"Hi kids, today's topic is copyright law and how we're allowed to copy anything we like because we're a multi-billion dollar company and can afford more lawyers than God, while you're just a schlep at a computer who's going to have their ass sued and thrown into jail.
By the way have you heard of Google books....that's right if you can't find it at a used book store, chances are we've copied it to put online.
So remember kids, don't infringe copyright. Let us do it for you, and enjoy the ads!"
I went back to college at age 38 after I had gotten divorced. At 42 I am still in college since the pool of available, good looking and non-desperate women is far larger than anywhere else I might go.
Plus you have a common interest/past time (college), you get to see them when they are not fucked up or drunk as hell, and for the best part, your competition is usually a bunch of young bucks who have as much skills in forming relationships of the short and fun type as a monkey does of quantum physics.
4 years, going on 5 and have not dated or had sex with a woman older than 26 since I started back to college. And since there are so many, you can have really high standards and still have plenty to pick from.
If you're staying in school JUST to sleep with young women, all you've discovered is how to be a dirty old man. It's not new. You're just using college as your personal playboy mansion.
If your relationship is going to move from casual/superficial to something more serious, finding someone your own age and level maturity has a lot of advantages over dating a bunch of mentally unstable experimental college girls who haven't worked out what they want from life. Meanwhile as you get older you'll find less and less 26 year olds willing to date/sleep with you.
In one of the books I read as a young person, self gratification was depreciated as a viable form of expression because if overused it could prevent the development of reasonable normal form of social interaction.
Funny no one gave me a book, I was just told I'd go blind;-)
But dating is just going out and having fun. Not Expensvie.
Are you kidding me? Or do you just watch downloaded movies and take your dates to Maccas?
Even if you go dutch, a good date can be expensive. I would take my wife whale watching, to the zoo etc. when we first got together. No regrets at all.
This is why the SteamID is put in the error message.
Oh well it's Steam and it includes a SteamID, so it must be perfect and bug free and could only every correctly identify genuine pirates.
Are you lot listening to yourselves? Slashdot has fallen big time when idiocy like this becomes the norm and a legitimate comment gets modded down because people don't like having their favourite DRM criticised. Shame on the lot of you. You reap what you sew.
If you are pioneering a completely new language, why not pioneer a new virtual machine, and lawyer up and make sure Oracle doesn't have any grounds to sue you?
steveha
Because it might be cheaper to buy Oracle than lawyer up against it?
Calling your customer a pirate on a public forum without very solid proof , even jovially is not smart (and may even be legally actionable).
1. How does he know there's no bug in his copy protection code that does not inadvertently trigger for legitimate users under ANY circumstance
2. How does he know the people "pirating" haven't paid for a legit copy and decided to get around all the BS restrictions by using a crack anyway.
I have personally encountered situation 1 before in freeware of all things. The Vista Australis freeware mod developers accused people who were seeing a particular bug in their of being pirates, because pirating MS Flight Sim 2004 could cause the information about the install directory in the registry to be missing. It turned out there was a particular circumstance, which happened to me, under which the bug was triggered even without any kind of piracy. I had never pirated the game. I didn't take kindly to being called a pirate, and was labelled a trouble maker on the forum for pointing out that accusing people of piracy without proof wasn't right even if the software they developed was fantastic and free (which it was), and even if the accusation was jovial.
This is not an example of a fun way of catching pirates. It's an example of a software developer over-estimating his cleverness and acting like an ass.
The amusing thing about your post is you just confirmed what he said. You didn't get infected by just hooking up to the Net (as was the case in the old days -- no browsing required), and you fell into the category of an outdated Adobe product. You were even saved by Microsoft Security Essentials.
You need a basic lesson in logic if you think that confirms what he says. I've demonstrated one instance of what he says BUT also demonstrated that several of the defenses I used were defeated. If my antivirus had not picked the file up as a trojan my PC would have been trashed. No antivirus has a 100% detection rate. So having an exploit get so far as to actually start a process that Security Essentials blocked is downright scary.
What more do you want? By the way, as for Adobe Reader, disable browser integration. Seriously. I'm also pretty sure the latest Reader products check for updates automatically, so if you're running an older product with known and fixed bugs, what's your excuse?
