Silly me. I thought the First Amendment allowed me to bitch until my heart is content.
You seem to be confusing your legal rights with whether or not you have any moral or logical leg to stand on. Many people do -- it's called having a sense of false entitlement.
If you want to change the system, vote for anyone except a Democrat or Republican. Any time another party looks like it might be competitive it will scare both parties into better behavior.
Except that you'll be voting, in effect, for the side that least embraces your beliefs most of the time.
Look at how Nader acted as a spoiler for Gore in Florida in 2000. Look how Perot acted as a spoiler for Bush in 1992. Look how Roosevelt split the Republican ticket with Taft in 1912 and got Wilson elected. How many Nader supporters do you think preferred Bush to Gore, and how many Perot supporters do you think preferred Clinton to Bush?
The major parties know this. This is why Republican Rick Santorum had his conservative fellows pump money into a Green Party challenger in his district to try to bleed off some votes from Bob Casey. (It didn't work. Romanelli couldn't get enough valid, legit signatures to get on the ballot, even with Republican financial support, and Santorum went down to Casey.)
Until we eliminate the first-past-the-post system of voting, a vote for a third party candidate is usually just shooting yourself in the foot.
It's just shocking the dissonance between the pre-computer way business was done back then (which makes you feel like you're looking at a wholly different time period) and how it seems like absolutely NOTHING has changed since then when you listen to Howard Beale's rants.
I mean, it's the past and it's today at the same time. It's eerie in a way that no deliberate attempt at creating an anachronism could be. There truly is nothing new under the sun.
*Sigh* Read up here. In short, the trend of "warming" on Mars is too short, Mars has a higher eccentricity to its orbit (meaning more fluctuation in its distance to the Sun) than Earth, and most importantly...
Solar radiance has been on the decline during this time period. If the Sun is such a dominant force in global climate change (on Earth and Mars), then why have temperatures supposedly been going UP on Mars while the radiance of the Sun has been going DOWN?
You people are just working so hard to maintain your happy delusions that you don't bother digging into the facts behind your claims. "(A) The Sun's output fluctuates. (B) Some glaciers on Mars are melting. That must mean that (I) the Sun's output is increasing, (II) all of Mars is warming (but let's not be too hasty about melting glaciers saying the same thing about Earth!), and therefore global warming is all the Sun's fault! Don't worry, be happy!"
The truth is that we have no evidence of *global* warming on Mars due to insufficient data on the planet's climate, and if the Sun was such an important influence, then the climate there should be *cooling* instead.
Pfft. I could take global warming deniers more seriously if they had ANY interest in getting to the objective truth instead of wrapping themselves in the most whatever scraps of information and half-truths they can use as a security blanket.
By the way, is it just me, or does the statement "Don't blame sun for global warming." not make you want to laugh on the face of it.
Why should it? Do you blame your stove and computer for the year-round temperature of your house or apartment, or are there more important forces at play?
Amphibian populations are notoriously hard to measure accurately. Populations rise and fall wildly. When you go out to do your first sample, if you're not careful there's often a heavy bias to picking the area with the highest population, so when you do your followup study and that pond has returned to a normal population, it looks like you've detected population decline.
See, now that's the first intelligent argument I've seen for not worrying as much about the problem. Is there any way to get a more accurate sampling of amphibian species, and is there a way to control for the noise, and is there any reason to presume your more likely to overcount population initially than undercount it?
The article starts out blaming man and herbicides, but then has to conclude that even areas free from herbicides, such as national parks "provide no refuge."
What areas free from pesticides? Maybe you didn't read the article:
"Atrazine is one of the more mobile and persistent pesticides being widely applied. In fact, residues have been found in remote, nonagricultural areas, such as the poles."
Places that are "protected from pollution" are not free of it. You'd be surprised just how much pollution there is in national parks.
So that is blamed on global warming (no doubt man-made), causing the ponds to dry out. Neither of these are supplemented with facts, but is all speculative. Frogs and salamanders are dying, so we must be causing it.
Two problems with these statements:
1) A problem may have multiple causes.
It's a widespread mental disease of today that people demand that experts must find THE source of the problem and fix IT. The three problems identified in the article are all major, separate contributors to amphibian decline. Each one may affect different species in different proportions. Fixing one will not solve the problem for all species, but it is not pointless for the species that it will save. (They do leave out habitat destruction, though.)
2) What do you mean "all speculative" and "not supplemented with facts?"
For crying out loud, the article references specific scientific studies. I decided to go searching for them:
Personally, I would like to have seen links to those studies in the article, but what more would you like to see? What is your standard for "speculation" v. "facts?"
