What you (and about 90% of this thread's participants) seem to miss is that these scientists used proven psychological conditioning methods to elicit a response, and then pointed their fingers at the video game they'd put in the room as a scapegoat.
So, then you're simply asserting that video games are utterly incapable teaching behavior due to a lack of a tangible reward? Getting a high score doesn't matter? Getting an Achievement on Xbox Live doesn't matter? A particularly enjoyably gory special effect doesn't matter?
Just plain having fun doesn't matter for conditioning? I don't think you understand how conditioning works. Dopamine is dopamine.
[T]hat's basic Pavlovian conditioning (or skinner, I always get those two mixed up.)
But obviously, I'm the "moron" who doesn't understand psychology at all. Generally speaking, video game violence and this study would be considered operant conditioning, not classical conditioning.
It seems very strange to suppose that intentionally creating an association between visual and taste stimuli would magically not work, just because a video game is involved.
And, yet, when violence is involved everyone on this site strongly presumes that there is absolutely no link between stimuli that rewards violent or aggressive behavior and real life aggression. Not a smidgen, not an amount that almost all sane people can control and thus not an amount that has marginal effect on society. None.
'Cause everybody knows that the issue is all about evil politicians and busybodies wanting to control your life. The subject is always black and white -- never gray.
If you actually care about using it as a phone, get a headset or earbuds, as another poster pointed out.
If you're just the kind pervert snapping secret pictures that the bill author fears, then you've still got a camera that doesn't automatically arouse suspicion. I mean, that's pretty obvious, right?
As long as there's no Pearl, it's still all right. And no Bobo. You could no longer even see the shark the show had jumped over over the horizon by that point.
If this is a public institution, then you can't have your property or liberty taken without due process.
We had a fun lecture or two on a situation involving a state college expelling a student without due process in my Admin Law class. Yes, such institutions count for purposes of due process caselaw. In the case of a loss of property though, the best you could get back would be the commercial value of the notes, which should be zero if you have a university honor code or something that prevents reselling notes, so this would largely be a dead end.
I don't know of any, but I can point out the last time there was a school massacre using a duffle bag or while wearing a sweatshirt. Should we ban those based upon studies that show if they are banned there are fewer killings by people with them? Or do you concede such a methodology is flawed?
You're honestly telling us that people have gone on a school massacre using a duffle bag or a sweatshirt as their killing weapon? Or are you honestly so stupid that you think there's no significant, causal relationship between the gun and the deaths involved?
I mean, who do you think you're impressing with this line of reasoning? "Gosh! I'll bet all these school shooters have hair! Maybe we should ban hair? (Because, obviously weapons used are no more important to a school shooting than the presence of hair.)" Did you think that maybe you were making me look like an idiot with the comparison? For the love of Mike, what the hell is wrong with you?
Actually, let's flip that. Do you have any studies showing that a person is no more likely to be involved in a homicide if they carry a gun than if they carry a duffel bag or a sweatshirt?
Fine, so demonstrate banning them reduces violence or that other weapons such as improvised explosives or poisons are less effective.
I'm not arguing the first, but the second is important. Guns are often called "equalizers" for a reason. The number of people you can kill with your bare hands before being stopped is less than the number of people you can kill with a knife is less than with a semi-automatic is less than a truck bomb is less than a nuke.
Do you think that there's no reason to keep nukes out of kids' hands because there's no evidence that keeping them out of kids' hand reduces violence? Naturally, nukes are a bit of an extreme example, but the difference in the scale of death than can be achieved by one kid trying to go out in a blaze of glory with a knife and one with a gun is obvious. That's why people keep guns for protection -- because they're better tools for the job of violence, both defensive and offensive.
Studies about this subject matter are hard to find. For bloody obvious reasons -- a lack of way to do a controlled study and too few school massacres to create significant crime statistics like we can about street crime. And a comparative study between countries is hard to do precisely because student massacres are practically unknown in stable economies outside of the US. (One might hint that that suggests an answer...)
While there have been a few mass murders that didn't involve firearms -- mostly acts of terrorism or the famous nightclub arsonist case -- I cannot find any evidence of a mass murder that occurred at a school that didn't involve a firearm. If you can find a single incident in modern history involving the death of more than 4 students at the hands of a single spree killer at a school that didn't involve a gun or standard manufactured munition (e.g. a grenade), I'd appreciate hearing it.
Anyway, what studies I can find are below.