Are you kidding me????? What do I want? An environment where browsing to a web page doesn't automatically execute anything outside the browser. A product that is patched well enough so that new exploits aren't discovered every other week. Are you seriously telling me a product that requires updates every week to stay safe is a good one?
As there were members of both genders involved in the dancing your comment doesn't make any sense.
It is possible to have members of the same gender in a room and not have any mating happening for a wide gamut of reasons. It only makes no sense because you learnt your logic skills watching episodes of Mythbusters.
I predict that there will be a lot of fair comments in this thread modded down as flamebait, and I guess this will be one of them.
My personal experience of Google: I do photographs for newspapers. Google have used several of my photographs as part of Google News without permission or payment. I sent them an invoice, and a long time later they contacted me to say that they weren't going to pay AND would only take down the photos if I filed a DMCA complaint.
Even if you disregard the (valid) parasite claims in the Daily Mail article, I would say that Google simply doesn't respect copyright. (Or, more accurately, doesn't respect other people's copyright. I'm quite sure they would jealously protect their own.)
I suspect the reason you haven't sent a DMCA takedown notice is that you know it's good for your business to leave those pictures on Google for promotional purposes. After all they just told you what you needed to do to get them taken down. You just want that benefit AND payment. I presume you were paid by the newspaper for taking the photos.
Now you want to be paid again because the newspaper and photos are searchable? I suspect you knew (or even hoped) they would be searchable. I suspect you use search engines every day. I suspect you realize that if they paid everyone just to link to a page or image, no company could provide web search.
Typical "pro" photographer arrogance. Most people only get paid once for their work. If they want to earn more they have to do more work. The standard model isn't to do work once, hold back the original work and keep reselling single copies of downsized versions for a fortune. Deal with it.
Anyone participating in these dances is unlikely to ever be permitted to mate with anyone of the opposite sex. So I guess this is a genetic sorting algorithm called "End-of-the-line sort".
Um, speaking from personal experience, participating in dance (yes, even folk dance) is pretty much the most surefire way to get laid ever. Social and folk dances are basically just a codified means of getting members of the opposite sex to interact with each other.
So you're telling me you use folk dancing to get laid? Ewwww! Seriously.
Some people don't require a "codified means of getting members of the opposite sex to interact". Try walking up and saying 'hi'. And stop treating every interaction as a potential opportunity to mate. Nothing less sexy than desperation.
Anyone participating in these dances is unlikely to ever be permitted to mate with anyone of the opposite sex. So I guess this is a genetic sorting algorithm called "End-of-the-line sort". Now all we need to make this truly cringeworth is the right (wrong!) lyrics.
"Baby, you've reached the end of the line tonight See-Arrr-Elll-Effff! There ain't no way you'll pass on your code tonight See-Arrr-Elll-Effff!"
Scientists invented a system sounds like they're putting little checkout stickers on the zebras. What they've done is learnt to read what any imprinting newborn zebra foal must learn to read instinctively in the first couple of hours of life.
..FACT...Post Sp2 Windows is trivial to secure with a wealth of free services from MSFT SE to AVG to Comodo CIS to Avast. OOTB post Sp2 is easy to lock down and will NOT get infected simply by hooking to the net as ALL incoming all blocked BY DEFAULT.
..FACT.. Talk to ANYONE that actually repairs machines (such as myself) and we'll be happy to tell you that a good 90% of infections are INSTALLED BY THE USER. REPEAT nearly ALL INFECTIONS are INSTALLED BY THE USERS, with the other 10% divided between outdated Adobe products and using out of date browsers like IE 6. Why would they install bugs?
I almost got pwned the other day through a driveby download googling some medical information. Using the latest Firefox browser. XPSP3 with updates. Latest flash and a slightly out of date version of Adobe reader - 9 (but it doesn't matter which version you use because they never fully fix it and there's always an exploit out in the wild that hasn't been fixed!) I certainly didn't click on any installers or even banner ads. So no it's not just user software. Microsoft Security Essentials is what prevented the virus from executing. Zonealarm would have kicked in next. But this drive by did manage to get past sever of my defenses. And windows firewall is no where near as good a solution as simply sticking a proper router in between for incoming AND a good software firewall for outgoing.
