a blanket statement as being a position against IP itself.
Being strictly topical and in critiquing the substance and form of your argument, but not its proponent, my argument is by definition is not ad hominem.
Wrong. You said IMHO, the talk about specs -> cracking is just the usual stuff you hear from people who either don't know jack or wish to set up strawmen." This is the very definition of an ad hominem attack. What you were trying to say is that anyone that disagrees with your "security through obscurity does not work" mantra must either be ignorant or is deliberately trying to be deceptive. Your quotation conveniently neglected the rest "An ad hominem fallacy consists of asserting that someone's argument is wrong and/or he is wrong to argue at all purely because of something discreditable/not-authoritative about the person or those persons cited by him rather than addressing the soundness of the argument itself."
Allow me to quote from a geniune ad hominem argument: "as to the "strawman", you obviously have no idea what the f*** that even means".
It was retaliatory (something I would not ordinarily engage in an otherwise civil dialog). It was directly relevant your assertion that I was drawing a strawman argument. In addition, the mere fact that it was a personal attack does not make it a true ad hominem argument. You are confusing the colloquial definition (i.e., any personal attack) with the real one (i.e., X can't be true, because you're Y). The fact that I explained why you were wrong instead of just saying that you're wrong merely because stupid/bad/evil/etc.
This, however, is an act of government overstepping its bounds. Mainstream computing is in its infancy and it's going to take awhile to get right. There are several other options out there for people that find Microsoft's operating system too onerous.
This actually COULD be a reasonable position depending on what you're talking about exactly and WHEN (at what stage in the evolution of DOS/Windows)? For instance, if you're talking about launching a brand new OS in an immature market there is a very good argument for why the manufacturer should be allowed to create and even bundle certain the applications in: because the hurdle for consumers is too high and the market for creating those applications is not big enough yet. It all depends on timing and on what you're talking about exactly. Besides, you're comparing a PC platform to a MUSIC system: two entirely different animals.
Yes, the lock-in is a pain sometimes (primarily because I have to use Windows to run Windows software). It would be nice to be able to run this stuff on my BSD computer system directly and other systems....
So what is your position exactly? That Microsoft should be forced to publish their SDKs to make porting easier? I fail to see the comparison.
Yes, I'm sure Microsoft benefits as a result of its lock-in.
Yes, they do but the question is: does wtf you're proposing have any argument to support it? We can say Microsoft is a monopoly and should be allowed to do certain things that benefit them (like, say, not publishing all of their source code in totality) without allowing them to bundle browsers and otherwise exploit their monopoly position in a mature market.
I think everyone who's obviously appealing to the Slashdot subculture (hates Microsoft, loves Apple, hates Sony, loves Google etc.) and claims "mod me down now!" should be modded down for the sneaky manipulation that many hapless moderators fall for. You don't have to tell people by reverse psychology what to do. What they'll do, they'll do anyway...
Except that I've been modded down almost as many times as I've been modded up (at the time I posted this I was @ +2). I'd be surprised if I'm not modded down to 1 by the end of the day (this usually happens when I take such contrary positions). As for the actual slashdot position, I disagree. Apple may be grudgingly accepted as doing some good things, but DRM as an article of faith to be bad by most people here and the Ipod/iTunes has a very significant backlash against them amongast geeks because they're too successful and more focused on users than geeks (fewer geek/features, more design). And Europe can almost do no wrong here... A handful of moderators may symphathize with my position, but the editors and the majority of the readers do not.
Yes, many places (Western Europe, parts of Asia, NZ, N. America, etc). I also, *gasp*, read: newspapers, economic publications, labor law, etc... not to mention talk to people from other countries (family and friends included). Some people may be happier in western europe, say, but not me. I want to be employed (and not in some stupid make-work/welfare program). I don't want to be coddled. I want the freedom to work in almost any profession I want without having to be certified by some regulatory body/union/etc (yes, some exist in the US... but nothing like Germany, say). I want the ability to hire and fire people as I see fit. I'm an entrepreneur and most of Europe is quite unfriendly to the enterprise in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Science is supposed to be about science, i.e., the quality of the arguments, the math, and the data, not the number of credentials after a person's name. Talking about someone's credentials might be highly relevant if we're talking about something subjective like wine tasting or fashion, but it's a distraction in a real scientific debate and it's a good indication that the person making the argument feels insecure in their own position.