We could have the perfect ecosystem for frogs and salamanders, and that would threaten some other species that found the weather too damp or warm to thrive. We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
Of course, they will continue dying out. That's nature. The issue is that they'll die out *much slower* than we're *currently* killing them off, and new species will evolve to fill the gaps. If you want to know what environment would be perfect for the frogs and salamanders, the answer would be the one they evolved to be adapted to. We're changing the world far faster than evolution can keep up.
In addition to what the previous person responding to your post mentioned, it's worth noting that some researchers think the most likely origin of the spread of this fungus to a wide range of habitats is due to widespread use of a research frog species from Africa, though there is some evidence that puts some doubt on that.
Another prominent theory is mentioned in the article you linked:
In Costa Rica's Cloud Forest Preserve of the Tropical Science Center, biologist J. Alan Pounds and his colleagues recently reported the total disappearance of the Monteverde harlequin frog, along with one golden toad species -- caused, he said in the journal Nature, by their increased susceptibility to chytrid disease as rising global temperatures have weakened their ability to resist the toxin.
In other words, chytrid is likely to either be an invasive species introduced around the world by human actions or a species that amphibians were previously able to resist before rising temperatures weakened them. Or both. Either way, saying "this time its [sic] not our fault" is disingenuous at best.
But even the containment of Chytrid might not be enough to save amphibians, which face a barrage of other threats including pollution, the introduction of alien species, habitat destruction, over-collection, and climate change.
Gosh, I guess we shouldn't worry at all then! I mean, if Chytrid is screwing them over, it's not like we should bother with climate change. I mean, why put out a cancer patient on fire? The cancer's going to kill 'em anyway.
Personally, I wouldn't take advice on the law or public policy from two jokers who make a living from misdirection and yelling profanity at reasoned arguments.
Furthermore, I wouldn't cite as evidence of how horrible the ESA is a video that builds part of its argument around the notion that there is no mass extinction event going on right now in an article about a mass extinction event going on right now.
Good Lord, give me back the past 30 minutes of my life. What an irritating mishmash of profanity, name-calling, and irrational conservative talking points. Lindy's story was kind of sad, but the impact of the story was blunted severely by all the smug, sneering, venomous, and immature posturing that overlay it.
You say there is no need to multi-boot because OSX does everything perfectly. I submit that OSX does nothing perfectly, but everything well, which makes it useless to me.
You're apparently incapable of comprehending something as simple as +1 and -1 = 0.
And you're incapable of understanding systems with more than two elements. The unwillingness of a single person to download a file 1000x is utterly irrelevant to the willingness of a single person to upload that file 1000x to an unknown number of people.
This is why the internet is such a horrible place to exchanging information. All you have are immature ignorant fools posting what ever they feel like. All they do is complain-complain-complain, bitch-bitch-bitch, whine-whine-whine. It's fucking ridiculous. It's so hard to find any thing good anymore. You know, good intellectual conversations, hello?!!?. Even Slashdot has it problems. And surely, you can't keep these people from posting on anything, they'll just fucking lie and make a new account.
I really do think the internet, the forums, blogs, whatever...really suck!
I understand where you're coming from. Really, I do....But the demonstration was wholly unnecessary.
EA makes great games, most of which I have played through and through.
I'll always buy their games, if it interests me, as most of their titles have.
Considering the sheer, raw volume of titles that EA pumps out every year, for this to be true, you'd have be a serious fanboy of this company to invest that much time and money into them. I don't think we should really consider your opinion as objective and particularly valid, ignoring the fact that the content that followed the above was pretty much also the kind of wounded, defensive spew of hate and profanity that only a serious fanboy could unleash in defense of the object of their worship.
But we can watch scantily clad ladies dancing around and gangstas promoting the dirty life?
Do they promote consumption, particularly of goods sold by the advertisers on MTV?
Then, yes.
(And MTV still shows videos? Do they ever run in timeslots where you don't have fear losing ratings to the infomercial for the juicing machine and the $50 sit-up machine?)
This whole discussion is not about details on statistics.
YES. IT. IS!! The entire reason I've been replying to you is because to defended some bad math by MadUndergrad. The whole reason I posted in the first place was *because* of that bad math.
This entire discussion has been about bad math! Maybe that fundamental misunderstanding is part of why you keep GETTING IT WRONG.
Nice straw man. You have so many unfounded assumptions there, it's laughable. You're assuming that A. the average user is going to leave his P2P client online and allow other people to download at max upload continuously for that duration of time, B. that's the only song he has that anyone is downloading, C. the MP3 is going to be popular enough that in that short duration it's actually going to be uploaded that much. And to make all that happen, the user has to be sharing just one small MP3. So thanks for proving my point - it's completely impossible for the average P2P user to be sharing their stuff to more than a couple of people.
I... I don't even know where to start.