Adding "FACT:" to the start of every paragraph is utterly lame and does not lend any authority at all to your post.
Email is inherently insecure, since it is transmitted in clear text and stored in multiple hops between destination and recipient, where its contents may be intercepted, altered, copied, stored, etc.. If you're relying on the law to keep your email private, you've already lost. Use digital signatures for authenticity and integrity, and strong encryption for confidentiality. At that point, you really don't need the law's help to keep your emails private.
How the fuck does this get modded insightful?
Using PGP or whatever else is not going to help you if the law requires that you give up your keys or rot in prison for the rest of your life.
If the opening poster was interested in technical ways to keep his email private I'm sure he would have asked. This is slashdot, so it's entirely possible he's already got the encryption and signature angle covered. This was not a techy question, and a techy answer is not appropriate!
Minnie Mouse. Since social engineering is the most noble kind of engineering.
Careful of that slippery slope. Once you start considering social engineering and mouseketeers there's a risk that Britney Spears will be named best engineer here on slashdot. Of course at that point the universe would no longer be able to sustain the paradox and would implode!
More than Duke Nukem or anything else I've heard referenced recently, none have blasted me back to my youth more than hearing the words "kermit" and "zmodem".
Nostalgia? Maybe. All I remember is having no end of trouble as a casual user of BBS. Zmodem is synonymous in my memory with file corruption on large downloads that took forever. What I remember not so fondly is going back to Xmodem out of sheer desperation (and sometimes that worked). I don't doubt that I did not understand the intricacies of zmodem as well as some may argue I should have. I didn't particularly want to understand it. I just wanted to use it to download.
The sad thing is even after decades resumable large downloads seem to be the exception not the rule. And free services have found new and interesting ways to slow down downloads by splitting them up, imposing time limits and restrictions and trying to get you to pay for the privilege of having those restrictions removed. I'd just love to see an estimate of total number of hours per year people spend/waste on something as trivial as obtaining files.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
I really think they are blowing this. I would love to see a modern C-64 but this isn't it. If I was building one I would start with one of the new AMD fusion chips. Put that into a a thin all in one keyboard that is no thicker than a Notebook. Include an HDMI port so you can hook it to a TV. Install a small Flash drive and no hard drives or CD/DVD. Include few USB 3 ports and maybe a Firewire port for people to add mass storage, and throw on a network port and possibly include wifi.
Sounds like you want a Wii. Okay its USB 2, not HDMI, and not Linux but the rest is pretty close.
The core is that ideas are tested by experiment. It is the process of saying "Hmmm, maybe X causes Y, let's try it and find out!"
No the core is do not accept anything as true unless it is proven. Experiment is just a means to that end. If the logic surrounding your experiments is flawed, or if you jump to conclusions (as they regularly do), or over-generalise (as they regularly do)., all the experiments in the world won't allow you to prove or predict a single thing.
Example: I decide to work out whether weight affects the speed at which an object falls, so I throw a stone and a feather over a cliff. I conclude gravity is weaker for lighter objects, because I fail to consider wind resistance, or come up with a better experiment that takes it into account.
They use the scientific method to prove or disprove hypotheses. So yeah, they're real scientists, they're just not academics.
They don't set up proper controls. They leap to all sorts of conclusions (often definitively) all through their testing and in coming up with their result. That's not science at all. Science doesn't require academic rigor, but it does require that you state your assumptions and quality your results clearly.
The problem is that they teach scientific principles so loosely and with so little rigor that it's actually damaging. Anyone who walks away from their "lessons" thinking they understand science has fooled themself. The trouble is that they then go out and represent this shoddy methodology to others who, when the techniques fail, judge all of science to be of limited validity.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hi kids, today's topic is copyright law and how we're allowed to copy anything we like because we're a multi-billion dollar company and can afford more lawyers than God, while you're just a schlep at a computer who's going to have their ass sued and thrown into jail.
By the way have you heard of Google books....that's right if you can't find it at a used book store, chances are we've copied it to put online.
So remember kids, don't infringe copyright. Let us do it for you, and enjoy the ads!"
soon as you get away with it enough you get complacent and let your guard down, thinking you are better than other criminals
Being a loud mouth idiot does not happen to everyone. Being a criminal does not happen to everyone.
