Yeah, except that there are differences among gamers and non-gamers at rest, too. And it's not very adaptive for your brain to have no beta activity when you're supposed to be awake.
As an aside, before everyone shouts "it's a correlational study blah blah" it's worth pointing out that this study combines a within-subjects experimental manipulation (compares brain activity at rest to activity during gaming) with a correlational variable (compares the effect of the experimental manipulation between gamers and non-gamers). The experimental effect of gaming is strongest in people who game regularly, but it's there for everybody except people who never game.
I usually think of "user friendly" as meaning "most users find it easy to use." By this definition user friendliness, rather than being based strictly on a priori design criteria, is defined empirically. If most users find it easy to use, it's user friendly. If not, then not.
This doesn't mean that designers are faced with a black hole until after they build a product. It just means that design principles should be induced from what previous experience tells you usually works with users, rather than dictated by what designers think people should be able to deal with.
The more the government interferes with business, particularily online business the less of a free market it actually is.
This criticism doesn't work even from a pro-free-market perspective. Free markets depend on informed actors. If you really believe in free markets, then the government absolutely has an obligation to ensure that economic actors can base decisions on reliable information. (See WorldCom, Enron, Xerox, et al.). The more consumers know, the better the free market works.
The Slashdot version notwithstanding, I saw nothing in either article indicating that the study identified health-threatening bacteria. Just plain bacteria. The study is funded by Clorox. Think there's an agenda?
Disney doesn't care about the stuff that will be "sensitive." They would like to trade in the stuff that will be "non-sensitive." Opt-out doesn't hurt them too much, because few enough people will exercise it; but opt-in would damage their interests a lot. By passing a law that makes that stuff opt-out, they take the steam out of any future efforts to make it opt-in: "We don't need any more laws, marketing information is already regulated enough!"
All the/. posts about "so then highways are to blame for drunk driving, air for bullets, God for everything" etc. etc. are actually, ironically, making these guys' point. The original article makes it clear that the lawyers are trying to point out what happens when you take their opposition's argument to its logical conclusion. That is, it leads to ridiculous consequences.
Unless, of course, they just figure that if AOL/Time Warner becomes a co-defendent, they'll be able to rake in bigger fees than Morpheus etc. can afford.
(Sometimes I wonder if/. should have a "Clearly didn't read article" downmod.)
Internet use - depression? Maybe not
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 3, Informative
there's a mile of similar commentary on the internet (such as neil postman, clifford stoll, etc.). robert kraut carried out the 'internet paradox' surveys that became the sociological proof of this effect, although the earlier findings were later recast.
I want to make sure this last point gets emphasized, because it's received so little publicity compared to the initial report (which gets misrepresented all the time anyway).
If you click on the link, you'll see that the first article is called "Internet Paradox Revisited," and in it Kraut et al. report a followup of the same participants from the original study, showing that the statistically significant but small relationship between Internet use and depression reported in the original paper disappeared over time. Kraut and his colleagues are responsible scientists: they never represented their first study as "sociological proof" (social science is probabilistic rather than deterministic, and most good social scientists are allergic to using the word "proof" in discussing their work), and they should be applauded for publishing data that contradict what they said earlier. In fact, Internet users look pretty well adjusted in the followup. As the original poster pointed out, maybe the people in this study are getting better at coping with new technology and integrating it into their social lives.
To those who say "tools are just tools, it's people that are good or bad," I'd like to pose this question. (This isn't just rhetorical, I'm really curious what people think.) Isn't it the responsibility of those who create or disseminate tools to understand the context into which they release them?
By analogy, if I give a gun to a criminal, some people would hold me partially accountable for what the criminal does with it, especially if I knew (or should have known) that this was a criminal. If I give a gun to a kid, I'm responsible for evaluating whether the kid's ready to learn about guns, and if so, to teach the kid about safety, etc.
Does the analogy extend to scientists? Do they have some responsibility to take part in social, political, etc. processes to ensure that the world they release their tools into is ready and capable of making ethical and moral use of them? If so, what are the minimum requirements and limits of this responsibility?