Further, you have to take into account firearms used defensively to stop such crimes, including stopping crimes by people who will manage to obtain firearms regardless of attempts to ban them.
Because that SOOOO applies to schools. Yes, why don't we let hormonal, fight-prone teens all carry around firearms -- to prevent an outbreak of violence? I mean, it works on the streets, right? Gun-toting teens are the least likely to be shot, right? Why that must mean that being a gang is awesome for safety!
Alright, enough mockery. The honest truth is that increased access to firearms directly correlates to a higher rate of firearm death and of violent death in general.
In the US wooden clogs are harder to get ahold of as in Europe in general. We don't have clog beatings. Spot the correlation.
Spot the last time 17 people were killing a "school clogging" by a teenager, and the SWAT team had to be called out. It's not about some arbitrary choice of weapons to hate but about the effectiveness of them.
Why is it just video games that are subject to all this scrutiny?
Video games are subject to this scrutiny for two reasons:
1) There was once a study along time ago showing that kids exposed to aggressive TV acted out aggressively afterward. A host of studies since then have alleged the same effect from video games. Studies have supported and refuted both ideas, and people have also called into question the link between aggressive play behavior and real world aggression. Unfortunately, a lot of the research and reporting on the research on both sides seems to be heavily tainted by preconceived bias.
2) Video games are a form of recreational media enjoyed by a substantial number of youths today, and they are often avoided by excessive moralists, who tend not to "get" what "the kids" are into. We did the same thing with rock & roll, rap music, tabletop gaming, etc.
It's one half politicized science and one half culture war.
Board games cause violence too.
My sister was perfectly capable of flying into a murderous rage if someone else purchased Boardwalk or Park Place in a game of Monopoly when we were kids.
Oh, pfft. You know there's a difference between something that is alleged to provoke violence and something which is just fought over. Let's not be silly.
Wow, something every person who plays games already knows.
Well, I was thinking the same thing, except from the opposite direction. I'm was kind of skeptical about how he might have showed no link given the small sample group of school shooters and the difficulty in finding actual video game links, but there's really nothing of the sort here. He's largely just criticizing the methodology (or complete lack thereof) of most people howling about the link between video games and school shootings.
He's basically doing little more than pointing out the obvious, but not really proving his own point. It's very much a, "Here's some common sense, here's where most of the people talking about the supposed connection betray their ignorance, and here's some outrage and politics too" kind of article. Less science than editorial. (One with a decent point mind you, but let's not pretend this is proof of the opposite. He's just calling "BS.")
My point was that it is sad that the federal government is so large that they need yet another bureaucrat to support all the other bureaucrats.
Grow up. No private company of any size larger than a single office can get away without someone managing the infrastructure, and there's no way to manage an organization even the size of the smallest state governments without some organizational discipline.
If you think a society on the scale of the United States can function with a government small enough not to need anyone tracking the organization's infrastructure, you're living in a child's fantasy. The same kind of whimsical, small government fantasy that led to the mismanagement of the past 8 years.
So you're agreeing that [...yet another straw man].
*sigh* I'm getting tired of trying to explain myself to someone who can't or deliberately won't give any sign of understanding.
I just want to say this. Stop arguing this point. You make people who want to change the public's perception of copyright look bad. Let me give you an illustration.
I'm a liberal, and I have two conservative friends that I hang out with a lot. "T" is open to discussion of ideas, even if we disagree, and always thinks his positions out. "R" listens to Rush Limbaugh every day and is a knee-jerk conservative. Whenever the three of us talk politics, the T is often undermined and left in an embarrassing position by the R's "contributions" to the discussion because R can make any sensible position taken by T look stupid by aping talking points without good logical support for them, making lame partisan jokes, spouting half-truths, and quibbling minutiae that have little to do with the ultimate debate. It's gotten to the point where even thought T & R agree on almost all points politically, T has told R to "Shut up and let the grown-ups talk."
In the realm of copyright infringement, you're R. You and I probably agree on most points philosophically about copyright and property. But your debate technique stinks, and you're making our position look foolish. So stop it. This senseless quibbling over "it's not 'theft', it's 'infringement'" may look to you like you're trying to win some moral victory over some line that must not be crossed, but it's ignoring the larger debate over whether that the RIAA is doing is right or not. No, it's not "okay" for the RIAA to go around calling IP misappropriation "theft," but it works. It's effective strategy, and you're getting bogged down in tactics. Give this battle up and win the war elsewhere. If you're even interested in fighting it, which I don't see much evidence of. Maybe semantics is all you care about in this, but I think the stakes are higher.