First, it's not a straw man. To be a straw man, I would have to be (falsely) presenting something as your argument and then tearing it down. What you've quoted is me giving an example of how people can easily share files more than a 1:1 ratio. If you don't understand what debate terms mean, don't toss them in to try (and fail) to make yourself look smarter.
Second, in no way did I suggest that someone is going to leave their client open for a long time *with unlimited use of his bandwidth.* Did you not see the part where I mentioned that you cap the upload bandwidth at 32 Kbps? I don't know about you, but that's about 1/4 of bandwidth of a cheapo residential DSL connection in most of America, and it's about 1/20 of the upload bandwidth of my connection. That's chump change.
As for leaving their client open for days at a time -- yes, I assume that some people would do this. I only know one person who leeches P2P and refuses to leave their client open for one second more than it takes to get the file (and to heck with seeding). Most people I know leave their clients open overnight or when they're away from home. You don't have a choice really with eDonkey2000 if you're looking for obscure files because they take so damned long to download because it can be hours or days before you get a slot in someone's queue to get a piece of the file. Downloading 1 GB file from eDonkey2000 can take literally a week, and just because your download queue is idle doesn't mean your upload queue is.
Third, you don't have to only share one file to have only one file people are interested in (while ignoring the rest of your collection), and if you're sharing *multiple* MP3s, you're more likely to be guilty of *more* acts of infringement, not less. But forgive me for simplifying the problem in the vain hope that you would understand the math.
Last, "impossible." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. You seem to equate "impossible" with "improbable." The two are not synonyms. Stop thinking that they are. This entire discussion is about whether or not it's "impossible" for a P2P user to share a file 1000 times and whether or not there is any validity MadUndergrad's and -- I guess at this point I can tarnish you with the same brush of math illiteracy -- your argument that no one making a file available could be liable for more than 2-3 acts of infingement.
And in case you haven't noticed, that's the whole argument. I'm saying it's possible and that you can't seriously believe that no one ever shares a file more than 2-3 times just because no one would download a single file 1000 times. Please, try to understand what I'm actually talking about before attacking it.
Sure there is. The physical supply in the case of P2P is how much upload bandwidth you have. Even running 24/7 doing not
Let's say you cap your client at an upload rate of 32 Kbps. If you have a popular, 4 MB, MP3 file on your system, you can upload a full copy roughly every 2 minutes. In a single day, that's over 700 copies of the file uploaded.
That should be one file every 16 minutes, and about 90 copies per day. Forgot the Kbps v. KBps distinction when doing the math.
You apparently aren't getting how averages work. It doesn't matter who *actually* does the uploading.
And you aren't getting how *averages* have absolutely nothing to do with the *actual* number of uploads an *individual* person does.
Saying that people, on average, have a 1:1 upload:download ratio says absolutely nothing about how that average is distributed. You could have 500 "good citizens" with a 2:1 ratio and 500 "parasites" with a 1:2 ratio. You could have 1 person only uploading the file and 9999 people only downloading it. Chances are that you'll probably see a bell curve or something similar, with most people hovering around the average, some people being leeches, and some people being seeders.
You fail statistics forever for not understanding this.
And most people won't sit there and upload 40x as much as they download (let alone 1,000x). No matter how you slice it, the average user cannot upload everything they download at a 40:1 ratio. It's a mathematical impossibility.
And this has absolutely nothing to do with whether an individual user uploaded a file 2x, 40x, or 1000x or not. Again, you cannot claim that someone is only liable for the actions of an AVERAGE user -- only their own actions.
You can't have it both ways, and you certainly can't have everyone uploading everything 1,000 times. But again, all you need to prove upload ratio one way or the other on a case by case basis is download and upload usage stats.
You don't need everyone uploading everything 1000 times for it to be possible for one person to upload one file 1000 times. Got it memorized?
Problem is though, the RIAA doesn't even try to determine how much their scapegoats are actually uploading, let alone try to go after the ones that actually might be uploading such large amounts. What they're currently doing is like treating every person who's ever smoked a joint as a top-level drug dealer because there's "thousands of people they might have given drugs to", and never mind the fact that they couldn't possibly have done it because they have never had that kind of supply.
The laxness of the RIAA's "it's possible" case is something to decry in its own right, but it's absolute insanity to say the opposite -- that it's completely impossible.
For one thing, it's simply not. If you leave Gnutella or eDonkey2000 running for days at a time, it's easily possible to continuously upload a file. Let's say you cap your client at an upload rate of 32 Kbps. If you have a popular, 4 MB, MP3 file on your system, you can upload a full copy roughly every 2 minutes. In a single day, that's over 700 copies of the file uploaded. (Most I may or may not have at some point seen was 60:1 over 2 days, though.)