"We are going to have to rule on the legality of this," he said, "because employers all over the country are doing this."
Are, were, have been for the last ??? years... This reminds me of Sandra Day O'Connor's contempt that people in Florida couldn't follow allegedly simple voting procedures (the folks at the country club where she votes just mark "Republican" all down the ballot for you and hand you a martini), or George Bush the First's amazement a infrared scanner at the grocery store late in his term (he hadn't been to a grocery store in years). Welcome to Everybody Else's America, judge!
Suggestion to all blackhats: What's clearly needed is an Outlook virus that appends itself to a random document and emails it as an attachment to everybody in your address book AND to president@whitehouse.gov. Bonus points if W clicks on one of the attachments.
Unfortunately, some of the sites I like to hit use javascript. Javascript is occasionally useful
This has probably been mentioned before, but... One workaround in Internet Explorer is to go to the security tab and disable (or force prompting for) cookies and javascript for "Internet", and then to "opt-in" the sites that you trust by placing them on your "Trusted Sites" list (and allow cookies/javascript for trusted sites). Ideally, you should have finer-grained control than to put all sites into just two categories, but if you're stuck using IE and you don't want to go with a web filter like Proxomitron, it's better than nothing.
In addition to the (very real) concerns about how to set some sort of universal standard, I see another problem. Wouldn't this also be a magnet for somebody wanting to prey on kids? With the number of people that would want to get an address in this domain, nobody could possibly monitor all the sites too closely. A predator could set up an initially innocuous-seeming site, and then use it as bait.
"The notion that science alone holds the secrets of our existence has become a religion of its own. The faith of Dawkins and others in biology seems even greater than the faith of the simple believer in God. Science is the proper way to understand the natural, of course; but science gives us no reason to deny that there are aspects of human identity that fall outside the sphere of nature, and hence outside the sphere of science."
The authors are falling back on that classic logical fallacy that religious groups everywhere have used to argue the creation side of the creation/evolution debate: "there is no evidence for your argument, so mine must be correct."
No, they're not saying that religion is right, only that science has not proven it wrong. To a scientist relying on the logic of inferential hypothesis testing, saying you're unable to reject an idea is different from saying you have supported or confirmed an idea. If you believe that you've proven a null hypothesis (God doesn't exist) when you've only failed to reject it (I cannot prove that God does exist), you've committed a fallacy.
Good scientific thinking does not lead you inevitably to atheism.
On reading this I became curious what my own institution's policies were, so I looked them up. FWIW:
First of all, my school maintains separate policies for copyright and patents. The copyright policy states that copyright of student works resides with the student. The patent policy makes no specific references to students, but says that anybody who uses university facilities or receives money from the uni (including gifts and grants) has to surrender patent rights to the uni, though they get a chunk of any royalties.
Since different aspects of software can fall under copyright or patent law, sounds like this must be mighty confusing for the CS folks. My best guess about what this means is that if you invent something, the university owns the invention, but you own whatever you say about the invention (and in the case of software, you own the specific code you wrote to implement the invention).
Go into any American fast-food restaurant or convenience store right now, and it's quite likely that you'll be dealing with idiots who can't even work the cash register without their manager present. If they treat you like crap, they won't get in trouble, because the manager knows he'll have trouble replacing them.
If this is the case, what are the homeless ex-dot-commers complaining about? They should have no trouble finding a job at McDonalds.
So the real question for seniors on the net is: how do you prepare people who were "outraged" by the mere idea (in its day) that game-shows were sometimes fixed and who think that anything that looks and feels like a news show is relatively unbiased?
This is a great question, and probably as important a component of teaching people about the Internet as the technological side.
Here are a couple of ideas that occur to me:
1. Give them examples of stories about people getting ripped off or hurt. You can't come up with an example to prepare them against every possible con scenario, but you can try to instill some skepticism by giving them an idea about the breadth and creativity of unscrupulous people on the Internet.