But anyway, this post is probably just falling on deaf ears again.
I stopped using Digg *over two years ago* because it had become a worthless POS full of sensationalist-attention-getting-vacuous-submissions, a partisan, pack-modding, friend-promoting, adolescent-mentality, moronic, herd-driven mouth-breathing circle jerk.
(There was a really good critique of it on Kuro5hin, but it seems to have disappeared).
The irony of these two sentences back-to-back cannot be overstated.
However I must admit this doesn't always work, for example I was reviewing headphones and there was an elitist audio expert which marked them down.
To be fair, you were buying audio equipment. It could have been anything from not having gold-plated connectors or $3000/ft cables to not having cherry wood knobs or not having been shipped in crushed velvet inside a vacuum-sealed, anti-static pack.
Morally, I don't think stealing a CD from a store owned by a rich man is any worse than stealing the same CD from the home owned by the same rich man. Or at least, I don't see why one would be considered more immoral than the other.
Interesting that they're both "rich men" suddenly, but I'd rather not beat a dead horse here.
Either way, copyright infringement is very different in that it isn't theft. It's copyright infringement. When I steal a CD, someone has lost a CD. When I infringe on someone's copyright, the creative work gets copied without the copyright owner's permission.
On that end of the transaction, they are different.
However, in both cases, the rightful owner of the property doesn't get paid for your gain. You get something for nothing, and the rightful owner is deprived of the value of their labor (or investment). On that end of the transaction, they are the same.
That's the part that allows the RIAA to hang their analogy on. Easy to see for the layman, and hard to fight against without looking foolish if you're unwilling to admit that part. Again, the legal niceties of licensing and infringement are lost on most people; "stealing" is easier to understand because it's something every one knows from when they were small children.
Popping back up the discussion stack a bit, a "reasonable person" gets the RIAA's argument intuitively. You have to explain yours because it's not intuitive to the common person raised in modern, western, property-focused society to think that you can take the end product of someone else's labor for free without owing them something, especially when they made it in the expectation that they could make money from it (and not just to be given away). Saying, "It's not 'stealing,' it's 'infringement,'" is technically accurate but meaningless as a rebuttal to the real message behind what the RIAA is saying: "It's wrong to do."
Playing games with the message instead of attacking it head on does nothing to counter that essential moral undercurrent. Saying, "It's just infringement!" is no more relevant to the average person than explaining the difference between larceny and embezzlement -- it's still taking something you haven't earned. You can't win like that, especially if you keep falling back to disingenuous arguments about what other people have said and what they mean.
Yes, and apparently you don't understand the meaning of the tag.
No, we understand the meaning of the phrase. We just don't find it very insightful. It's a knee-jerk comment that has become extremely tiresome with repetition. We know we don't have proof of a causal mechanism. That doesn't mean the correlation itself isn't interesting or exciting. Posting "correlation is not causation" just a great big "Bah, Humbug!" to the story and serves no productive purpose.
I'm seriously considering Troll-modding every post that rehashes this old argument in the future. I'm sick and tired of it.
I've posted this before but when Napster was in its height, I bought more CDs in the year I used Napster than in the 13 previous years I owned CD players. [...] As soon as the RIAA started making noise about filing suits I quit not only using Napster, but I also quit listening to [music] radio. [...] The RIAA has lost me as a big-spending customer. I track down USED CDs now, on the rare occasions I do buy.
Same here. I bought half of my CD collection during the year I used Napster. Most of the other half was from the years before. I have bought less than 10 CDs in the years since then (less than 5% of my collection), and almost all of those are later albums by bands I bought in that period or albums by indie artists not sold through the RIAA.
My tastes broadened immensely, and I went on buying frenzies because of being stoked about music because of Napster. Now, I hardly ever listen to the radio anymore, and I just can't get excited about music. I pretty much listen to NPR or podcasts in the car, and when I do listen to modern music (almost always because an NPR fund-raising drive has finally driven me nuts after several days), I just don't ever feel like buying an album. Part of it's the fact that my tastes in music have fossilized with age, but even when I do like a new group, I just don't want to give the RIAA my money. Screw 'em. They killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
The moral argument supporting private property rights is a product of scarcity, which doesn't apply to copyrights. Even the pro-copyright crowd doesn't really treat copyrights as though they were property; differences include time limits, statutory damages, higher penalties than are imposed for outright theft, etc.