This guy was on the wrong TV show. He should have been on "World's Dumbest Criminals"
I went back to college at age 38 after I had gotten divorced. At 42 I am still in college since the pool of available, good looking and non-desperate women is far larger than anywhere else I might go.
Plus you have a common interest/past time (college), you get to see them when they are not fucked up or drunk as hell, and for the best part, your competition is usually a bunch of young bucks who have as much skills in forming relationships of the short and fun type as a monkey does of quantum physics.
4 years, going on 5 and have not dated or had sex with a woman older than 26 since I started back to college. And since there are so many, you can have really high standards and still have plenty to pick from.
Rodney Dangerfield, is that you?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090685/
If you're staying in school JUST to sleep with young women, all you've discovered is how to be a dirty old man. It's not new. You're just using college as your personal playboy mansion.
If your relationship is going to move from casual/superficial to something more serious, finding someone your own age and level maturity has a lot of advantages over dating a bunch of mentally unstable experimental college girls who haven't worked out what they want from life. Meanwhile as you get older you'll find less and less 26 year olds willing to date/sleep with you.
In one of the books I read as a young person, self gratification was depreciated as a viable form of expression because if overused it could prevent the development of reasonable normal form of social interaction.
Funny no one gave me a book, I was just told I'd go blind ;-)
But who needs a book when you have Futurama - http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBUQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DBtqGTn7PCBw&rct=j&q=futurama%20don't%20date%20robots&ei=5GCmTb2-FIbnrAfG6KXkCQ&usg=AFQjCNHBXgfWk00y6IcQcfjgDcLclyhhRg&cad=rja
But dating is just going out and having fun. Not Expensvie.
Are you kidding me? Or do you just watch downloaded movies and take your dates to Maccas?
Even if you go dutch, a good date can be expensive. I would take my wife whale watching, to the zoo etc. when we first got together. No regrets at all.
Well, as atrociously bad as I am at dating, it's always nice to know that there will always be somebody sadder and more pathetic than you.
Jerry Springer, is that you?
This is why the SteamID is put in the error message.
Oh well it's Steam and it includes a SteamID, so it must be perfect and bug free and could only every correctly identify genuine pirates.
Are you lot listening to yourselves? Slashdot has fallen big time when idiocy like this becomes the norm and a legitimate comment gets modded down because people don't like having their favourite DRM criticised. Shame on the lot of you. You reap what you sew.
If you are pioneering a completely new language, why not pioneer a new virtual machine, and lawyer up and make sure Oracle doesn't have any grounds to sue you?
steveha
Because it might be cheaper to buy Oracle than lawyer up against it?
Calling your customer a pirate on a public forum without very solid proof , even jovially is not smart (and may even be legally actionable).
1. How does he know there's no bug in his copy protection code that does not inadvertently trigger for legitimate users under ANY circumstance
2. How does he know the people "pirating" haven't paid for a legit copy and decided to get around all the BS restrictions by using a crack anyway.
I have personally encountered situation 1 before in freeware of all things. The Vista Australis freeware mod developers accused people who were seeing a particular bug in their of being pirates, because pirating MS Flight Sim 2004 could cause the information about the install directory in the registry to be missing. It turned out there was a particular circumstance, which happened to me, under which the bug was triggered even without any kind of piracy. I had never pirated the game. I didn't take kindly to being called a pirate, and was labelled a trouble maker on the forum for pointing out that accusing people of piracy without proof wasn't right even if the software they developed was fantastic and free (which it was), and even if the accusation was jovial.
This is not an example of a fun way of catching pirates. It's an example of a software developer over-estimating his cleverness and acting like an ass.
Should Yellowstone go boom, in the USA the best possible outcome would be to go right along with it.
Go right ahead. More food for the rest of us. If everyone were so defeatist, the human race would have gone extinct long before we developed tools.
The amusing thing about your post is you just confirmed what he said. You didn't get infected by just hooking up to the Net (as was the case in the old days -- no browsing required), and you fell into the category of an outdated Adobe product. You were even saved by Microsoft Security Essentials.
You need a basic lesson in logic if you think that confirms what he says. I've demonstrated one instance of what he says BUT also demonstrated that several of the defenses I used were defeated. If my antivirus had not picked the file up as a trojan my PC would have been trashed. No antivirus has a 100% detection rate. So having an exploit get so far as to actually start a process that Security Essentials blocked is downright scary.