2. Show them some actual sites with incorrect information, poor business practices, etc. A good example (that would probably hit home for many older people) might be to look up a medical condition on several authoritative-looking websites, and show them the differences and contradictions among the various websites' descriptions of symptoms, treatments, etc.
3. When they're starting out, some of the guidelines you'd use with your kids are probably applicable here as well. Don't give out identifying information except perhaps an email address for registration, don't give out credit card numbers, don't give out passwords, etc. Of course, you can't talk down to them or they'll be (justifiably) insulted, and they will probably eventually want to do things like e-commerce. So also tell them about the things you should consider before buying stuff online (e.g., return policy, privacy policy, reputation of the merchant, etc.). If they wait a while before they start doing e-commerce, the extra net-savviness from their experience will probably help them in finding such information online.
4. Show them the extent of online horrors by sending them to goatse.cx. (Just kidding, I think.)
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like there's some info missing from this story. What was the "inappropriate content" that the university objects to? On what grounds are they threatening to arrest you, flikx -- is it because of the site, or because of the spoofed emails (that they might believe really came from you)?
Not that I necessarily don't believe you, but the university's reaction sounds awfully harsh for what you describe. If they believe you did something genuinely bad that you didn't do, like make threats (or instigate others' threats), that doesn't make them right, but it might make them sound a little more reasonable. If so, your defense might be more effective if it's based on presenting evidence that you didn't do the genuinely bad thing(s) they think you did, rather than asserting your freedom of speech.
Here's the offending spam, reprinted from the website:
Delivered-To: spertus@mills.edu
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 23:16:08 -0500
From: Kozmo Customer Service
To: Valued Kozmo Customer
Subject: Service Update from kozmo.com
Through customer feedback we heard that many of our members like you,
who originally opted not to receive occasional e-mail news from us,
would like to change their preference. Now, you can opt-in to our
subscriber contact list via the Web site -- http://www.kozmo.com -- by
clicking the "My Account" button, going to the "My Personal Info"
section and entering your e-mail address. If you choose not to
opt-in, your original preference will not change.
You also may not have heard about a new service at kozmo.com that
revolutionizes gift giving. When you first joined kozmo.com, you
could have products delivered to your door in under an hour. Now you
can use our new gifting feature to have any item on the site delivered
as a gift to anyone in our service areas in 11 cities across the
country.* Every item we carry -- from DVDs to MP3 players, diapers to
baby blankets, gourmet chocolates to martini glasses -- can be sent as
a gift. We can deliver your gift in our new signature orange box with
a personal greeting. We'll even deliver gifts on Christmas Day!
You can also subscribe to our e-mail updates by replying to this
e-mail and typing OPT-IN.
Happy holidays and thank you for choosing kozmo.com.
Best regards,
Your friends at kozmo.com
*Subject to inventory and service ability. When sending a gift, please allow
extra time for gift processing and packaging.
Copyright 2000 Kozmo.com, Inc.
Lots of posts have pointed out that this doesn't seem to be a big deal -- that they're selling information that's had personal identifiers stripped off so that third parties can only test aggregated marketing models. Thus they can't track me down with junk mail, phone calls, etc. As long as they stick to this policy, fine.
But protecting myself from unwanted intrusions is only one aspect of privacy. What about other reasons why I might want to withhold consent to use my personal information? For example, what if a company that does something I consider unsavory (damaging the environment, supporting political candidates I don't like, etc.) wants to buy my anonymized information from TiVo to use in their aggregated analysis in order to help them make a better profit? Shouldn't I have the right to withhold my information?
While this is on a tiny scale, I don't see how it differs much from a boycott. I can choose not to buy products from Company X, so why can't I avoid helping them in some other way to make a profit?
it would be better if there was some kind of cell phone maker organization that setup somethign were you could buy a device that would make tell cell phones that they are in a 'quiet zone'
In my opinion, it's much better if cell-phone jamming is optional, rather than accomplished by brute force. What if the babysitter is trying to tell me there's been an emergency at home, and my phone doesn't even vibrate?