Reproduction and distribution costs for intellectual property can be zero because there's no scarcity there, but there is scarcity of the resources that went into the initial creation -- at the very least the labor if nothing else.
I'm not saying that copyright should be treated exactly the same as physical property (so don't go putting words to that effect into my mouth), but saying there is no scarcity involved in the economics behind intellectual property is simply wrong. Copyrighted music does not just pop out of the ether into the hands of the RIAA to evilly horde from the public.
The government or military might be interested in your data, especially if you are not government or military. Especially if you are suspected of something. Whether or not it's true.
Assuming a government with infinite resources. Honestly, I'm no dittohead like the above poster might be, but I don't seriously worry about the government spending the money and effort to forensically scrub my drive for anything unless they had far easier to get evidence that it was worthwhile.
For example, a pedophile might have some incriminating evidence outside of an encrypted/wiped part of a hard drive that might suggest it was worthwhile -- like printed porn in his house, suspicious filenames in the "recent items" lists in the preferences of his programs, or logs in the governments possession of suspicious online activity. But if all you have is someone you'd *like* to lock up and a hard drive with empty space full of noise from a single random wipe, then it just isn't worth the trouble.
Of course, I'm in law school and have heard more of the prosecutor's side of things than most people. Prosecutors do have to worry about time and budget resources. Unless you think the federal government has some really good excuse to throw limitless time and money at you, you probably shouldn't worry. Forensics is *expensive* even without cracking open the platter and trying to painstakingly read info with an electron microscope. Mere searching of the live files on your system costs tens of thousands -- can you imagine how much days or weeks of electron microscope time + experts would cost? I'm thinking millions or more. No prosecutor wants to waste that kind of money on a shot in the dark.
And if you live far enough in conspiracy land to think you're a likely target for being "disappeared" or persecuted at all costs, then frankly *you* are a greater weak point than your hard drive for producing incriminating evidence. A little abusive detention would be a hell of a lot cheaper (and probably more fun for the jackboot squad).
That's why the DoD has lowered their standards to a single fixed wipe and to prove it is going to send all of their super secret hard drives to china to be proven that the data is unreadable.
Because the DoD makes ALL its decisions based on sound science. That's why the Air Force took over the CIA's sponsorship of remote viewing in 70s, why the Navy funded research into cold fusion and anti-grav, and why we're buying hand-held polygraphs for troops in Afghanistan.
I mean, I had the same knee jerk suspicion, but I'm not going to hold up the DoD's standards as proof of anything but potentially reasonable paranoia. The Pentagon has a long-demonstrated sweet tooth for junk science.
Kundra replaced all of D.C. gov's word and exchange infrastructure with google apps.
Wonder if he would push that for the whole federal government?
Would that be a good thing -- both in terms of changing from giving one powerful vendor a monopoly on services to another and in terms of security? Plus, would this really do anything to move us away from keeping things in MS formats since Google Apps work with them?
Would you have preferred instead a technologist from AT&T, Verizon, etc? Cisco is the "good guy" by comparison.
A) That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of better companies to choose from. B) What makes Cisco a "good guy" in comparison? Who do you think it selling repressive regimes the technology to control the internet? Six of one, half a dozen of the other. C) How about someone competent at management instead of a "good guy" or "bad guy?" Cisco may be an industry juggernaut, but has the name Cisco ever been equated with awesome management in your mind? How about Motorola, which is where she's spent the vast majority of her career?
Maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction on my part, but the "DC brand" is less tarnished for IT in my mind than Motorola's and Cisco's are.
The fact that people are debating who should be the Technology Central Planner, instead of realizing that the very idea of one is silly and dangerous, shows that liberty is dead.
Gosh, I guess liberty is defined as the government having absolutely NO plan for how they spend money on their own IT infrastructure. I guess we should leave all that to random whim of local agency bureaucrats who have nothing better to work on.
Or are you some delusional crazy who thinks that the nation's CTO is going to be dictating (Soviet style) what direction development and product release the private sector must take. If that's true, then don't worry -- that's the responsibility of the alien/jew hybrids at the UN NWO committee who run the mind control laser satellites. All hail Lemuria! May her tendrils forever writhe in ecstasy!
Slashdot Mirror
What you (and about 90% of this thread's participants) seem to miss is that these scientists used proven psychological conditioning methods to elicit a response, and then pointed their fingers at the video game they'd put in the room as a scapegoat.