No, you could not. We can readily prove that the earth is round and that the earth is not the center of the universe. These theories are testable, readily observable, and backed by many years of sound science. The theory of global warming by contrast is unproven, cannot be directly observed, and has truly only gained traction over the past 10 or perhaps 20 years if you want to be generous. What's more, even if you accept the "theory", this still leaves the question of the degree/speed of warming due to human CO2 emissions and what its ultimate impact will be to actual people (e.g., sea level, food supply, etc).
No, I've actually talked to Professor Giegengack and done research on my own. You are too quick to gloss over the deficiencies in the theory. Please read the actual articles and do some of your own research.
Name 100 scientists that are actually gainfully employed by such "institutes" (not to mention their long term job prospects). Even if such employment options were readily available to the scientist, they would essentially be walking away from their research careers and they'd be written off by their peers and by the media.
What proof do you have of this? Even if they're trying to do so-called "real science" and they're immune to all sorts of pressure, they can still be wrong. Published scientific research is overturned on a daily basis and it would not be the first time widely accepted theories have fallen out of favor in the scientific community.
You're looking for a smoking gun where none is likely to be found. Despite tens of thousands of research grants and researchers looking into it they haven't "proven" the theory of global warming yet either. It is still just a theory, albeit a widely accepted one. What you utterly fail understand is that this is a fundamentally different pursuit than, say, "proving" Newton's theory of gravity. The earth is warming at the moment. The question is what is causing it (and to what degree/timing/etc). There exist so many different factors that it would be very difficult to accurately model. If someone could develop a computer model that could smoothly predict all fluxuations in temperature over the past several million years AND recent history (with better measurements) then they would probably turn the tide of scientific thought (WHICH NONE OF THE MODELS TO DATE HAVE DONE: none of them adequately explain the volatility, cooling trends in the last 60-70 years, several thousand years worth of proxy records, etc).
The trouble is that this is a herculean task and most scientific efforts are going to fall well short of this leaving the scientist a footnote at best (more likely: Joe Blow Phd found some evidence that further explained this one variable out of 3K) and that's assuming some perfect model is ever found. This is hardly an incentive to be contrary to something this heated when your career and popularity amongst your peers is on the line.
I wouldn't stake my life on being against global warming (i.e., do nothing), but if I were a betting man I'
Arguments that contradict the theory of global warming are not getting a fair shake in academia. Global warming is also over-hyped thanks to people like Al Gore making scary movies (and you're talking about bad science influencing people???). Scientists are human and prone to do things that promote their careers even sometimes at the expense of good science. A respected researcher may be very reluctant to promote an argument or show evidence that might seem to contradict the theory because it would tend to harm their careers given the current state of affairs right now, not to mention the fact that they are apt to recieve a lot more scrutiny than something that supports the theory (before publication and afterwards). Furthermore, this theory effects everyone. A researcher might find evidence that contradicts the theory or published models, but choose not to do it because they believe in the cause. Comments like yours are proof of this kind of thinking. "OH no, we can't publish this, because people are too stupid to think and *BIG OIL* will use it to advance their cause" It's a huge incentive to silence dissenters.
Though I would concede that paying for a specific set of results is not the ideal form of science, I also feel very strongly that the current state of affairs is stacked very much in the other direction and maybe, just maybe, an incentive for contrary research might help the debate. If this small payment provides enough of an incentive to publish strong research to the contrary, perhaps it will gain traction and encourage further study by other prominent scientists.
I personally believe that the earth is warming and that human CO2 emissions plays at least some small role. I also believe that given the uncertainties it would make sense to hedge our bets at least a little (what I disagree vehemently with is the panic and irrationality: we have BIGGER and more URGENT problems to deal with according to most of the main stream research even). That said, the science supporting global warming that which argues that human CO2 emissions are playing huge/exclusive role in warming and that the models that suggest that X more CO2 will cause Y increase in temperature is FAR FROM CLEAR. This kind of science is much more complex and is fundamentally different than, say, proving well established theories of the past. What we basically have is a theory that greenhouse gas helps warm the earth (which I'm sure is true) and some correlation in very recent history between CO2 and temperatures (though, even these fail to explain recent cooling periods). The rest is all pretty much just modeling and more theory. Unfortunately, unlike other well established theories we have virtually no way to test it, little data to work with (not, say, the entire universe), and a lot of other confounding data. There is also significantly good reason to doubt it. For instance, most of the research shows that the correlation between CO2 and global temperatures show almost no significant correlation over the history of the world (many millions of years... often times when CO2 levels were many times higher than they were today temperatures were even cooler) and a lack of ability of the supporters to adequately explain it.