The text of the actual injunction is here (PDF format). Basically, it looks like the RIAA has to provide filenames, and both parties are responsible for using "reasonable measures in identifying variations of the filename(s)."
The injunction also seems to put the burden of identifying copyrighted material mostly on the RIAA, and the burden of removal mostly on Napster. Which makes it sound like Pig Latin schemes etc. may not harm Napster after all.
I find that I have mixed feelings about weapons like this. On the one hand, it's probably better than killing people or permanently maiming them. On the other hand, though, it's pretty easy to imaging people using that fact to justify over-using such a device -- witness some of the controversies over the police practice of swabbing pepper spray in the eyes of nonviolent protesters. The line between appropriate use of nonlethal weapons and torture can get pretty thin.
...it does make sense that CD and cassette singles could be hurt by Napster. After all, one of the big Napster advantages is that you shouldn't be forced to buy all the crappy *N'Sync songs that nobody listens to, only the crappy *N'Sync songs that are big on the radio.
On balance, the facts presented here seem less FUDdy than the facts presented in the BBC article. But they're certainly not FUD-free. Part of the problem is that no information presented by either side takes into account the possibility that things other than Napster could be affecting RIAA profits. Who's to say that the RIAA wouldn't have seen an even bigger increase in profits without Napster? That wouldn't be good PR, but logically it would still support their case.
There is not much that could stand up to the standards of proof demanded by hard Science
No offense, but this is silly. Thomas Szasz published "The Myth of Mental Illness" in 1974, and the whole "therapy doesn't work" school of thought has been discredited for years. Ironically (given the comment above), it was based largely on Eysenck's biased and selective reading of the literature, and when statisticians developed meta-analyisis as a "harder" scientific approach to synthesizing multiple studies, psychotherapy was clearly to be quite effective. (I've got a couple refs on my course website if you're curious; check out the psychotherapy overheads).
And psychotherapy isn't the only place where social scientists have made real contributions. Consider the role of Kenneth and Mamie Clark's research in overturning "separate but equal" in Brown vs. Board of Education, and more recent research on the psychology of race relations.
Frankly, the fact that people might think of Szasz and Eysenck as the state of the art in mental health research is the best evidence that we need social scientists advising courts.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, except that there are differences among gamers and non-gamers at rest, too. And it's not very adaptive for your brain to have no beta activity when you're supposed to be awake.
As an aside, before everyone shouts "it's a correlational study blah blah" it's worth pointing out that this study combines a within-subjects experimental manipulation (compares brain activity at rest to activity during gaming) with a correlational variable (compares the effect of the experimental manipulation between gamers and non-gamers). The experimental effect of gaming is strongest in people who game regularly, but it's there for everybody except people who never game.
This doesn't mean that designers are faced with a black hole until after they build a product. It just means that design principles should be induced from what previous experience tells you usually works with users, rather than dictated by what designers think people should be able to deal with.
The more the government interferes with business, particularily online business the less of a free market it actually is.
This criticism doesn't work even from a pro-free-market perspective. Free markets depend on informed actors. If you really believe in free markets, then the government absolutely has an obligation to ensure that economic actors can base decisions on reliable information. (See WorldCom, Enron, Xerox, et al.). The more consumers know, the better the free market works.
The Slashdot version notwithstanding, I saw nothing in either article indicating that the study identified health-threatening bacteria. Just plain bacteria. The study is funded by Clorox. Think there's an agenda?
How's this for a cynical hypothesis?
Disney doesn't care about the stuff that will be "sensitive." They would like to trade in the stuff that will be "non-sensitive." Opt-out doesn't hurt them too much, because few enough people will exercise it; but opt-in would damage their interests a lot. By passing a law that makes that stuff opt-out, they take the steam out of any future efforts to make it opt-in: "We don't need any more laws, marketing information is already regulated enough!"
All the /. posts about "so then highways are to blame for drunk driving, air for bullets, God for everything" etc. etc. are actually, ironically, making these guys' point. The original article makes it clear that the lawyers are trying to point out what happens when you take their opposition's argument to its logical conclusion. That is, it leads to ridiculous consequences.
