Its many and frequent difficult to fix problem bring customers back for service.
I take your point, but we're speculating about possible consequences of continuing patent trollery, rather than discussing the world as it is right now.
If the demand is there, small shops will learn to Linux fast enough:)
Seems ridiculous to just buy one and have it working, doesn't it?;)
Depends how much you need to pay for the privilege. If the costs of patent litigation get passed on to the consumer, and if patent trolling continues to escalate, then building your own could become worth many people's time.
But in fact, it's not an either/or proposition. Most local independant computer shops I've come across offer their own brand hand-built computers for sale. If the scenario proposed came to pass, I'd guess a lot of them would start offering ready-built linux boxes. So you'd get to dodge the MS Tax and buy a computer "just working". Win-win:)
I might be very satisfied writing novels and having them published, but I don't think I'd be satisfied at all being paid a salary to entertain a millionaire's kids by telling them stories all day long, and with no rights to tell those same stories to anyone else.
Well, yeah. I mean if you assume that working as a children's entertainer under some form of NDA would be the only possible creative outlet for litterary talent in a post-copyright world, then that would make sense. I think you'd be hard put to establish that, however. I don't Shakespear wrote for a patron, and he made a living. Dickens made much of his income from speaking engagements. Neither of them had their works vanish into obscurity because. Neither did Michelangelo, come to think of it.
And of course, just because you write a novel doesn't mean it'll get published, nor is publication any garuantee of sales. So copyright doesn't do what you what it to do, and taking it away won't prevent you making a living as writer.
Maybe you're saying that doesn't matter, but I think there's a pretty stark difference between the two situations.
Well, clearly it matters to you, but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the point at hand. You'd like the status quo retained, either because you make money as an author, or because you aspire to do so. This is understandable, but it doesn't offer much of a way forward.
The post-copyright world is coming, like it or no. The hard question is how to ensure that large scale creative endeavours remain financially viable. I'm not sure gregrah and I see eye-to-eye here, but he was asking exactly the right question.
But I see that you conveniently ignored my main point
Mind if I take a crack at it?
To rephrase - if all of the content that you are illegally downloading today were to disappear from the world tomorrow, would you miss it?
Well, if all the content people were illegally downloading were to disappear, of course it would be missed. But then, that's not likely to happen.
If yes, then how would you propose that society creates incentive for artists to create such content *without* copyright laws?
There's two parts to that; the question as to whether social incentives are needed in order for art to be created; and how best to fund artists without copyright.
In the fist instance, I don't believe that society needs to create incentives for artists to create art. Most artists create because they are driven to do so, rather than as the result of a business plan.
This isn't to say that artists shouldn't be able to make a living from their efforts, of course. However, there are existing models for such recompense. Michelangelo spent four years of his life paint the roof of the Cistene Chapel. And he did it without copyright to provide an incentive. Art has been commissioned by taking up a subscription in advance before now. So I don't see copyright as a necessary element in the recompense of the artist.
So the question then becomes, given that copyright is not essential, what benefits does it give us, that we should defend it?
Personally, I'm of the opinion that copyright worked well in an age when the means of reproduction required significant capital investment, and when placing a surcharge on distribution was sufficient to compensate the punblishers (and hopefully creators)of a work. Those conditions no longer hold true, and as a result I think copyright is increasingly impeding rather than facillitating the creative act. And I think that's only going to get worse as time goes on.
The poster in question said he didn't need to make money out of programming because he had a day job. That, at first hand, sounds like some one with great Football skills saying he plays for free in aficionado leagues and cares not about playing in the NFL because he has a dayjob at BK that pays the bills.
I rather read his point as "I don't want to develop on iOS, and since I'm not doing this for the money, pointing out how much money some people have made isn't particularly persuasive"
The point is, "moderate success" is not as rare as people think it is in the Apple App Store. This is not as common thinking as you appear to guess. It seems people that have not tried or done research on it think it's either huge success or no money at all.