This would not be the first time the large numbers of scientists have gotten something very wrong (especially something as hyped and politicized as this).
FYI:
If you were genuinely curious, you should have searched. The civil engineering department obviously employs professors that do research in areas that you may not view as traditionally being "civil engineering" (e.g., beach erosion, natural disaster mitigation, environmental engineering, etc). Someone expert in metereology and oceanography could probably be very useful in researching these things (e.g., how to build systems to save lifes during a tsunami).
Second, he was formerly a researcher (employed by the Canadian government). The Guardian's staff apparently views the word "scientist" as just an occupation.
Third, this is basically an ad hominem argument... he's a "former scientist", and let's just assume he's an objectivist, commits fraud, etc so he couldn't possibly be right. Please.
FYI. You can find lots of info on him by starting here.
Tadepalli Satyanarayana Murty, known simply as Tad Murty, has worked with Canada and the US on the Pacific Ocean tsunami warning system. An expert on tsunamis, storm surges and tidal waves, he is vice-president of The Tsunami Society, Honolulu, which publishes the journal Science of Tsunami Hazards. Having served the Canadian Oceanographic Service for 27 years, he was also the director of Australia's National Tidal Facility for three years. Currently with the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Ottawa, Murty was involved with the preparation of the 'Indian Ocean Tsunami Travel Time Atlas', due to be published soon, which India has managed to produce ahead of Australia. Since the December 26, 2004 tsunami, Murty, originally from Guntur, has made seven trips to India. In his last visit to Chennai recently, as an invitee of FICCI, he spoke to Outlook at length on the various challenges that the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System poses and the need for coastal inundation maps.
Another relevant article Why don't you listen to what doctors have to say? 41% of doctors surveyed said they thought it had benefits... Some doctors (just 18%) also see some harm (their biggest complaint: time spent correcting misperceptions), but to say that it's simply a matter of DTC ads being "bad" is too simplistic and wrong.
The fact is that virtually every industry, except for perhaps commodity industries, engages in some form of marketing that targets buyers, decisions makers, and their end-users. Even good and very important products need marketing (I say this with experience, having worked for many years for a medical devices company and with many connections in the med-tech area). While I agree, in principle, that prescribing drugs inappropriately is bad and is sometimes a real problem, the solution is not simple. The under-prescription of drugs not only harms those patients who are not prescribed the drugs, they drastically reduce the market for the drug companies and thus the incentive and the ability for the drug companies to recoup their costs (which are necessary to ensure the production of drugs in the first place). I won't say everything is peachy in the drug industry, but misguided attempts to regulate it are equally dangerous.
Also, as to your specific question about what pharma. consulting groups do, they can certainly play an important and beneficial role (one of my siblings worked for one for several years). A lot of what they do involves talking to doctors, managed care, hospitals, and sometimes patients to figure out what their problems and concerns area. There is often a lack of basic knowledge about drugs and/or misperceptions their side-effects. They are also frequently called upon to study uses for new drugs or new uses for existing drugs. By identifying what these are, the drug companies can then figure out how best to address them. Information is rarely so perfectly distributed on both sides that there can't be any benefits from further study. I won't say that they can't do anything harmful for society, but this is true for virtually everything under the sun.
Virtually everyone in the western world is doing much better than merely surviving. In point of fact, they're living much longer than at any other point in history. Survival has never been guaranteed, but thanks to the ingenuity and hard work of a great many individuals the overwhelming majority of us live quite comfortably.
Nonsense. People have been fighting over resources as long as mankind has existed for.
Nonsense, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that pre-agrarian society's were nearly uniformly fighting and killing each other very regularly. In fact, the records indicate that their homicide rates were several times higher in primitive societies than what we see in even the worst ghettos today. While it may be true that farming made particular plots of land far more valuable than others, this primarily only had the effect of concentrating the importance by boosting yield. Think about it: pre-agrarian societys had similar amounts of habitable land with much lower yield per acre and much less certainty over who had claim to what -- this would tend to bring competing groups and individuals into conflict in order to survive.