/. should have a "Clearly didn't read article" downmod.)
Unless, of course, they just figure that if AOL/Time Warner becomes a co-defendent, they'll be able to rake in bigger fees than Morpheus etc. can afford.
(Sometimes I wonder if
there's a mile of similar commentary on the internet (such as neil postman, clifford stoll, etc.). robert kraut carried out the 'internet paradox' surveys that became the sociological proof of this effect, although the earlier findings were later recast.
I want to make sure this last point gets emphasized, because it's received so little publicity compared to the initial report (which gets misrepresented all the time anyway).If you click on the link, you'll see that the first article is called "Internet Paradox Revisited," and in it Kraut et al. report a followup of the same participants from the original study, showing that the statistically significant but small relationship between Internet use and depression reported in the original paper disappeared over time. Kraut and his colleagues are responsible scientists: they never represented their first study as "sociological proof" (social science is probabilistic rather than deterministic, and most good social scientists are allergic to using the word "proof" in discussing their work), and they should be applauded for publishing data that contradict what they said earlier. In fact, Internet users look pretty well adjusted in the followup. As the original poster pointed out, maybe the people in this study are getting better at coping with new technology and integrating it into their social lives.
IMO group work, in-class assignments, big discussions, or just not having class are better alternatives
Hey, so I'm teaching people right now!
To those who say "tools are just tools, it's people that are good or bad," I'd like to pose this question. (This isn't just rhetorical, I'm really curious what people think.) Isn't it the responsibility of those who create or disseminate tools to understand the context into which they release them?
By analogy, if I give a gun to a criminal, some people would hold me partially accountable for what the criminal does with it, especially if I knew (or should have known) that this was a criminal. If I give a gun to a kid, I'm responsible for evaluating whether the kid's ready to learn about guns, and if so, to teach the kid about safety, etc.
Does the analogy extend to scientists? Do they have some responsibility to take part in social, political, etc. processes to ensure that the world they release their tools into is ready and capable of making ethical and moral use of them? If so, what are the minimum requirements and limits of this responsibility?
"We are going to have to rule on the legality of this," he said, "because employers all over the country are doing this."
Are, were, have been for the last ??? years... This reminds me of Sandra Day O'Connor's contempt that people in Florida couldn't follow allegedly simple voting procedures (the folks at the country club where she votes just mark "Republican" all down the ballot for you and hand you a martini), or George Bush the First's amazement a infrared scanner at the grocery store late in his term (he hadn't been to a grocery store in years). Welcome to Everybody Else's America, judge!
Suggestion to all blackhats: What's clearly needed is an Outlook virus that appends itself to a random document and emails it as an attachment to everybody in your address book AND to president@whitehouse.gov. Bonus points if W clicks on one of the attachments.
Unfortunately, some of the sites I like to hit use javascript. Javascript is occasionally useful
This has probably been mentioned before, but... One workaround in Internet Explorer is to go to the security tab and disable (or force prompting for) cookies and javascript for "Internet", and then to "opt-in" the sites that you trust by placing them on your "Trusted Sites" list (and allow cookies/javascript for trusted sites). Ideally, you should have finer-grained control than to put all sites into just two categories, but if you're stuck using IE and you don't want to go with a web filter like Proxomitron, it's better than nothing.
In addition to the (very real) concerns about how to set some sort of universal standard, I see another problem. Wouldn't this also be a magnet for somebody wanting to prey on kids? With the number of people that would want to get an address in this domain, nobody could possibly monitor all the sites too closely. A predator could set up an initially innocuous-seeming site, and then use it as bait.
The authors are falling back on that classic logical fallacy that religious groups everywhere have used to argue the creation side of the creation/evolution debate: "there is no evidence for your argument, so mine must be correct."
No, they're not saying that religion is right, only that science has not proven it wrong. To a scientist relying on the logic of inferential hypothesis testing, saying you're unable to reject an idea is different from saying you have supported or confirmed an idea. If you believe that you've proven a null hypothesis (God doesn't exist) when you've only failed to reject it (I cannot prove that God does exist), you've committed a fallacy.