What more do you want? By the way, as for Adobe Reader, disable browser integration. Seriously. I'm also pretty sure the latest Reader products check for updates automatically, so if you're running an older product with known and fixed bugs, what's your excuse?
Are you kidding me????? What do I want? An environment where browsing to a web page doesn't automatically execute anything outside the browser. A product that is patched well enough so that new exploits aren't discovered every other week. Are you seriously telling me a product that requires updates every week to stay safe is a good one?
As there were members of both genders involved in the dancing your comment doesn't make any sense.
It is possible to have members of the same gender in a room and not have any mating happening for a wide gamut of reasons. It only makes no sense because you learnt your logic skills watching episodes of Mythbusters.
I predict that there will be a lot of fair comments in this thread modded down as flamebait, and I guess this will be one of them.
My personal experience of Google: I do photographs for newspapers. Google have used several of my photographs as part of Google News without permission or payment. I sent them an invoice, and a long time later they contacted me to say that they weren't going to pay AND would only take down the photos if I filed a DMCA complaint.
Even if you disregard the (valid) parasite claims in the Daily Mail article, I would say that Google simply doesn't respect copyright. (Or, more accurately, doesn't respect other people's copyright. I'm quite sure they would jealously protect their own.)
I suspect the reason you haven't sent a DMCA takedown notice is that you know it's good for your business to leave those pictures on Google for promotional purposes. After all they just told you what you needed to do to get them taken down. You just want that benefit AND payment. I presume you were paid by the newspaper for taking the photos.
Now you want to be paid again because the newspaper and photos are searchable? I suspect you knew (or even hoped) they would be searchable. I suspect you use search engines every day. I suspect you realize that if they paid everyone just to link to a page or image, no company could provide web search.
Typical "pro" photographer arrogance. Most people only get paid once for their work. If they want to earn more they have to do more work. The standard model isn't to do work once, hold back the original work and keep reselling single copies of downsized versions for a fortune. Deal with it.
How's that for a fair comment?
Anyone participating in these dances is unlikely to ever be permitted to mate with anyone of the opposite sex. So I guess this is a genetic sorting algorithm called "End-of-the-line sort".
Um, speaking from personal experience, participating in dance (yes, even folk dance) is pretty much the most surefire way to get laid ever. Social and folk dances are basically just a codified means of getting members of the opposite sex to interact with each other.
So you're telling me you use folk dancing to get laid? Ewwww! Seriously.
Some people don't require a "codified means of getting members of the opposite sex to interact". Try walking up and saying 'hi'. And stop treating every interaction as a potential opportunity to mate. Nothing less sexy than desperation.
Anyone participating in these dances is unlikely to ever be permitted to mate with anyone of the opposite sex. So I guess this is a genetic sorting algorithm called "End-of-the-line sort". Now all we need to make this truly cringeworth is the right (wrong!) lyrics.
"Baby, you've reached the end of the line tonight See-Arrr-Elll-Effff!
There ain't no way you'll pass on your code tonight See-Arrr-Elll-Effff!"
Scientists invented a system sounds like they're putting little checkout stickers on the zebras. What they've done is learnt to read what any imprinting newborn zebra foal must learn to read instinctively in the first couple of hours of life.
..FACT...Post Sp2 Windows is trivial to secure with a wealth of free services from MSFT SE to AVG to Comodo CIS to Avast. OOTB post Sp2 is easy to lock down and will NOT get infected simply by hooking to the net as ALL incoming all blocked BY DEFAULT.
..FACT.. Talk to ANYONE that actually repairs machines (such as myself) and we'll be happy to tell you that a good 90% of infections are INSTALLED BY THE USER. REPEAT nearly ALL INFECTIONS are INSTALLED BY THE USERS, with the other 10% divided between outdated Adobe products and using out of date browsers like IE 6. Why would they install bugs?