You miss the point. Groups are certainly comprised of individuals, this is a matter of definition, but the net output of groups also depends very much on the particular efforts of particular individuals. To say that every person's contribution is equal regardless of effort, ability/intelligence, education, type and quality of their work, etc is pure nonsense. A group that restrains the individual is a group that ultimately suffers.
Individuals can choose to work with groups of people to protect rights out of enlightened self-interest. It doesn't necessarily have to be imposed on them against their own will. Whether you actually agree with this or not, you are conflating your argument and extending it to forcibly redistribute assets and such: a wholly different thing.
The two concepts are not mutually exclusive. One can be an individualist and believe in the tremendous importance of collective action without believing that they should need to sacrifice their own well being in ways that do not benefit them.
This is an ad hominem argument.
Which is not terribly different than how you justify anything you wish to be in name of this il-defined "survival." You are reducing complexity of life down to some simple idealistic notion of collectivism despite the fact that such attempts have failed time and time again. The fact is that people are fundamentally selfish and just because you can redistribute stuff by force of law does not mean that you will not do more harm than good in absolute terms.
Nonsense. It may not be your peculiar idealized form of collectivism (which FYI you have not defined),
"No tyranny in history has ever been established overnight. The method of dictators has always been a slow, gradual, well-calculated series of measures, each one of them seemingly innocent enough, easily alibied and explained by the ruler as embodying the best intentions in the world, and not one of them clear, direct and sufficiently flagrant to make the entire people--every single man on the street--realize that it affects him personally.
Each measure is passed without great trouble or violent public opposition because the average man does not see at the time how it can possibly affect his own existence--the only thing he is really interested in. Then, one day, he awakens suddenly to realize all his rights and liberties are gone. He cannot say exactly how or when it happened. He sees only the cumulative effect of single measures he did not consider important at the time he accepted them. He may be horrified and he may want to scream in protest. But it is too late to protest.
The vast majority of Americans have not the slightest interest in politics. They think that whatever happens in Washington applies only to a vague entity called "the country" and perhaps to those vague arch-villians, the big corporations, but the worst effect it can possibly have on them, the private citizens personally, is the slight nuisance of increased taxes. They take their civil rights for granted and haven't the slightest idea of what makes these rights possible. Hasn't the time come to point out to them that they have no rights whatever, not even the right to remain alive, unless there exists some institution to protect and guarantee these rights to them?
If all the power in the country is centered in one hand--who is going to see that that hand exercises it correctly? And if those in power wish to take a citizen's life--who can stop them by pointing to the law, when they are the law? What good is a constitution when there is no one to see that it is observed? Russia has a liberal constitution too, yet Russian citizens can be executed without trial. Their constitution makers conveniently forgot to provide an independent organ to watch that the constitution be obeyed.
Germany has elections too, only there's no independent organization to check on the polls. Does everybody understand that a constitution is not written to protect the government from the people, but to protect the people from the government? A constitution is only a people's safeguard. And if this safeguard is left entirely at the mercy of those against whom it is supposed to guard--isn't it just as absurd and useless as a lock placed on a door against burglars, with the key entrusted to the burglars?"
Another quote: Pure democracy is kind of like three wolves and two chickens voting on what to have for dinner.
Most of us can agree that it is proper and even critical role of government to secure basic freedom. However, to move from securing basic freedom to redistributing assets, excessively controlling consumer choice, etc is a very dangerous and slippery slope. You totally ignore that there are many collectivist organizations in 20th century that have done great harm to the individual (e.g., Naziism, Communist Russia, Communist China, etc). There is no guarantee that a simple majority vote, even an overwhelming ones, delivers justice or freedom.
Second, the stock market is fundamentally different than Wikipedia and other internet-schemes which utilize the so-caled "wisdom of crowds".
A) The stock market recognizes that not everyone is equal. Better investors/managers (e.g., Warren Buffet, David Swensen, etc) are given much more influence (far more capital behind their decisions) than the average schmoe.
B) The vast majority of influencers in the stock market have a very real stake in the outcome of their investments (either their own fortures or their careers).