Good scientific thinking does not lead you inevitably to atheism.
On reading this I became curious what my own institution's policies were, so I looked them up. FWIW:
First of all, my school maintains separate policies for copyright and patents. The copyright policy states that copyright of student works resides with the student. The patent policy makes no specific references to students, but says that anybody who uses university facilities or receives money from the uni (including gifts and grants) has to surrender patent rights to the uni, though they get a chunk of any royalties.
Since different aspects of software can fall under copyright or patent law, sounds like this must be mighty confusing for the CS folks. My best guess about what this means is that if you invent something, the university owns the invention, but you own whatever you say about the invention (and in the case of software, you own the specific code you wrote to implement the invention).
Go into any American fast-food restaurant or convenience store right now, and it's quite likely that you'll be dealing with idiots who can't even work the cash register without their manager present. If they treat you like crap, they won't get in trouble, because the manager knows he'll have trouble replacing them.
If this is the case, what are the homeless ex-dot-commers complaining about? They should have no trouble finding a job at McDonalds.
So the real question for seniors on the net is: how do you prepare people who were "outraged" by the mere idea (in its day) that game-shows were sometimes fixed and who think that anything that looks and feels like a news show is relatively unbiased?
This is a great question, and probably as important a component of teaching people about the Internet as the technological side.
Here are a couple of ideas that occur to me:
1. Give them examples of stories about people getting ripped off or hurt. You can't come up with an example to prepare them against every possible con scenario, but you can try to instill some skepticism by giving them an idea about the breadth and creativity of unscrupulous people on the Internet.
2. Show them some actual sites with incorrect information, poor business practices, etc. A good example (that would probably hit home for many older people) might be to look up a medical condition on several authoritative-looking websites, and show them the differences and contradictions among the various websites' descriptions of symptoms, treatments, etc.
3. When they're starting out, some of the guidelines you'd use with your kids are probably applicable here as well. Don't give out identifying information except perhaps an email address for registration, don't give out credit card numbers, don't give out passwords, etc. Of course, you can't talk down to them or they'll be (justifiably) insulted, and they will probably eventually want to do things like e-commerce. So also tell them about the things you should consider before buying stuff online (e.g., return policy, privacy policy, reputation of the merchant, etc.). If they wait a while before they start doing e-commerce, the extra net-savviness from their experience will probably help them in finding such information online.
4. Show them the extent of online horrors by sending them to goatse.cx. (Just kidding, I think.)
Maybe it's just me, but it seems like there's some info missing from this story. What was the "inappropriate content" that the university objects to? On what grounds are they threatening to arrest you, flikx -- is it because of the site, or because of the spoofed emails (that they might believe really came from you)?
Not that I necessarily don't believe you, but the university's reaction sounds awfully harsh for what you describe. If they believe you did something genuinely bad that you didn't do, like make threats (or instigate others' threats), that doesn't make them right, but it might make them sound a little more reasonable. If so, your defense might be more effective if it's based on presenting evidence that you didn't do the genuinely bad thing(s) they think you did, rather than asserting your freedom of speech.
Here's the offending spam, reprinted from the website:
Delivered-To: spertus@mills.edu
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2000 23:16:08 -0500
From: Kozmo Customer Service
To: Valued Kozmo Customer
Subject: Service Update from kozmo.com
Through customer feedback we heard that many of our members like you,
who originally opted not to receive occasional e-mail news from us,
would like to change their preference. Now, you can opt-in to our
subscriber contact list via the Web site -- http://www.kozmo.com -- by
clicking the "My Account" button, going to the "My Personal Info"
section and entering your e-mail address. If you choose not to
opt-in, your original preference will not change.