For another thing, your drug metaphor is idiotic because, unlike a smoking joint, there is no physical supply of data to run out of. If that's your best argument, then it's no wonder you can't seem to understand this problem.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that sharing a file and liability have another wrinkle to consider -- contributory infringement liability. A defendant may have contributory infringement liability when they, "with knowledge of the infringing activity, induces, causes, or materially contributes to the infringing conduct of another." This is part of the RIAA's "making available" theory of liability. The idea is that one person making a single file available (to say 3 people) "induces, causes, or materially contributes" to the copyright infringement that occurs when *they* share the file and so on.
Now the RIAA has serious problems in proving the chain of causality here, but that's a discussion for people who are interested in the law, and you can't even get basic statistics and sampling down, so I'll leave it at that.
His post is about the average user. AVERAGE. Got it? Peer to peer is a 1:1 transfer. Nothing is uploaded and just 'disappears'. Nothing is uploaded and just automagically dispersed to 1,000 people. The only time something is uploaded is if it is being downloaded. Therefore, if the average user downloads an item 1-2 times, the average user also uploads that item 1-2 times. You do know what average means, right? Because that's the point you seem to keep missing.
The point you are continually missing that I've brought up in every single post is that the average user doesn't upload a file to only a single person. If 30 other average users "[download] an item 1-2 times," then the user that was sharing the file has uploaded the file 30-60 times.
Get it now? Unlike MadUndergrad's asserts, which you continuously defend, there is no 1:1 connection between the number of times an average user would download a single file and the number of times an average user would upload a single file because each user downloading only wants the file once, but any number of people can want the same file.
Depending on your file sharing service, you may end up seeding a file many times its original size. On BitTorrent, people tend to share files to a 1:1 ratio because each file is *individually shared*, but services like Gnutella or eDonkey2000, which share an entire directory of files, can be sluggish enough on downloads that a popular file on your system gets shared up over 40:1 before you can get the other files that you wanted to download during a session and close the program. (Not that I've seen this happen with certain popular PDF files while downloading a movie or anything...)
Do you get it now?
And the situation is made *even worse* in reality by the fact that while people don't always share *all* of the file, file fragments for downloading almost certainly do not count for fair use. If 10 users want a file seeded by 4 people, the seeds are (on average) going to distribute <2.5 copies of the file, but they may *share to* (and distribute derivative works to) 10 people.
The whole, "Each person only wants a file 1-3 times, so I can only be said to share it 1-3 times" argument is NONSENSE based on how P2P works and based on how people actually *use* P2P.
For just one person to upload the same file 1,000 times, you have to have 1,000 people who don't upload any of that file. And you'll find very very few people who are going to let other downloaders leech even enough for a 50-1 ratio.
Well, now that's a different problem entirely, isn't it?
We know that if 1000 people get a file that was seeded by a single peer originally, that peer must have uploaded between 1-1000x the size of the file in bytes. We don't know if the seed provides all of the data for those copies or if peers supplied other peers with it.
However, that's not the weird math that MadUndergrad originally was proposing (that you jumped into defend). His argument was -- and I requote here because I'm not sure you read it:
If the average user shares song X 1000 times, then the average user downloads song X 1000 times. Who the hell downloads a given song 1000 times? Most/all p2p is not streaming. They'd download it several times, tops. The average user thus only shares a given song maybe 2 or three times. Without proof to the contrary, that is what has to be assumed.
He's talking about downloads here. "Who the hell downloads a given song 1000 times?... They'd download it several times, tops. The average user thus only shares a given song maybe 2 or three times."
MadUndergrad's argument is not about how much the peers are responsible for the uploading and sharing of data -- it's that since no one peer will download a file more than "several times, tops" that people can't be shown to have shared a song more than 2-3 times. His argument advocates that the only amount of liability you can have for sharing is the most that a single peer would download from you.
Okay, since you stepped up, please explain this line from MadUndergrad's post above: "Who the hell downloads a given song 1000 times?"
No one does. 1 person uploads a song 1000 times. 1000 different people download it 1 time each. Maybe a few of those people download it twice, but no one person is responsible for all the downloads as implied by the above statement.
MadUndergrad makes the statement that each individual only downloads a song 2-3 times tops and that that's all you can assume when a file is shared for purposes of damages. But that's nuts. Sharing happens each time anyone downloads a song, not the maximum number of times any *one* user does.
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Silly me. I thought the First Amendment allowed me to bitch until my heart is content.
You seem to be confusing your legal rights with whether or not you have any moral or logical leg to stand on. Many people do -- it's called having a sense of false entitlement.
If you want to change the system, vote for anyone except a Democrat or Republican. Any time another party looks like it might be competitive it will scare both parties into better behavior.