C) They can only spend their capital once (Ok, they can leverage it and engage other techniques... but these are limited and typically increase ones risk dramatically). The investor is forced to either put more of their money behind those things which they're more confident in or simply diversify and spread their money around equally.
D) Their "correctness" is ultimately judged based on actual objective outcomes that are fairly hard to refute. Ok, we can dispute the long term value of an enterprise at any point in time, but it's hard to dispute, say, that some company did not earn several billion more 3 years after the investment was made (the market might not react 100% predictably... but that's a different issue). Someone that is really able to accurately predict earnings will tend to profit greatly (and thus their influence will increase... see Warren Buffet).
Contrast this with something like Wikipedia. If you "vote" wrong, what do you lose? Nothing really (OK, maybe you might loose some geek cred... whatever). If you vote right, what do you gain? Nothing. If I'm uber-knowledgable in some area and super-confident that the current position is wrong, there's really no mechanism that would allow me to exert more influence than the other blathering idiots (in the stock market, say, I might dump half my capital into a position). If the majority of editing users have a certain philosophical take, there is nothing to stop them from effectively silencing critics, even if they have doubts about their own position, except for their own integrity and perhaps the editors.
Well I'm referring primarily to public equities. "The stock market" can refer also to the trading of bonds (debt) which can further confuse the discussion.
This is definitely not what I mean when I refer to the stock market. Many millions of Americans, for instance, are invested in public equities through mutual and pension funds. These tend to be pretty good investments and they don't require a tremendous level of sophistication to use properly (it mainly just involves choosing the right funds and the right balance of them relative to your liquidty needs/risk tolerance). Most of the funds invested in the market are invested responsibily (either by institutional investors, professional money/fund managers, or sophisticated/wealthy individuals). The day trader types that respond purely to the latest press releases certainly do exist, but they're bit players in the grand scheme of things (especially post-bubble).
I agree that public equities are significantly more volatile than other investments, but if you diversify within them properly the odds of losing your shirt is close to zero (it would basically require a total market collapse... in which case everyone would have major problems). The biggest problem is short-term liquidity. If you need cash to pay the bills, then you may be forced to sell when the market is down and thus lose out. Of course, real estate isn't really very liquid either; the bank barely pays above inflation; CDs aren't much better;... if you want a decent rate of return you're going to expose yourself to some risk.
Only if all you're looking for is a roof. However, many people see their house as several year long investment (just look at your friends) and they play similarly speculative games whether they're aware of it or not. In fact, I'd argue that more people these days are taking significantly greater risks with their housing investments than they are in the stock market (which is worse, in many ways, because it's totally undiversified). The difference is that most people intuitively understand that there is risk on the stock market, whereas millions of people see real estate as a "safe investment" (having only seen the housing market in their area go up and up and up).
Most mortages aren't based on floating interest rates. Low fixed interest rates and readily available credit have fueled the boom, but so have rising house prices. It is a feedback loop. Rapid appreciation has made taking out loans for housing very attractive for consumers (they see it as an investment that pays off quickly) and, as long house pricing remains relatively stable or grows, the banks have little risk exposure. The general
My point is that you're overstating your case. The risk in housing in general is not as small as you'd like to think. Unless you assume that the individual is just buying the absolute minimum property/house they need to survive or that they couldn't have used those excess funds (by buying more house than they "need", making improvements, etc) better and that they never will need to sell the house to retire or cover other expenses, they are taking a very real risk. Most people in the US, at least, aren't so poor that they can only afford the minimum amount of shelter: they need somewhere else to invest their funds and much of that ends up in their house (which is more than they really "need") and necessarily in other places (e.g, t-bills, bank, bonds, various funds, etc). While I'd agree that there is greater volatility in stocks and a greater chance of losing your shirt, it'd be stupid to look housing as a relatively zero risk investment once you've gotten past a certain level of necessity (you also need to look at house pricing... sometimes you can buy too soon or in the wrong area and pay too big a premium).
There is certainly more risk in equities than in most other investments, but you're stopping "other investments" at the someone's only and presumably very basic house so the apparent difference to you is much larger than it is in reality. Most people in the developed world can save and want to be able to cover costs from their savings eventually, so they need to invest somewhere so that they can spend later without losing out to inflation (at bare minimum) and hopefully appreciate. Almost none of these investments have such substantial inherent value that the average investor wouldn't need to worry if the market actually crashed. Having a roof over your head is important, but it alone won't pay for your education, retirement, taxes, etc.