You also may not have heard about a new service at kozmo.com that
revolutionizes gift giving. When you first joined kozmo.com, you
could have products delivered to your door in under an hour. Now you
can use our new gifting feature to have any item on the site delivered
as a gift to anyone in our service areas in 11 cities across the
country.* Every item we carry -- from DVDs to MP3 players, diapers to
baby blankets, gourmet chocolates to martini glasses -- can be sent as
a gift. We can deliver your gift in our new signature orange box with
a personal greeting. We'll even deliver gifts on Christmas Day!
You can also subscribe to our e-mail updates by replying to this
e-mail and typing OPT-IN.
Happy holidays and thank you for choosing kozmo.com.
Best regards,
Your friends at kozmo.com
*Subject to inventory and service ability. When sending a gift, please allow
extra time for gift processing and packaging.
Copyright 2000 Kozmo.com, Inc.
Lots of posts have pointed out that this doesn't seem to be a big deal -- that they're selling information that's had personal identifiers stripped off so that third parties can only test aggregated marketing models. Thus they can't track me down with junk mail, phone calls, etc. As long as they stick to this policy, fine.
But protecting myself from unwanted intrusions is only one aspect of privacy. What about other reasons why I might want to withhold consent to use my personal information? For example, what if a company that does something I consider unsavory (damaging the environment, supporting political candidates I don't like, etc.) wants to buy my anonymized information from TiVo to use in their aggregated analysis in order to help them make a better profit? Shouldn't I have the right to withhold my information?
While this is on a tiny scale, I don't see how it differs much from a boycott. I can choose not to buy products from Company X, so why can't I avoid helping them in some other way to make a profit?
it would be better if there was some kind of cell phone maker organization that setup somethign were you could buy a device that would make tell cell phones that they are in a 'quiet zone'
You mean something like this?
In my opinion, it's much better if cell-phone jamming is optional, rather than accomplished by brute force. What if the babysitter is trying to tell me there's been an emergency at home, and my phone doesn't even vibrate?
The text of the actual injunction is here (PDF format). Basically, it looks like the RIAA has to provide filenames, and both parties are responsible for using "reasonable measures in identifying variations of the filename(s)."
The injunction also seems to put the burden of identifying copyrighted material mostly on the RIAA, and the burden of removal mostly on Napster. Which makes it sound like Pig Latin schemes etc. may not harm Napster after all.
I find that I have mixed feelings about weapons like this. On the one hand, it's probably better than killing people or permanently maiming them. On the other hand, though, it's pretty easy to imaging people using that fact to justify over-using such a device -- witness some of the controversies over the police practice of swabbing pepper spray in the eyes of nonviolent protesters. The line between appropriate use of nonlethal weapons and torture can get pretty thin.
...it does make sense that CD and cassette singles could be hurt by Napster. After all, one of the big Napster advantages is that you shouldn't be forced to buy all the crappy *N'Sync songs that nobody listens to, only the crappy *N'Sync songs that are big on the radio.
On balance, the facts presented here seem less FUDdy than the facts presented in the BBC article. But they're certainly not FUD-free. Part of the problem is that no information presented by either side takes into account the possibility that things other than Napster could be affecting RIAA profits. Who's to say that the RIAA wouldn't have seen an even bigger increase in profits without Napster? That wouldn't be good PR, but logically it would still support their case.
There is not much that could stand up to the standards of proof demanded by hard Science
No offense, but this is silly. Thomas Szasz published "The Myth of Mental Illness" in 1974, and the whole "therapy doesn't work" school of thought has been discredited for years. Ironically (given the comment above), it was based largely on Eysenck's biased and selective reading of the literature, and when statisticians developed meta-analyisis as a "harder" scientific approach to synthesizing multiple studies, psychotherapy was clearly to be quite effective. (I've got a couple refs on my course website if you're curious; check out the psychotherapy overheads).
And psychotherapy isn't the only place where social scientists have made real contributions. Consider the role of Kenneth and Mamie Clark's research in overturning "separate but equal" in Brown vs. Board of Education, and more recent research on the psychology of race relations.
Frankly, the fact that people might think of Szasz and Eysenck as the state of the art in mental health research is the best evidence that we need social scientists advising courts.