Except that you'll be voting, in effect, for the side that least embraces your beliefs most of the time.
Look at how Nader acted as a spoiler for Gore in Florida in 2000. Look how Perot acted as a spoiler for Bush in 1992. Look how Roosevelt split the Republican ticket with Taft in 1912 and got Wilson elected. How many Nader supporters do you think preferred Bush to Gore, and how many Perot supporters do you think preferred Clinton to Bush?
The major parties know this. This is why Republican Rick Santorum had his conservative fellows pump money into a Green Party challenger in his district to try to bleed off some votes from Bob Casey. (It didn't work. Romanelli couldn't get enough valid, legit signatures to get on the ballot, even with Republican financial support, and Santorum went down to Casey.)
Until we eliminate the first-past-the-post system of voting, a vote for a third party candidate is usually just shooting yourself in the foot.
It's just shocking the dissonance between the pre-computer way business was done back then (which makes you feel like you're looking at a wholly different time period) and how it seems like absolutely NOTHING has changed since then when you listen to Howard Beale's rants.
I mean, it's the past and it's today at the same time. It's eerie in a way that no deliberate attempt at creating an anachronism could be. There truly is nothing new under the sun.
mars has melting ice caps, explain that one away?
*Sigh* Read up here. In short, the trend of "warming" on Mars is too short, Mars has a higher eccentricity to its orbit (meaning more fluctuation in its distance to the Sun) than Earth, and most importantly...
Solar radiance has been on the decline during this time period. If the Sun is such a dominant force in global climate change (on Earth and Mars), then why have temperatures supposedly been going UP on Mars while the radiance of the Sun has been going DOWN?
You people are just working so hard to maintain your happy delusions that you don't bother digging into the facts behind your claims. "(A) The Sun's output fluctuates. (B) Some glaciers on Mars are melting. That must mean that (I) the Sun's output is increasing, (II) all of Mars is warming (but let's not be too hasty about melting glaciers saying the same thing about Earth!), and therefore global warming is all the Sun's fault! Don't worry, be happy!"
The truth is that we have no evidence of *global* warming on Mars due to insufficient data on the planet's climate, and if the Sun was such an important influence, then the climate there should be *cooling* instead.
Pfft. I could take global warming deniers more seriously if they had ANY interest in getting to the objective truth instead of wrapping themselves in the most whatever scraps of information and half-truths they can use as a security blanket.
Funny, why is Man exempt from that rule, when it's our inability to overcome basic human nature that's lead to this situation?
Sooner or later, we have to adapt or die.
By the way, is it just me, or does the statement "Don't blame sun for global warming." not make you want to laugh on the face of it.
Why should it? Do you blame your stove and computer for the year-round temperature of your house or apartment, or are there more important forces at play?
I prefer in the silicon myself, but mayhaps we have both been reading too much Kurzweil.
Amphibian populations are notoriously hard to measure accurately. Populations rise and fall wildly. When you go out to do your first sample, if you're not careful there's often a heavy bias to picking the area with the highest population, so when you do your followup study and that pond has returned to a normal population, it looks like you've detected population decline.
See, now that's the first intelligent argument I've seen for not worrying as much about the problem. Is there any way to get a more accurate sampling of amphibian species, and is there a way to control for the noise, and is there any reason to presume your more likely to overcount population initially than undercount it?
The article starts out blaming man and herbicides, but then has to conclude that even areas free from herbicides, such as national parks "provide no refuge."
What areas free from pesticides? Maybe you didn't read the article:
"Atrazine is one of the more mobile and persistent pesticides being widely applied. In fact, residues have been found in remote, nonagricultural areas, such as the poles."
Places that are "protected from pollution" are not free of it. You'd be surprised just how much pollution there is in national parks.
So that is blamed on global warming (no doubt man-made), causing the ponds to dry out. Neither of these are supplemented with facts, but is all speculative. Frogs and salamanders are dying, so we must be causing it.
Two problems with these statements:
1) A problem may have multiple causes.
It's a widespread mental disease of today that people demand that experts must find THE source of the problem and fix IT. The three problems identified in the article are all major, separate contributors to amphibian decline. Each one may affect different species in different proportions. Fixing one will not solve the problem for all species, but it is not pointless for the species that it will save. (They do leave out habitat destruction, though.)
2) What do you mean "all speculative" and "not supplemented with facts?"
For crying out loud, the article references specific scientific studies. I decided to go searching for them:
Personally, I would like to have seen links to those studies in the article, but what more would you like to see? What is your standard for "speculation" v. "facts?"
We could have the perfect ecosystem for frogs and salamanders, and that would threaten some other species that found the weather too damp or warm to thrive. We blame ourselves for everything, when in fact there's no evidence that, if we all vanished tomorrow, animals wouldn't continue to die out as they always have.