I wouldn't say it's a certainty that you'd lose money, but you'd likely miss out on better investments. A decent index fund or mutual fund is more than just 1 more stock; they offer a great deal of diversification which dramatically reduces your risk and increases your liquidity.
I'm not just talking about myself, but my parents and grandparents who have seen both boom and bust (although I did pretty well between 2000 & 2003). It'd be silly to invest wholly in an index that tries to mirror the DOW because of the lack of diversification (just 30 stocks and the way it is weighted).
As for your examples, they're not illustrative of your presumed point.
If you had invested in an index that mirrors the DJIA between 1930 and 1990 (a relative low), your investment would still have appreciated by roughly 1000% . In other words, if you had invested 10K in 1930, it would have been worth roughly 100K in 1990 and you would have received about 100K in dividends (avg dividend yield ~4-5%). What's more, if you had re-invested that cash back into the DJIA, those payouts would have been worth
I disagree. Simply breathing and paying "something" in taxes does not mean you're pulling your own weight. There are lazy people in this country that barely work and pay very little in taxes (and many more in some other countries which disincentivize hard work and incentivize people not to work) [and no, before you flame me, I'm not saying everyone that isn't working full time or earning a high salary is necessarily lazy]. Furthermore, I would argue that even if you're earning the (respectable) US median income and paying taxes accordingly your tax dollars truly aren't going to pay for less-immediate needs like basic research, but will instead go to more urgent needs (e.g., roads, police, sanitation, defense, etc). Most people are using more government resources than they're putting back in. While I wouldn't suggest that everyone should have to pay the same amount of taxes regardless of income, it's absurd to totally ignore the inherent agency problem with associated with government spending.
I grew up with WordStar in the mid-80s and used it regularly. Even then, I found certain funtions and modes were a pain if I wasn't used to using them. I imagine that I had a much eaiser time of it than most. Although I do find the bloat associated with GUIs to be a nuisance (less so these days) and the inability to perform certain tasks easily with a decent set of keystrokes very annoying, I think it's overall been a benefit for computing. I also think that having a common interface has grown increasingly more important now that most of us are using multiple applications (not to mention web apps). Forcing yourself to use different keystrokes to accomplish the same thing in different programs is problematic for most people--your muscle memory is very bad at switching like that.
That said, while I welcome this launching tool, I'm not blown away with it yet. Having to hold down the caps lock (or perform caps/alt switching) sucks (a little too dogmatic on the anti-modal thing) and I think they could do a lot more with it if they really focused themselves....
Almost all companies have very positive net equity and, if they don't, that usually suggests that the lenders have tremendous confidence in the company's continuing operations. What's more, you fail to acknowledge that many assets are non-cash-equivalents that generate revenue (i.e., real estate, bank loans, etc). What's more, few companies keep cash per se, they have it invested in short term / highly liquid assets which generate interest and/or appreciate. While cash and cash equivalents are non-optimal investments, many companies justifiably keep a good chunk of cash&equivalents on hand so that they can quickly acquire companies/technology/assets without having to leverage themselves further.
You're missing the point. The real market value of the companies net assets are not why investors buy stocks, they buy them for their future cash flows. Without these, there'd be no reason to buy the stock at its supposed liquidation value. What it does do it help set some floor on market price. Furthermore, you'd be wrong to buy stocks just based on price/book ratio (even discounted) as these stocks tend to under-perform the market.
Nonsense. Most people aren't just buying for the property to live there forever; they want and need the asset to at least hold its value. Still owning your land if you're upside down isn't going to do you a lot of good if you want to move, build a bigger house, take out a loan to send your kids to college, pay medical bills, start a business, etc. Also, the land itself has some "risk", there could be a lein on your land (that you don't know about), pollution, fire, the neighboor could turn into a ghetto, the government could decide to build a freeway next to your house, etc.
Furthermore, people that don't live beyond their means need to put their money somewhere else after they've bought their house. If you want to save to pay for your kids' education, retirement, medical expenses, and other misc. expenses then you're going to have to find somewhere else to park your money: all of these expose you some degree of risk and merely saying that you can hold onto them is nonsense -- it won't pay the bills.
