I see what you are saying, but I don't have any trouble knowing that most filesharing infringes copyright law, and still denying that "the tools themselves are criminal". Sure bittorrent trackers have substantial non-infringing use -- for some small values of "substantial". But I understand what you are saying.
It's true, and my opinions on copyright aren't nearly as extreme as my post made them out to be. I do certainly oppose the copyright status quo, but you are right to dispute the phrase "any act" -- clearly, not any act is righteous in this context, and I could have phrased it more precisely.
I used to think this, but after that failed prosecution of whatever the guy was back in the 90s, the feds passed a law with criminal sanctions for non-commercial filesharing. So yes, shockingly and sadly, copyright infringement is a federal criminal issue.
I agree with you. It is disingenuous to say that running a bittorrent tracker isn't promoting copyright infringement. Unless your tracker specializes in, say, Linux distros (rare), then almost certainly the vast majority of your tracker's use is for illegal filesharing.
People should not make that argument (except in court, where it might juuuust work), because it is transparently misleading.
Instead, people should stick to the point, which is that the copyright laws themselves are absurd, anti-consumer, bad for culture, bad for humanity, bad in almost every way, and thus any action to subvert them is righteous. That argument is more plain, perfectly transparent, and most importantly, it is true.
Oh, golly, I hope that's not strictly true, or else I'd have to stop supporting them. I don't believe anything is absolute, not even speech*; but, even if free speech doesn't stretch to cover every situation, I do believe it stretches well beyond personal file copying, which is why I have supported their efforts thus far.
(* yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre is the trite example. There are other good ones.)
Call it what you want; I don't call it faith. I don't have the arrogance of ignorance to assert that whatever notion I previously held is more right than the consensus of people who know better than I do.
The keys for science are qualifications, consensus, and multiple converging lines of evidence. The deniers do have consensus, but they don't have qualifications or multiple lines of evidence. If you want to equate science with religion, that's interesting, but it's not how I see it.
God damn, people like you are annoying! Did you even fucking read the first sentence of the article?
Scientists have determined that a number of human activities are contributing to global warming
The key word here is CONTRIBUTING. Jeez, it's impossible to make a scientific statement without people like you trying to make it into something it isn't. That quoted statement is true and plainly stated. It is only a problem when read by people like you, who read too much or too little into it.
If you can find examples of qualified people saying "global warming is caused only by human activity", then I will have heard that for the first time.
And if you can find a HELL OF A LOT of people saying that, then you will have educated me and shown that I wasn't paying close enough attention.
But as it is, all you have shown is that you are a jackass who doesn't pay attention.
I would explain that by saying that Apple also hires huge numbers of highly educated geniuses. Do you disagree with that? I don't work at either company; it's just what I've heard about each one. You correctly point out that all of my information comes as an outsider. Do you work at Google or Apple and thus have insider information?
Microsoft, by the way, ALSO hired huge numbers of well-educated geniuses. That was a long time ago. I haven't heard much about their hiring practices since the 1990s.
I judge overall success in the obvious way: by looking at the company's overall dominance in a variety of markets; by looking at the overall bottom line; by judging it as a competitive leader. Yes, Microsoft is also a highly successful company.
I'm not sure what we are disagreeing about. I don't think I've made any controversial statements, and what you say doesn't seem to contradict strongly anything I've said.
It would be an error to conflate "we should change the amount that humans affect the climate" with "climate change is the result of only human activity".
I love when kooks attack the "independence" of an investigation. Praytell, who COULD be both qualified and independent? You apparently think that no university could be independent; some have said that no scientist could be independent; so that leaves only the unqualified. Good luck with that.
Actually that's exactly what the leaked data and source code do not show. That's why all these investigations have found no wrongdoing. In science, cherrypicking or fabricating data is wrongdoing, whereas merely being a couple degrees shy of completely transparent is imperfect but forgivable.
I think you are referring to the deniers who were badgering these scientists constantly, becoming a distraction to the work being done. It's one thing to say that science should be open; it's quite another to say that scientists owe it to kooks to kowtow to their woo-woo beliefs. It is a false dichotomy to say that only people who "100% believe" have access to the data. In fact, it is more like telling the people who have a 100% political agenda to disturb and annoy scientists, in terms far more polite than they deserve, to fuck off.
Yes. I think you are right. I fully accept the conclusions about global warming, I just don't happen to think it's the biggest problem we face. Sure I want to do something about it, in proportion to the other things we are trying to get done.
All of what you said is wrong, except that there is "no proof of causality". That is true, because science does not, and can not, ever produce proof of anything. It merely provides overwhelming evidence, which is what we have here.
Some people choose not to accept overwhelming evidence. It's fine for you to be one of those people, but it's sad when there are so many people who do so.