I almost got pwned the other day through a driveby download googling some medical information. Using the latest Firefox browser. XPSP3 with updates. Latest flash and a slightly out of date version of Adobe reader - 9 (but it doesn't matter which version you use because they never fully fix it and there's always an exploit out in the wild that hasn't been fixed!) I certainly didn't click on any installers or even banner ads. So no it's not just user software. Microsoft Security Essentials is what prevented the virus from executing. Zonealarm would have kicked in next. But this drive by did manage to get past sever of my defenses. And windows firewall is no where near as good a solution as simply sticking a proper router in between for incoming AND a good software firewall for outgoing.
Adding "FACT:" to the start of every paragraph is utterly lame and does not lend any authority at all to your post.
Email is inherently insecure, since it is transmitted in clear text and stored in multiple hops between destination and recipient, where its contents may be intercepted, altered, copied, stored, etc.. If you're relying on the law to keep your email private, you've already lost. Use digital signatures for authenticity and integrity, and strong encryption for confidentiality. At that point, you really don't need the law's help to keep your emails private.
How the fuck does this get modded insightful?
Using PGP or whatever else is not going to help you if the law requires that you give up your keys or rot in prison for the rest of your life.
If the opening poster was interested in technical ways to keep his email private I'm sure he would have asked. This is slashdot, so it's entirely possible he's already got the encryption and signature angle covered. This was not a techy question, and a techy answer is not appropriate!
Minnie Mouse. Since social engineering is the most noble kind of engineering.
Careful of that slippery slope. Once you start considering social engineering and mouseketeers there's a risk that Britney Spears will be named best engineer here on slashdot. Of course at that point the universe would no longer be able to sustain the paradox and would implode!
More than Duke Nukem or anything else I've heard referenced recently, none have blasted me back to my youth more than hearing the words "kermit" and "zmodem".
Nostalgia? Maybe. All I remember is having no end of trouble as a casual user of BBS. Zmodem is synonymous in my memory with file corruption on large downloads that took forever. What I remember not so fondly is going back to Xmodem out of sheer desperation (and sometimes that worked). I don't doubt that I did not understand the intricacies of zmodem as well as some may argue I should have. I didn't particularly want to understand it. I just wanted to use it to download.
The sad thing is even after decades resumable large downloads seem to be the exception not the rule. And free services have found new and interesting ways to slow down downloads by splitting them up, imposing time limits and restrictions and trying to get you to pay for the privilege of having those restrictions removed. I'd just love to see an estimate of total number of hours per year people spend/waste on something as trivial as obtaining files.
What is the meaning of 'shut-down?'
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Yes it is. It's also understandable, justifiable, and a very poor reflection on the surrounding society, but it's still theft.
Actually it's not fheft it's copyright infrin....wait a second!
I really think they are blowing this. I would love to see a modern C-64 but this isn't it. If I was building one I would start with one of the new AMD fusion chips. Put that into a a thin all in one keyboard that is no thicker than a Notebook. Include an HDMI port so you can hook it to a TV. Install a small Flash drive and no hard drives or CD/DVD. Include few USB 3 ports and maybe a Firewire port for people to add mass storage, and throw on a network port and possibly include wifi.
Sounds like you want a Wii. Okay its USB 2, not HDMI, and not Linux but the rest is pretty close.
The core is that ideas are tested by experiment. It is the process of saying "Hmmm, maybe X causes Y, let's try it and find out!"
No the core is do not accept anything as true unless it is proven. Experiment is just a means to that end. If the logic surrounding your experiments is flawed, or if you jump to conclusions (as they regularly do), or over-generalise (as they regularly do)., all the experiments in the world won't allow you to prove or predict a single thing.
Example: I decide to work out whether weight affects the speed at which an object falls, so I throw a stone and a feather over a cliff. I conclude gravity is weaker for lighter objects, because I fail to consider wind resistance, or come up with a better experiment that takes it into account.
They use the scientific method to prove or disprove hypotheses. So yeah, they're real scientists, they're just not academics.
They don't set up proper controls. They leap to all sorts of conclusions (often definitively) all through their testing and in coming up with their result. That's not science at all. Science doesn't require academic rigor, but it does require that you state your assumptions and quality your results clearly.
The problem is that they teach scientific principles so loosely and with so little rigor that it's actually damaging. Anyone who walks away from their "lessons" thinking they understand science has fooled themself. The trouble is that they then go out and represent this shoddy methodology to others who, when the techniques fail, judge all of science to be of limited validity.