So, then you're simply asserting that video games are utterly incapable teaching behavior due to a lack of a tangible reward? Getting a high score doesn't matter? Getting an Achievement on Xbox Live doesn't matter? A particularly enjoyably gory special effect doesn't matter?
Just plain having fun doesn't matter for conditioning? I don't think you understand how conditioning works. Dopamine is dopamine.
[T]hat's basic Pavlovian conditioning (or skinner, I always get those two mixed up.)
But obviously, I'm the "moron" who doesn't understand psychology at all. Generally speaking, video game violence and this study would be considered operant conditioning, not classical conditioning.
It seems very strange to suppose that intentionally creating an association between visual and taste stimuli would magically not work, just because a video game is involved.
And, yet, when violence is involved everyone on this site strongly presumes that there is absolutely no link between stimuli that rewards violent or aggressive behavior and real life aggression. Not a smidgen, not an amount that almost all sane people can control and thus not an amount that has marginal effect on society. None.
'Cause everybody knows that the issue is all about evil politicians and busybodies wanting to control your life. The subject is always black and white -- never gray.
If you actually care about using it as a phone, get a headset or earbuds, as another poster pointed out.
If you're just the kind pervert snapping secret pictures that the bill author fears, then you've still got a camera that doesn't automatically arouse suspicion. I mean, that's pretty obvious, right?
As long as there's no Pearl, it's still all right. And no Bobo. You could no longer even see the shark the show had jumped over over the horizon by that point.
If this is a public institution, then you can't have your property or liberty taken without due process.
We had a fun lecture or two on a situation involving a state college expelling a student without due process in my Admin Law class. Yes, such institutions count for purposes of due process caselaw. In the case of a loss of property though, the best you could get back would be the commercial value of the notes, which should be zero if you have a university honor code or something that prevents reselling notes, so this would largely be a dead end.
Fun story, though.
I don't know of any, but I can point out the last time there was a school massacre using a duffle bag or while wearing a sweatshirt. Should we ban those based upon studies that show if they are banned there are fewer killings by people with them? Or do you concede such a methodology is flawed?
You're honestly telling us that people have gone on a school massacre using a duffle bag or a sweatshirt as their killing weapon? Or are you honestly so stupid that you think there's no significant, causal relationship between the gun and the deaths involved?
I mean, who do you think you're impressing with this line of reasoning? "Gosh! I'll bet all these school shooters have hair! Maybe we should ban hair? (Because, obviously weapons used are no more important to a school shooting than the presence of hair.)" Did you think that maybe you were making me look like an idiot with the comparison? For the love of Mike, what the hell is wrong with you?
Actually, let's flip that. Do you have any studies showing that a person is no more likely to be involved in a homicide if they carry a gun than if they carry a duffel bag or a sweatshirt?
Fine, so demonstrate banning them reduces violence or that other weapons such as improvised explosives or poisons are less effective.
I'm not arguing the first, but the second is important. Guns are often called "equalizers" for a reason. The number of people you can kill with your bare hands before being stopped is less than the number of people you can kill with a knife is less than with a semi-automatic is less than a truck bomb is less than a nuke.
Do you think that there's no reason to keep nukes out of kids' hands because there's no evidence that keeping them out of kids' hand reduces violence? Naturally, nukes are a bit of an extreme example, but the difference in the scale of death than can be achieved by one kid trying to go out in a blaze of glory with a knife and one with a gun is obvious. That's why people keep guns for protection -- because they're better tools for the job of violence, both defensive and offensive.
Studies about this subject matter are hard to find. For bloody obvious reasons -- a lack of way to do a controlled study and too few school massacres to create significant crime statistics like we can about street crime. And a comparative study between countries is hard to do precisely because student massacres are practically unknown in stable economies outside of the US. (One might hint that that suggests an answer...)
While there have been a few mass murders that didn't involve firearms -- mostly acts of terrorism or the famous nightclub arsonist case -- I cannot find any evidence of a mass murder that occurred at a school that didn't involve a firearm. If you can find a single incident in modern history involving the death of more than 4 students at the hands of a single spree killer at a school that didn't involve a gun or standard manufactured munition (e.g. a grenade), I'd appreciate hearing it.
Anyway, what studies I can find are below.
Further, you have to take into account firearms used defensively to stop such crimes, including stopping crimes by people who will manage to obtain firearms regardless of attempts to ban them.