They didn't challenge the credibility of a scientist. To do that, they would do the difficult work of producing incongruous reproducible scientific results.
Instead, they did the easy thing, which was to illegally hack into a computer system and leak private, misleading emails to a conspiracy-minded population of kooks ready to take individual words or phrases far out of context to reinforce their preconceived notions.
But, like you said, if they had "challenged the credibility of a scientist or his research", then that would be fine.
If the entire remaining 5% is strictly from man, I just can't see that being a significant contributor to the speeding of this natural process.
(Assuming your facts are right.) It's not a problem that you don't know why 5% would be significant. The problem is that you have apparently decided that your ignorance outweighs the informed conclusions of scientists in a position to know.
Yeah, dude, I also have no idea why 5% is such a big deal. But I'm not a climate scientist, and I'm not going to sit around trying to say that my lack of knowing means there is nothing to know. I don't know how pretty much all advanced science reaches its conclusions, but I'm not going to deny it.
Wait, who have you ever heard say that humans are the only thing affecting climate? I have literally never ever heard that, except perhaps from deniers mis-characterizing their opponents.
The metric system is a mediocre improvement over the imperial system, but I'd rather some other system altogether.
We need a system which, first of all, has units which are meaningful to humans. British units are like this: a cup is a useful measure, but a liter is a bit too large. Kilograms are okay, but that's a confusing screwup of the concept of base units -- a single gram is too small to be useful. A meter is both too long to measure human-scale things and too short to measure large things.
We also need a system which divides evenly by two and three. British units are like this, too, most of the time: twelve inches in a foot; so what's a third of a foot? four inches, even. But what's a third of a meter? Some repeating decimal. (This is a difficult request because it might require rethinking the most common way that humans count, in base-ten, but hey that can't be harder than rethinking the entire way we measure everything.)
Metric clearly wins hands-down based on easy conversion up and down the scale. Metric also wins for overall consistency. British wins for useful base measures and numerical divisibility (sometimes). It would be swell if metric had been thought out just a little better, but I'd still prefer it to the British system; and yet I'd still rather something better than either one.
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you are saying, but I don't have any trouble knowing that most filesharing infringes copyright law, and still denying that "the tools themselves are criminal". Sure bittorrent trackers have substantial non-infringing use -- for some small values of "substantial". But I understand what you are saying.
No thanks. I'm not the kind of person who would leap from a medium issue like copyright to an extreme accusation like tyranny.
You're projecting.
It's true, and my opinions on copyright aren't nearly as extreme as my post made them out to be. I do certainly oppose the copyright status quo, but you are right to dispute the phrase "any act" -- clearly, not any act is righteous in this context, and I could have phrased it more precisely.
Okay, thanks for your opinion.
I used to think this, but after that failed prosecution of whatever the guy was back in the 90s, the feds passed a law with criminal sanctions for non-commercial filesharing. So yes, shockingly and sadly, copyright infringement is a federal criminal issue.
I agree with you. It is disingenuous to say that running a bittorrent tracker isn't promoting copyright infringement. Unless your tracker specializes in, say, Linux distros (rare), then almost certainly the vast majority of your tracker's use is for illegal filesharing.
People should not make that argument (except in court, where it might juuuust work), because it is transparently misleading.
Instead, people should stick to the point, which is that the copyright laws themselves are absurd, anti-consumer, bad for culture, bad for humanity, bad in almost every way, and thus any action to subvert them is righteous. That argument is more plain, perfectly transparent, and most importantly, it is true.
They want to show that free speech is absolute
Oh, golly, I hope that's not strictly true, or else I'd have to stop supporting them. I don't believe anything is absolute, not even speech*; but, even if free speech doesn't stretch to cover every situation, I do believe it stretches well beyond personal file copying, which is why I have supported their efforts thus far.
(* yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre is the trite example. There are other good ones.)
Call it what you want; I don't call it faith. I don't have the arrogance of ignorance to assert that whatever notion I previously held is more right than the consensus of people who know better than I do.
The keys for science are qualifications, consensus, and multiple converging lines of evidence. The deniers do have consensus, but they don't have qualifications or multiple lines of evidence. If you want to equate science with religion, that's interesting, but it's not how I see it.
God damn, people like you are annoying! Did you even fucking read the first sentence of the article?
Scientists have determined that a number of human activities are contributing to global warming
The key word here is CONTRIBUTING. Jeez, it's impossible to make a scientific statement without people like you trying to make it into something it isn't. That quoted statement is true and plainly stated. It is only a problem when read by people like you, who read too much or too little into it.
If you can find examples of qualified people saying "global warming is caused only by human activity", then I will have heard that for the first time.