Yeah, Considering we all run on analogue hardware, we have a dismaying tendency to think in binary terms sometimes:)
As for the App store, from the reading I've done, I got the impression that the curve tailed off quite sharply. A handful of people making good money, maybe five times that making enough to get by, and then a hell of a lot who never recoup the cost of the dev kit. That said, I can't remember where I read that, so take it with a pinch of salt. Still, it sounds about right to me.
You would need to already be making money to not need a day job.
So your point is that if the had already become a successful mobile app developer in his spare time, then he would be able to quit his day job?
That seems an odd thing to say. The logic is unassailable, certainly, but I can't imagine you were saying anything the poster hadn't figured out for himself.
On the other hand, there is not worse looser than he who does not even bother to try.
Of course there is. The guy who jumps off the top of the Empire State Building and flaps his arms real hard on the way down, for example. He can try as hard as likes, but he's still going to lose. Big time.
Of course, if he learns to fly before he hits the ground, then I'm going to look pretty stupid. But unless his name is Arthur Dent, I know which way I'm betting.
Besides, no one suggest you quit your day job first.
That wasn't the way it came across to me. "You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do" Maybe there's an unintended ambiguity there.
You would first develop and should you meet moderate success, then you can quit the dayjob
You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do.
On the other hand, it's the "making money" bit of that sentence that's problematical. I expect there are plenty of successful app developers who'll tell you they got that way by having fun and playing their cards right. The trouble is that the relationship rarely works in reverse. Having fun does not ensure success, any more than playing your cards right ensures winning the game.
I'm fairly confident that for every mobile app that makes a ton of money, there are a hundred that get maybe two or three sales. Not giving up the day job is a smart move.
I recently went back to using windowmaker myself, and have to say it's really nice to use a wm that doesn't keep changing all the time, plus it's got to be *the* most configurable wm there is.
Having used both, I think that prize goes to FVWM. WindowMaker is nice, though.
I thought it sucked. You thought it sucked. A load of guys from the maths department that wanted to do quick mathematical computations loved it. APLwas not meaningless symbols to everyone.
Right. It's a niche language, very useful for a fairly narrow subset of programmers, but something of an impediment for the rest of us.
The point is that using an expanded set of glyphs didn't, of itself, make a language that was widely useful, let alone better. At the same time, it brought considerable drawbacks, many of which have already been mentioned in this thread.
Of course, that doesn't mean you couldn't leverage unicode to create a more expressive syntax. But TFA doesn't really have any ideas on how this is to be done apart from "obviously, more glyphs would be better", which I think APL disproves, at least in the general case.
None. But that doesn't matter, since you can't infringe a product.
In this scenario, Ambrosia is the hypothetical Martian product. Microsoft are simply patent holders, looking to find a patent broad enough to allow a claim of infringement against the Martians.
Existence of a past event (volunteers for X) is not a guarantee for the occurrence another independent event (volunteers for Y where Y has no relation to X). You don't rely on work being done with resources you cannot reliable predict to count on.
All very true, but only really relevant if the GP was saying "volunteers will definitely save the project". But he wasn't - the point was that a project is not necessarily screwed if it has to rely on volunteer labour
Powerpoint says something about what you do with it
What? You point at objects and lightning bursts from your fingertips and incinerates them? I think that must have been one of the features dropped my Microsoft when they bought out Forethought, Inc.
I think you're working very hard to try and force distinctions where none exist. Maya as a common concept? On the streets of Delhi, maybe.
what desktop are you using and what is your language of choice?
If I can jump in here: I use FVWM with a heavily customised config file. Languages of choice, depending on the task at hand, are C, C++, Perl, and (currently) Lua or Ruby. That's running Linux, rather than BSD. I do use some Gnome and KDE apps.
I've never used Java for anything significant. I did use Mono professionally for three to four years, a couple of years ago, I can safely say that I don't miss it in the least.
Gnome is all right, and I quite like KDE, but both of them consume a lot of resources to provide a set of integration features that I don't need and rarely use. And I've rather got used to having a desktop that does things my way, rather than whatever is current trendy in the relevant communities.