Because that SOOOO applies to schools. Yes, why don't we let hormonal, fight-prone teens all carry around firearms -- to prevent an outbreak of violence? I mean, it works on the streets, right? Gun-toting teens are the least likely to be shot, right? Why that must mean that being a gang is awesome for safety!
Alright, enough mockery. The honest truth is that increased access to firearms directly correlates to a higher rate of firearm death and of violent death in general.
Firearm Availability and Unintentional Firearm Deaths, Suicide, a
In the US wooden clogs are harder to get ahold of as in Europe in general. We don't have clog beatings. Spot the correlation.
Spot the last time 17 people were killing a "school clogging" by a teenager, and the SWAT team had to be called out. It's not about some arbitrary choice of weapons to hate but about the effectiveness of them.
Why is it just video games that are subject to all this scrutiny?
Video games are subject to this scrutiny for two reasons:
1) There was once a study along time ago showing that kids exposed to aggressive TV acted out aggressively afterward. A host of studies since then have alleged the same effect from video games. Studies have supported and refuted both ideas, and people have also called into question the link between aggressive play behavior and real world aggression. Unfortunately, a lot of the research and reporting on the research on both sides seems to be heavily tainted by preconceived bias.
2) Video games are a form of recreational media enjoyed by a substantial number of youths today, and they are often avoided by excessive moralists, who tend not to "get" what "the kids" are into. We did the same thing with rock & roll, rap music, tabletop gaming, etc.
It's one half politicized science and one half culture war.
Board games cause violence too.
My sister was perfectly capable of flying into a murderous rage if someone else purchased Boardwalk or Park Place in a game of Monopoly when we were kids.
Oh, pfft. You know there's a difference between something that is alleged to provoke violence and something which is just fought over. Let's not be silly.
Wow, something every person who plays games already knows.
Well, I was thinking the same thing, except from the opposite direction. I'm was kind of skeptical about how he might have showed no link given the small sample group of school shooters and the difficulty in finding actual video game links, but there's really nothing of the sort here. He's largely just criticizing the methodology (or complete lack thereof) of most people howling about the link between video games and school shootings.
He's basically doing little more than pointing out the obvious, but not really proving his own point. It's very much a, "Here's some common sense, here's where most of the people talking about the supposed connection betray their ignorance, and here's some outrage and politics too" kind of article. Less science than editorial. (One with a decent point mind you, but let's not pretend this is proof of the opposite. He's just calling "BS.")
Anyone else think of Chocolate Underground when they read this review?
My point was that it is sad that the federal government is so large that they need yet another bureaucrat to support all the other bureaucrats.
Grow up. No private company of any size larger than a single office can get away without someone managing the infrastructure, and there's no way to manage an organization even the size of the smallest state governments without some organizational discipline.
If you think a society on the scale of the United States can function with a government small enough not to need anyone tracking the organization's infrastructure, you're living in a child's fantasy. The same kind of whimsical, small government fantasy that led to the mismanagement of the past 8 years.
So you're agreeing that [...yet another straw man].
*sigh* I'm getting tired of trying to explain myself to someone who can't or deliberately won't give any sign of understanding.
I just want to say this. Stop arguing this point. You make people who want to change the public's perception of copyright look bad. Let me give you an illustration.
I'm a liberal, and I have two conservative friends that I hang out with a lot. "T" is open to discussion of ideas, even if we disagree, and always thinks his positions out. "R" listens to Rush Limbaugh every day and is a knee-jerk conservative. Whenever the three of us talk politics, the T is often undermined and left in an embarrassing position by the R's "contributions" to the discussion because R can make any sensible position taken by T look stupid by aping talking points without good logical support for them, making lame partisan jokes, spouting half-truths, and quibbling minutiae that have little to do with the ultimate debate. It's gotten to the point where even thought T & R agree on almost all points politically, T has told R to "Shut up and let the grown-ups talk."
In the realm of copyright infringement, you're R. You and I probably agree on most points philosophically about copyright and property. But your debate technique stinks, and you're making our position look foolish. So stop it. This senseless quibbling over "it's not 'theft', it's 'infringement'" may look to you like you're trying to win some moral victory over some line that must not be crossed, but it's ignoring the larger debate over whether that the RIAA is doing is right or not. No, it's not "okay" for the RIAA to go around calling IP misappropriation "theft," but it works. It's effective strategy, and you're getting bogged down in tactics. Give this battle up and win the war elsewhere. If you're even interested in fighting it, which I don't see much evidence of. Maybe semantics is all you care about in this, but I think the stakes are higher.