Uh, stocks capitalize virtually all businesses, not just "large industry." (And even those few significant companies that aren't incorporated, i.e., sole proprietorships and partnerships, face the same kind of risks with respect to business risks, lenders, etc.) While startups, for instance, usually aren't listed on public stock exchanges, almost all of them (that really have a path to growth) are incorporated and have several groups of shareholders. If your beef is with public markets, you still can't just say it is only relevant to "large" industry as most early investors depend, whether directly or indirectly, on being able to sell to a public market to provide them liquidity and many startups depend on the infusion of cash from public equity markets to spur growth.
So is your paycheck and the cash in your wallet.
All investments have some degree of risk involved if you ever plan on being able to exchange it for something else (e.g., cash) in the future. PERIOD. Yes, if certain companies were to be forced to cease operations the shareholders would have zero net equity, but this is not true of all stocks. It is more likely to happen with a stock (more risk), but you're not totally safe even if your park your money in a S&L account (or munipal bond... or even a t-bill -- though very unlikely to default).
You can compute the actual value of your equity stake with a reasonable degree of accuracy. If you own 10% of the equity in a company with all common stock and no debt, then you do, in fact, own roughly 10% of the assets (and may actually be worth more once you've computed in IP, etc). I would be very happy to buy 10% of Microsoft's stock today for 3.5 billion even if the market value was there or lower (though I would not buy it at its current price). Yes, if you own 10% of a company with high debt, then actually own less than 10% of the assets and possibly even zilch. However, this value can be determined with some degree of accuracy if you know how to read the statements properly.
I'm not suggesting that you totally ignore the market, far from it. This same advice applies to any investment you would make though. If you're buying gold, you need to take into account the market value to unless your sole intent is to melt it down and make jewelry out of it (and even then....). The price you pay when you buy it factors in a certain speculative value and the price when you want to sell will as well. Of course the risk is higher with equity, but so is the potential/average payout. There is no such thing as absolutely no risk.
Investors can be stupid and investors can be lied to. That does not make the entire pursuit worthless, nor does it mean that we have a better system. Hwang Woo-suk, the Korean scientist the forged his stem cell work, was payed very well, given a lot of funding, published in major journals, given academic support, and more.... up until the revelation that he was forging his work. So does this mean science is bad? No. It means that people are people and any human system is bound to have liars, frauds, crooks, etc. The trick is to pursue them to keep the great majority honest.
I wouldn't completely disagree with you here, but all institutions have the same kind of problems as they're staffed by people. We don't have a better alternative. It's better to allow people to under and over-react than to not allow them to react at all. In general the market prices things fairly efficiently -- the fact that it is very hard to beat the market consistently demonstrates this fact.
In any event, I would not want a company that I've invested in to pay dividends if they could re-invest that money at a higher rate of return than what I could otherwise obtain in the market (especially after taxes are taken into account). Most small cap, mid cap, and even many large cap firms can re-invest most of their earnings at a higher rate of return (relative to its risk).
Everything is like baseball cards--there is no store of value that guarantees that you'll be able to buy a full basket of goods tomorrow. This is particularly true with US dollars and other currencies (we no longer have a "gold standard" or anything like it). A pound of gold 10 years from now may buy 1/2 as much bread as it did today. Ok, so perhaps you might argue that there is some inherent store of value if you own, say, a brick of gold (you could pound it into jewellery for family, use it for fillings, etc... pretty crummy), but its relative value is far from assured. The biggest difference is in the levels of volatility and liquidity.
What's more, the same argument can be made for most stocks. If I own 10% of Microsoft's common stock, then I own 3.5 billion dollars in cash at least (last I checked), 10% of their IP (whatever that might be worth), cash flow from contracts, etc. These are real values. Of course, if I purchased Microsoft's stock today I'd be paying a very significant premium for its percieved value in the future... but the same is basically true of every investment (albeit to a lesser degree). If you buy a plot of land, you are paying a premium for the lands' future value whether you know it or not...you're not just buying it for yourself and that's it. Ultimately you want to sell it. Even if you're hoping to, say, grow crops on the land, something bad could happen several years down the road....