Of course, they will continue dying out. That's nature. The issue is that they'll die out *much slower* than we're *currently* killing them off, and new species will evolve to fill the gaps. If you want to know what environment would be perfect for the frogs and salamanders, the answer would be the one they evolved to be adapted to. We're changing the world far faster than evolution can keep up.
In addition to what the previous person responding to your post mentioned, it's worth noting that some researchers think the most likely origin of the spread of this fungus to a wide range of habitats is due to widespread use of a research frog species from Africa, though there is some evidence that puts some doubt on that.
Another prominent theory is mentioned in the article you linked:
In Costa Rica's Cloud Forest Preserve of the Tropical Science Center, biologist J. Alan Pounds and his colleagues recently reported the total disappearance of the Monteverde harlequin frog, along with one golden toad species -- caused, he said in the journal Nature, by their increased susceptibility to chytrid disease as rising global temperatures have weakened their ability to resist the toxin.
In other words, chytrid is likely to either be an invasive species introduced around the world by human actions or a species that amphibians were previously able to resist before rising temperatures weakened them. Or both. Either way, saying "this time its [sic] not our fault" is disingenuous at best.
But even the containment of Chytrid might not be enough to save amphibians, which face a barrage of other threats including pollution, the introduction of alien species, habitat destruction, over-collection, and climate change.
Gosh, I guess we shouldn't worry at all then! I mean, if Chytrid is screwing them over, it's not like we should bother with climate change. I mean, why put out a cancer patient on fire? The cancer's going to kill 'em anyway.
Personally, I wouldn't take advice on the law or public policy from two jokers who make a living from misdirection and yelling profanity at reasoned arguments.
Furthermore, I wouldn't cite as evidence of how horrible the ESA is a video that builds part of its argument around the notion that there is no mass extinction event going on right now in an article about a mass extinction event going on right now.
Good Lord, give me back the past 30 minutes of my life. What an irritating mishmash of profanity, name-calling, and irrational conservative talking points. Lindy's story was kind of sad, but the impact of the story was blunted severely by all the smug, sneering, venomous, and immature posturing that overlay it.
You say there is no need to multi-boot because OSX does everything perfectly. I submit that OSX does nothing perfectly, but everything well, which makes it useless to me.
Y.. you're one tough customer to please!
You're apparently incapable of comprehending something as simple as +1 and -1 = 0.
And you're incapable of understanding systems with more than two elements.
The unwillingness of a single person to download a file 1000x is utterly irrelevant to the willingness of a single person to upload that file 1000x to an unknown number of people.
This is why the internet is such a horrible place to exchanging information. All you have are immature ignorant fools posting what ever they feel like. All they do is complain-complain-complain, bitch-bitch-bitch, whine-whine-whine. It's fucking ridiculous. It's so hard to find any thing good anymore. You know, good intellectual conversations, hello?!!?. Even Slashdot has it problems. And surely, you can't keep these people from posting on anything, they'll just fucking lie and make a new account.
I really do think the internet, the forums, blogs, whatever...really suck!
I understand where you're coming from. Really, I do. ...But the demonstration was wholly unnecessary.
EA makes great games, most of which I have played through and through.
I'll always buy their games, if it interests me, as most of their titles have.
Considering the sheer, raw volume of titles that EA pumps out every year, for this to be true, you'd have be a serious fanboy of this company to invest that much time and money into them. I don't think we should really consider your opinion as objective and particularly valid, ignoring the fact that the content that followed the above was pretty much also the kind of wounded, defensive spew of hate and profanity that only a serious fanboy could unleash in defense of the object of their worship.
Oh, there's aren't, really, but don't think you're escaping corporate America by going from one media company to another.
You mean you weren't engaging in rather sharp and witty irony?
That's... kind of sad, actually.
But we can watch scantily clad ladies dancing around and gangstas promoting the dirty life?
Do they promote consumption, particularly of goods sold by the advertisers on MTV?
Then, yes.
(And MTV still shows videos? Do they ever run in timeslots where you don't have fear losing ratings to the infomercial for the juicing machine and the $50 sit-up machine?)
This whole discussion is not about details on statistics.
YES. IT. IS!! The entire reason I've been replying to you is because to defended some bad math by MadUndergrad. The whole reason I posted in the first place was *because* of that bad math.
This entire discussion has been about bad math! Maybe that fundamental misunderstanding is part of why you keep GETTING IT WRONG.
Nice straw man. You have so many unfounded assumptions there, it's laughable. You're assuming that A. the average user is going to leave his P2P client online and allow other people to download at max upload continuously for that duration of time, B. that's the only song he has that anyone is downloading, C. the MP3 is going to be popular enough that in that short duration it's actually going to be uploaded that much. And to make all that happen, the user has to be sharing just one small MP3. So thanks for proving my point - it's completely impossible for the average P2P user to be sharing their stuff to more than a couple of people.
