It seems that a lot of people are talking as if the purpose of these lawsuits is for the music industry to make money from defendants. This notion seems unlikely, given that music is a multi-billion dollar (US) a year industry. The amount that they receive from these lawsuits is but the smallest fraction of their income. To me, it seems far more likely that the purpose is to instill fear of crippling lawsuits in individuals, thus dissuading them from illegally downloading music. The amount they receive directly from defendants is small, but their gain if they are able to prolong the expectation that people have of paying (and paying highly) for music is fantastically large. As such, even if they did have to pay far more in legal costs than they received in settlements and judgements, it is easily worth the cost.
The information I have is from the ideas that there is a general consensus on in the field of Psychology. Among the following, it is not known how much is culture vs. innate factors, but these are based on tests administered to very large numbers of people in many separate studies.
1. On average, men are slightly better at spacial reasoning than women. This slight difference is so small as to be absolutely dwarfed by the variation between members of the same sex.
2. Women may be slightly better at simple computation than men. Again, the difference is miniscule, requiring a huge sample size to be detectable.
3. In general, there is a bit more variation in ability among men: there are less moderate performing individuals, and more that are very good or very bad. Note that this effect is not large enough to substantially affect the proportion of men to women at any level except possibly a small fraction of the top percentile. (Interestingly, men tend to display a little more variation not only in math skills, but in a wide variety of qualities.)
Practically speaking, even assuming all differences are innate and not cultural, the they are so small that making policy decisions based on the assumption that men are much better as a whole doesn't make sense.
In my opinion, this man was simply trying to come up with an excuse for his poor performance at helping to change the "good ole boys" climate of higher-level science and engineering departments.
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It seems that a lot of people are talking as if the purpose of these lawsuits is for the music industry to make money from defendants. This notion seems unlikely, given that music is a multi-billion dollar (US) a year industry. The amount that they receive from these lawsuits is but the smallest fraction of their income. To me, it seems far more likely that the purpose is to instill fear of crippling lawsuits in individuals, thus dissuading them from illegally downloading music. The amount they receive directly from defendants is small, but their gain if they are able to prolong the expectation that people have of paying (and paying highly) for music is fantastically large. As such, even if they did have to pay far more in legal costs than they received in settlements and judgements, it is easily worth the cost.
(no sig)
The information I have is from the ideas that there is a general consensus on in the field of Psychology. Among the following, it is not known how much is culture vs. innate factors, but these are based on tests administered to very large numbers of people in many separate studies.
1. On average, men are slightly better at spacial reasoning than women. This slight difference is so small as to be absolutely dwarfed by the variation between members of the same sex.
2. Women may be slightly better at simple computation than men. Again, the difference is miniscule, requiring a huge sample size to be detectable.
3. In general, there is a bit more variation in ability among men: there are less moderate performing individuals, and more that are very good or very bad. Note that this effect is not large enough to substantially affect the proportion of men to women at any level except possibly a small fraction of the top percentile. (Interestingly, men tend to display a little more variation not only in math skills, but in a wide variety of qualities.)
Practically speaking, even assuming all differences are innate and not cultural, the they are so small that making policy decisions based on the assumption that men are much better as a whole doesn't make sense.
In my opinion, this man was simply trying to come up with an excuse for his poor performance at helping to change the "good ole boys" climate of higher-level science and engineering departments.
It's always about SCO. I'm still waiting to see a MS-DOS attack. Oh, wait...