That was not my argument from the beginning; I was simply pre-empting those in the anti-IP camp that would chime in. That said, the poster was clearly against _ALL_ DRM. Yes, someone can be against a specific form of DRM, e.g., FairPlay, and support DRM. However, I take the view that someone that asserts that DRM rights should not be allowed to exist as being against robust IP rights. Yes, it's possible that they might still support some notion of IP, but they do not support the notion that the IP owners should the have the right to set the price and the conditions of access and particularly reasonable conditions that have a very significant chance of impacting their ability to enforce their copyright (prevent rapant piracy). This does not mean that people need to actually like DRM in general or any specific set of rights, just that two consenting parties should be allowed to contract as they see fit.
I never said any such thing. You need to learn to read more carefully. There are many people on slashdot that are opposed to IP. I've been on slashdot for at least 8 years now and I've had plenty of conversations with these people; it is those people that I was addressing with my "anti-IP" comment. Note: this would also not be a strawman argument.
Nonsense. I never insulted you before then.
It is always bad to blindly parrot that which you don't understand how to apply properly. You assert that two parties have reverse engineered it, but you ignore how long it took them to accomplish it with each iteration and that today we don't have a way to quickly crack Apple's DRM.
The regulatory agency is not just asking Apple to reveal the "specs". They want interoperability to play already purchased iTunes music on other portable media players and to allow 3rd party applications to use the iTunes store. This necessarily means that they will have to share (both locally and over the internet) the decryption keys which would open a very significant hole in the effective security of the overall system. You can't just ignore this fact.
Furthermore, opening the code, even without the keys themselves, creates two problems. First, it makes it much easier for a hacker to create a hacking tool (the best they've come up with so far is forcing iTunes to do its bidding). Second, it has the effect of ossifying the algorithms which would restrict Apple's ability to respond to the next attack.
Uh, yes it does. The effective soundness of the scheme relies: on the security of the security of the keys, forcing many-would be hackers to re-implement the entire algorithm, and/or preventing the digital stream from being easily captured.
The word that you're looking for is "your" -- not "you're." In any event, my original argument was that the government agency was making a mistake and I addressed it on its own merits.
The comment regarding people being "anti-IP" came much later and was leveled at the original poster and at many on slashdot. There can be no disputing that this is precisely the position of a large part of the community on slashdot. As for the OP, he said that they are "rightly saying that DRM is unfair to the people".... I take such a blanket statement as being a position against IP itself.
Wrong. You said IMHO, the talk about specs -> cracking is just the usual stuff you hear from people who either don't know jack or wish to set up strawmen." This is the very definition of an ad hominem attack. What you were trying to say is that anyone that disagrees with your "security through obscurity does not work" mantra must either be ignorant or is deliberately trying to be deceptive. Your quotation conveniently neglected the rest "An ad hominem fallacy consists of asserting that someone's argument is wrong and/or he is wrong to argue at all purely because of something discreditable/not-authoritative about the person or those persons cited by him rather than addressing the soundness of the argument itself."
It was retaliatory (something I would not ordinarily engage in an otherwise civil dialog). It was directly relevant your assertion that I was drawing a strawman argument. In addition, the mere fact that it was a personal attack does not make it a true ad hominem argument. You are confusing the colloquial definition (i.e., any personal attack) with the real one (i.e., X can't be true, because you're Y). The fact that I explained why you were wrong instead of just saying that you're wrong merely because stupid/bad/evil/etc.
So what is your position exactly? That Microsoft should be forced to publish their SDKs to make porting easier? I fail to see the comparison.
Yes, they do but the question is: does wtf you're proposing have any argument to support it? We can say Microsoft is a monopoly and should be allowed to do certain things that benefit them (like, say, not publishing all of their source code in totality) without allowing them to bundle browsers and otherwise exploit their monopoly position in a mature market.
Except that I've been modded down almost as many times as I've been modded up (at the time I posted this I was @ +2). I'd be surprised if I'm not modded down to 1 by the end of the day (this usually happens when I take such contrary positions). As for the actual slashdot position, I disagree. Apple may be grudgingly accepted as doing some good things, but DRM as an article of faith to be bad by most people here and the Ipod/iTunes has a very significant backlash against them amongast geeks because they're too successful and more focused on users than geeks (fewer geek/features, more design). And Europe can almost do no wrong here... A handful of moderators may symphathize with my position, but the editors and the majority of the readers do not.