I... I don't even know where to start.
First, it's not a straw man. To be a straw man, I would have to be (falsely) presenting something as your argument and then tearing it down. What you've quoted is me giving an example of how people can easily share files more than a 1:1 ratio. If you don't understand what debate terms mean, don't toss them in to try (and fail) to make yourself look smarter.
Second, in no way did I suggest that someone is going to leave their client open for a long time *with unlimited use of his bandwidth.* Did you not see the part where I mentioned that you cap the upload bandwidth at 32 Kbps? I don't know about you, but that's about 1/4 of bandwidth of a cheapo residential DSL connection in most of America, and it's about 1/20 of the upload bandwidth of my connection. That's chump change.
As for leaving their client open for days at a time -- yes, I assume that some people would do this. I only know one person who leeches P2P and refuses to leave their client open for one second more than it takes to get the file (and to heck with seeding). Most people I know leave their clients open overnight or when they're away from home. You don't have a choice really with eDonkey2000 if you're looking for obscure files because they take so damned long to download because it can be hours or days before you get a slot in someone's queue to get a piece of the file. Downloading 1 GB file from eDonkey2000 can take literally a week, and just because your download queue is idle doesn't mean your upload queue is.
Third, you don't have to only share one file to have only one file people are interested in (while ignoring the rest of your collection), and if you're sharing *multiple* MP3s, you're more likely to be guilty of *more* acts of infringement, not less. But forgive me for simplifying the problem in the vain hope that you would understand the math.
Last, "impossible." You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. You seem to equate "impossible" with "improbable." The two are not synonyms. Stop thinking that they are. This entire discussion is about whether or not it's "impossible" for a P2P user to share a file 1000 times and whether or not there is any validity MadUndergrad's and -- I guess at this point I can tarnish you with the same brush of math illiteracy -- your argument that no one making a file available could be liable for more than 2-3 acts of infingement.
And in case you haven't noticed, that's the whole argument. I'm saying it's possible and that you can't seriously believe that no one ever shares a file more than 2-3 times just because no one would download a single file 1000 times. Please, try to understand what I'm actually talking about before attacking it.
Sure there is. The physical supply in the case of P2P is how much upload bandwidth you have. Even running 24/7 doing not
Minor correction:
Let's say you cap your client at an upload rate of 32 Kbps. If you have a popular, 4 MB, MP3 file on your system, you can upload a full copy roughly every 2 minutes. In a single day, that's over 700 copies of the file uploaded.
That should be one file every 16 minutes, and about 90 copies per day. Forgot the Kbps v. KBps distinction when doing the math.
You apparently aren't getting how averages work. It doesn't matter who *actually* does the uploading.
And you aren't getting how *averages* have absolutely nothing to do with the *actual* number of uploads an *individual* person does.
Saying that people, on average, have a 1:1 upload:download ratio says absolutely nothing about how that average is distributed. You could have 500 "good citizens" with a 2:1 ratio and 500 "parasites" with a 1:2 ratio. You could have 1 person only uploading the file and 9999 people only downloading it. Chances are that you'll probably see a bell curve or something similar, with most people hovering around the average, some people being leeches, and some people being seeders.
You fail statistics forever for not understanding this.
And most people won't sit there and upload 40x as much as they download (let alone 1,000x). No matter how you slice it, the average user cannot upload everything they download at a 40:1 ratio. It's a mathematical impossibility.
And this has absolutely nothing to do with whether an individual user uploaded a file 2x, 40x, or 1000x or not. Again, you cannot claim that someone is only liable for the actions of an AVERAGE user -- only their own actions.
You can't have it both ways, and you certainly can't have everyone uploading everything 1,000 times. But again, all you need to prove upload ratio one way or the other on a case by case basis is download and upload usage stats.
You don't need everyone uploading everything 1000 times for it to be possible for one person to upload one file 1000 times. Got it memorized?
Problem is though, the RIAA doesn't even try to determine how much their scapegoats are actually uploading, let alone try to go after the ones that actually might be uploading such large amounts. What they're currently doing is like treating every person who's ever smoked a joint as a top-level drug dealer because there's "thousands of people they might have given drugs to", and never mind the fact that they couldn't possibly have done it because they have never had that kind of supply.
The laxness of the RIAA's "it's possible" case is something to decry in its own right, but it's absolute insanity to say the opposite -- that it's completely impossible.