And if you can find a HELL OF A LOT of people saying that, then you will have educated me and shown that I wasn't paying close enough attention.
But as it is, all you have shown is that you are a jackass who doesn't pay attention.
explain Apple's recent success
I would explain that by saying that Apple also hires huge numbers of highly educated geniuses. Do you disagree with that? I don't work at either company; it's just what I've heard about each one. You correctly point out that all of my information comes as an outsider. Do you work at Google or Apple and thus have insider information?
Microsoft, by the way, ALSO hired huge numbers of well-educated geniuses. That was a long time ago. I haven't heard much about their hiring practices since the 1990s.
I judge overall success in the obvious way: by looking at the company's overall dominance in a variety of markets; by looking at the overall bottom line; by judging it as a competitive leader. Yes, Microsoft is also a highly successful company.
I'm not sure what we are disagreeing about. I don't think I've made any controversial statements, and what you say doesn't seem to contradict strongly anything I've said.
That's right. You don't know what is. And that's the problem.
It would be an error to conflate "we should change the amount that humans affect the climate" with "climate change is the result of only human activity".
You have made that error.
You posted that comment twice, which means I laughed twice at how stupid it is.
I love when kooks attack the "independence" of an investigation. Praytell, who COULD be both qualified and independent? You apparently think that no university could be independent; some have said that no scientist could be independent; so that leaves only the unqualified. Good luck with that.
Actually that's exactly what the leaked data and source code do not show. That's why all these investigations have found no wrongdoing. In science, cherrypicking or fabricating data is wrongdoing, whereas merely being a couple degrees shy of completely transparent is imperfect but forgivable.
I think you are referring to the deniers who were badgering these scientists constantly, becoming a distraction to the work being done. It's one thing to say that science should be open; it's quite another to say that scientists owe it to kooks to kowtow to their woo-woo beliefs. It is a false dichotomy to say that only people who "100% believe" have access to the data. In fact, it is more like telling the people who have a 100% political agenda to disturb and annoy scientists, in terms far more polite than they deserve, to fuck off.
Yes. I think you are right. I fully accept the conclusions about global warming, I just don't happen to think it's the biggest problem we face. Sure I want to do something about it, in proportion to the other things we are trying to get done.
All of what you said is wrong, except that there is "no proof of causality". That is true, because science does not, and can not, ever produce proof of anything. It merely provides overwhelming evidence, which is what we have here.
Some people choose not to accept overwhelming evidence. It's fine for you to be one of those people, but it's sad when there are so many people who do so.
They didn't challenge the credibility of a scientist. To do that, they would do the difficult work of producing incongruous reproducible scientific results.
Instead, they did the easy thing, which was to illegally hack into a computer system and leak private, misleading emails to a conspiracy-minded population of kooks ready to take individual words or phrases far out of context to reinforce their preconceived notions.
But, like you said, if they had "challenged the credibility of a scientist or his research", then that would be fine.
No. Actually nothing like that at all.
If the entire remaining 5% is strictly from man, I just can't see that being a significant contributor to the speeding of this natural process.
(Assuming your facts are right.) It's not a problem that you don't know why 5% would be significant. The problem is that you have apparently decided that your ignorance outweighs the informed conclusions of scientists in a position to know.
Yeah, dude, I also have no idea why 5% is such a big deal. But I'm not a climate scientist, and I'm not going to sit around trying to say that my lack of knowing means there is nothing to know. I don't know how pretty much all advanced science reaches its conclusions, but I'm not going to deny it.
Wait, who have you ever heard say that humans are the only thing affecting climate? I have literally never ever heard that, except perhaps from deniers mis-characterizing their opponents.
the global warming [scientists] haven't really provided much evidence
You obviously pay very close attention. Kudos for your attention to available information.
The metric system is a mediocre improvement over the imperial system, but I'd rather some other system altogether.
We need a system which, first of all, has units which are meaningful to humans. British units are like this: a cup is a useful measure, but a liter is a bit too large. Kilograms are okay, but that's a confusing screwup of the concept of base units -- a single gram is too small to be useful. A meter is both too long to measure human-scale things and too short to measure large things.
We also need a system which divides evenly by two and three. British units are like this, too, most of the time: twelve inches in a foot; so what's a third of a foot? four inches, even. But what's a third of a meter? Some repeating decimal. (This is a difficult request because it might require rethinking the most common way that humans count, in base-ten, but hey that can't be harder than rethinking the entire way we measure everything.)
Metric clearly wins hands-down based on easy conversion up and down the scale. Metric also wins for overall consistency. British wins for useful base measures and numerical divisibility (sometimes). It would be swell if metric had been thought out just a little better, but I'd still prefer it to the British system; and yet I'd still rather something better than either one.