But anyway, this post is probably just falling on deaf ears again.
I stopped using Digg *over two years ago* because it had become a worthless POS full of sensationalist-attention-getting-vacuous-submissions, a partisan, pack-modding, friend-promoting, adolescent-mentality, moronic, herd-driven mouth-breathing circle jerk.
(There was a really good critique of it on Kuro5hin, but it seems to have disappeared).
The irony of these two sentences back-to-back cannot be overstated.
However I must admit this doesn't always work, for example I was reviewing headphones and there was an elitist audio expert which marked them down.
To be fair, you were buying audio equipment. It could have been anything from not having gold-plated connectors or $3000/ft cables to not having cherry wood knobs or not having been shipped in crushed velvet inside a vacuum-sealed, anti-static pack.
Treadmill and bike at the same time? Doesn't he know you aren't suppose to multitask?
Maybe he just didn't want to get his feet dirty.
Morally, I don't think stealing a CD from a store owned by a rich man is any worse than stealing the same CD from the home owned by the same rich man. Or at least, I don't see why one would be considered more immoral than the other.
Interesting that they're both "rich men" suddenly, but I'd rather not beat a dead horse here.
Either way, copyright infringement is very different in that it isn't theft. It's copyright infringement. When I steal a CD, someone has lost a CD. When I infringe on someone's copyright, the creative work gets copied without the copyright owner's permission.
On that end of the transaction, they are different.
However, in both cases, the rightful owner of the property doesn't get paid for your gain. You get something for nothing, and the rightful owner is deprived of the value of their labor (or investment). On that end of the transaction, they are the same.
That's the part that allows the RIAA to hang their analogy on. Easy to see for the layman, and hard to fight against without looking foolish if you're unwilling to admit that part. Again, the legal niceties of licensing and infringement are lost on most people; "stealing" is easier to understand because it's something every one knows from when they were small children.
Popping back up the discussion stack a bit, a "reasonable person" gets the RIAA's argument intuitively. You have to explain yours because it's not intuitive to the common person raised in modern, western, property-focused society to think that you can take the end product of someone else's labor for free without owing them something, especially when they made it in the expectation that they could make money from it (and not just to be given away). Saying, "It's not 'stealing,' it's 'infringement,'" is technically accurate but meaningless as a rebuttal to the real message behind what the RIAA is saying: "It's wrong to do."
Playing games with the message instead of attacking it head on does nothing to counter that essential moral undercurrent. Saying, "It's just infringement!" is no more relevant to the average person than explaining the difference between larceny and embezzlement -- it's still taking something you haven't earned. You can't win like that, especially if you keep falling back to disingenuous arguments about what other people have said and what they mean.
Yes, and apparently you don't understand the meaning of the tag.
No, we understand the meaning of the phrase. We just don't find it very insightful. It's a knee-jerk comment that has become extremely tiresome with repetition. We know we don't have proof of a causal mechanism. That doesn't mean the correlation itself isn't interesting or exciting. Posting "correlation is not causation" just a great big "Bah, Humbug!" to the story and serves no productive purpose.
I'm seriously considering Troll-modding every post that rehashes this old argument in the future. I'm sick and tired of it.
I've posted this before but when Napster was in its height, I bought more CDs in the year I used Napster than in the 13 previous years I owned CD players. [...] As soon as the RIAA started making noise about filing suits I quit not only using Napster, but I also quit listening to [music] radio. [...] The RIAA has lost me as a big-spending customer. I track down USED CDs now, on the rare occasions I do buy.
Same here. I bought half of my CD collection during the year I used Napster. Most of the other half was from the years before. I have bought less than 10 CDs in the years since then (less than 5% of my collection), and almost all of those are later albums by bands I bought in that period or albums by indie artists not sold through the RIAA.
My tastes broadened immensely, and I went on buying frenzies because of being stoked about music because of Napster. Now, I hardly ever listen to the radio anymore, and I just can't get excited about music. I pretty much listen to NPR or podcasts in the car, and when I do listen to modern music (almost always because an NPR fund-raising drive has finally driven me nuts after several days), I just don't ever feel like buying an album. Part of it's the fact that my tastes in music have fossilized with age, but even when I do like a new group, I just don't want to give the RIAA my money. Screw 'em. They killed the goose that laid the golden egg.