For one thing, it's simply not. If you leave Gnutella or eDonkey2000 running for days at a time, it's easily possible to continuously upload a file. Let's say you cap your client at an upload rate of 32 Kbps. If you have a popular, 4 MB, MP3 file on your system, you can upload a full copy roughly every 2 minutes. In a single day, that's over 700 copies of the file uploaded. (Most I may or may not have at some point seen was 60:1 over 2 days, though.)
For another thing, your drug metaphor is idiotic because, unlike a smoking joint, there is no physical supply of data to run out of. If that's your best argument, then it's no wonder you can't seem to understand this problem.
Lastly, I'd like to point out that sharing a file and liability have another wrinkle to consider -- contributory infringement liability. A defendant may have contributory infringement liability when they, "with knowledge of the infringing activity, induces, causes, or materially contributes to the infringing conduct of another." This is part of the RIAA's "making available" theory of liability. The idea is that one person making a single file available (to say 3 people) "induces, causes, or materially contributes" to the copyright infringement that occurs when *they* share the file and so on.
Now the RIAA has serious problems in proving the chain of causality here, but that's a discussion for people who are interested in the law, and you can't even get basic statistics and sampling down, so I'll leave it at that.
His post is about the average user. AVERAGE. Got it? Peer to peer is a 1:1 transfer. Nothing is uploaded and just 'disappears'. Nothing is uploaded and just automagically dispersed to 1,000 people. The only time something is uploaded is if it is being downloaded. Therefore, if the average user downloads an item 1-2 times, the average user also uploads that item 1-2 times. You do know what average means, right? Because that's the point you seem to keep missing.
The point you are continually missing that I've brought up in every single post is that the average user doesn't upload a file to only a single person. If 30 other average users "[download] an item 1-2 times," then the user that was sharing the file has uploaded the file 30-60 times.
Get it now? Unlike MadUndergrad's asserts, which you continuously defend, there is no 1:1 connection between the number of times an average user would download a single file and the number of times an average user would upload a single file because each user downloading only wants the file once, but any number of people can want the same file.
Depending on your file sharing service, you may end up seeding a file many times its original size. On BitTorrent, people tend to share files to a 1:1 ratio because each file is *individually shared*, but services like Gnutella or eDonkey2000, which share an entire directory of files, can be sluggish enough on downloads that a popular file on your system gets shared up over 40:1 before you can get the other files that you wanted to download during a session and close the program. (Not that I've seen this happen with certain popular PDF files while downloading a movie or anything...)
Do you get it now?
And the situation is made *even worse* in reality by the fact that while people don't always share *all* of the file, file fragments for downloading almost certainly do not count for fair use. If 10 users want a file seeded by 4 people, the seeds are (on average) going to distribute <2.5 copies of the file, but they may *share to* (and distribute derivative works to) 10 people.
The whole, "Each person only wants a file 1-3 times, so I can only be said to share it 1-3 times" argument is NONSENSE based on how P2P works and based on how people actually *use* P2P.
For just one person to upload the same file 1,000 times, you have to have 1,000 people who don't upload any of that file. And you'll find very very few people who are going to let other downloaders leech even enough for a 50-1 ratio.
Well, now that's a different problem entirely, isn't it?
We know that if 1000 people get a file that was seeded by a single peer originally, that peer must have uploaded between 1-1000x the size of the file in bytes. We don't know if the seed provides all of the data for those copies or if peers supplied other peers with it.
However, that's not the weird math that MadUndergrad originally was proposing (that you jumped into defend). His argument was -- and I requote here because I'm not sure you read it:
If the average user shares song X 1000 times, then the average user downloads song X 1000 times. Who the hell downloads a given song 1000 times? Most/all p2p is not streaming. They'd download it several times, tops. The average user thus only shares a given song maybe 2 or three times. Without proof to the contrary, that is what has to be assumed.
He's talking about downloads here. "Who the hell downloads a given song 1000 times? ... They'd download it several times, tops. The average user thus only shares a given song maybe 2 or three times."
MadUndergrad's argument is not about how much the peers are responsible for the uploading and sharing of data -- it's that since no one peer will download a file more than "several times, tops" that people can't be shown to have shared a song more than 2-3 times. His argument advocates that the only amount of liability you can have for sharing is the most that a single peer would download from you.
And that's crazy talk.
How often does this have to be explained??
Okay, since you stepped up, please explain this line from MadUndergrad's post above:
"Who the hell downloads a given song 1000 times?"
No one does. 1 person uploads a song 1000 times. 1000 different people download it 1 time each. Maybe a few of those people download it twice, but no one person is responsible for all the downloads as implied by the above statement.
MadUndergrad makes the statement that each individual only downloads a song 2-3 times tops and that that's all you can assume when a file is shared for purposes of damages. But that's nuts. Sharing happens each time anyone downloads a song, not the maximum number of times any *one* user does.