The moral argument supporting private property rights is a product of scarcity, which doesn't apply to copyrights. Even the pro-copyright crowd doesn't really treat copyrights as though they were property; differences include time limits, statutory damages, higher penalties than are imposed for outright theft, etc.
Reproduction and distribution costs for intellectual property can be zero because there's no scarcity there, but there is scarcity of the resources that went into the initial creation -- at the very least the labor if nothing else.
I'm not saying that copyright should be treated exactly the same as physical property (so don't go putting words to that effect into my mouth), but saying there is no scarcity involved in the economics behind intellectual property is simply wrong. Copyrighted music does not just pop out of the ether into the hands of the RIAA to evilly horde from the public.
The government or military might be interested in your data, especially if you are not government or military. Especially if you are suspected of something. Whether or not it's true.
Assuming a government with infinite resources. Honestly, I'm no dittohead like the above poster might be, but I don't seriously worry about the government spending the money and effort to forensically scrub my drive for anything unless they had far easier to get evidence that it was worthwhile.
For example, a pedophile might have some incriminating evidence outside of an encrypted/wiped part of a hard drive that might suggest it was worthwhile -- like printed porn in his house, suspicious filenames in the "recent items" lists in the preferences of his programs, or logs in the governments possession of suspicious online activity. But if all you have is someone you'd *like* to lock up and a hard drive with empty space full of noise from a single random wipe, then it just isn't worth the trouble.
Of course, I'm in law school and have heard more of the prosecutor's side of things than most people. Prosecutors do have to worry about time and budget resources. Unless you think the federal government has some really good excuse to throw limitless time and money at you, you probably shouldn't worry. Forensics is *expensive* even without cracking open the platter and trying to painstakingly read info with an electron microscope. Mere searching of the live files on your system costs tens of thousands -- can you imagine how much days or weeks of electron microscope time + experts would cost? I'm thinking millions or more. No prosecutor wants to waste that kind of money on a shot in the dark.
And if you live far enough in conspiracy land to think you're a likely target for being "disappeared" or persecuted at all costs, then frankly *you* are a greater weak point than your hard drive for producing incriminating evidence. A little abusive detention would be a hell of a lot cheaper (and probably more fun for the jackboot squad).
That's why the DoD has lowered their standards to a single fixed wipe and to prove it is going to send all of their super secret hard drives to china to be proven that the data is unreadable.
Because the DoD makes ALL its decisions based on sound science. That's why the Air Force took over the CIA's sponsorship of remote viewing in 70s, why the Navy funded research into cold fusion and anti-grav, and why we're buying hand-held polygraphs for troops in Afghanistan.
I mean, I had the same knee jerk suspicion, but I'm not going to hold up the DoD's standards as proof of anything but potentially reasonable paranoia. The Pentagon has a long-demonstrated sweet tooth for junk science.
Kundra replaced all of D.C. gov's word and exchange infrastructure with google apps.
Wonder if he would push that for the whole federal government?
Would that be a good thing -- both in terms of changing from giving one powerful vendor a monopoly on services to another and in terms of security? Plus, would this really do anything to move us away from keeping things in MS formats since Google Apps work with them?
Well, which one has more horse sense?
I think we abandoned our horse-based IT infrastructure in the 1860s.
Would you have preferred instead a technologist from AT&T, Verizon, etc? Cisco is the "good guy" by comparison.
A) That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of better companies to choose from.
B) What makes Cisco a "good guy" in comparison? Who do you think it selling repressive regimes the technology to control the internet? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
C) How about someone competent at management instead of a "good guy" or "bad guy?" Cisco may be an industry juggernaut, but has the name Cisco ever been equated with awesome management in your mind? How about Motorola, which is where she's spent the vast majority of her career?
Maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction on my part, but the "DC brand" is less tarnished for IT in my mind than Motorola's and Cisco's are.
The fact that people are debating who should be the Technology Central Planner, instead of realizing that the very idea of one is silly and dangerous, shows that liberty is dead.
Gosh, I guess liberty is defined as the government having absolutely NO plan for how they spend money on their own IT infrastructure. I guess we should leave all that to random whim of local agency bureaucrats who have nothing better to work on.
Or are you some delusional crazy who thinks that the nation's CTO is going to be dictating (Soviet style) what direction development and product release the private sector must take. If that's true, then don't worry -- that's the responsibility of the alien/jew hybrids at the UN NWO committee who run the mind control laser satellites. All hail Lemuria! May her tendrils forever writhe in ecstasy!