Because if there never was those abstract ideas, we would be worse off
People were having ideas long before there was a patent system. I really don't people are going to stop just because they can't get a monopoly on the idea. Still, at least we're addressing the issue now, which is a definite improvement.
And reward the person that JUST implements them. The person that had money to put the idea into implementation.
That sounds like the person with the idea made a bad deal with the venture capital guy. Patents are not a substitute for business acumen, nor should they be.
And lets cut to the chase, and skip the fucking bull shit. There IS a market for ideas. They are traded for a monetary value.
There used to be a market for slaves. People were traded for a monetary value. Does that mean that trading and owning slaves should be enshrined in law? Because if not, then the fact that you can make money is not a sufficient justification for their existence.
Again, back to the jealousy thing.
Again back to the cheap ad hominems. If you can't make your point with out getting personal, you probably can't make it at all...
From someone that has never had a profitable idea of your own. Your just jealous of the individuals that have.
All right. Let's suppose for a moment that I am as you suggest: stupid, unimaginative and covetous. That doesn't bring us any closer closer to answering the question.
Why should we reward abstract ideas rather than concrete implementation?
but in all "fairness" if someone had the idea first then why shouldn't they get some benefit from it ?
Seriously, why should they? I've yet to see any sort of justification for why an idea (as opposed to a product or an implementation) should be rewarded.
The closest I've seen ran along the lines of "that's the way the system works now, so that makes it ok", which doesn't really help very much.
Wine works well for x86, not so well for non-x86. As netbook makers introduce ARM powered models to save battery, "play all your games on Wine" won't be the easy cop-out that it used to be, at least until DOSBox gains some sort of dynarec.
I'll worry about that when I can play all my games on a netbook in the first place. They're not exactly intended as high-end gaming platforms.
Very true, but determining the actual intent of the creator is even harder than determining the content bias (whether intentional or unintentional), therefore defining "bias" colloquially as "seeking to mislead" is extremely difficult in practice
You can make some judgements. Fox News went to court to establish their legal right to knowingly present lies as news, for instance.
It's a judgement call, but that doesn't mean we can't make the call.
I, for one, never made an assertion that I, nor anyone on this site was unqualified to hold any opinion.
Fair enough, I accept the clarification.
If you want to know my thoughts regarding it, I consider the entire treaty to be flagrantly criminal
it was aimed at sycraft_fu more than yourself. I just saw your comment about "we are smug, intelligent self-assured" and it seemed like a neat way to link in the point. I do think "we" are considerably more diverse than you give us credit for, but it was a bit of a cheap shot in your case, and for that I apologise.
See, I think this outlines the crux of our discussion right here. You seem to be trying to argue a particular viewpoint. That's fine. My point was, I don't think the grandparent was trying to argue any particular position
And if he'd devoted equal effort to trying to expand the midset of the pro-ACTA lobby as well, then I'd probably agree with you. As it is I don't propose to
know what he intended, which is one reason I called him on his post, but I think I had grounds enough for what I posted, thank you.
It was an attempt to develop a false dichotomy: Either we accept what we consider to be obvious as the entire truth/picture and, thus, liberate ourselves from misinformation from outside sources, or we assess our own biases only to come to the conclusion that we are unqualified to think and, therefore, have to accept nothing but information from outside sources
Perhaps I should have used "sarcasm" tags. It was an attempt to point out the absurdity of suggesting that someone someone's judgement was called into question by the lack of universal consensus on the subject. Because that would mean you could only logically be confident in your judgement if your opinion was universal; which in turn would require a judgement call that you're now not qualified to make... and so you wind up needing some authority figure to tell you what everyone thinks so you can think it too. Maybe I tied to condense that down too much.
And again, if he'd applied it to both sides equally, I doubt we'd be having this discussion.
Effectively, you tried to sum his post down to something along the lines of, "You're all biased and, therefore wrong,"
Or alternatively I might have just meant the sentence I quoted, you know? That is the convention, I believe.
He just seemed to advocating that slashdotters should consider the fact that what is obvious to us isn't as obvious to everyone else.
He just seemed to advocating that anti-ACTA slashdotters etc etc etc. That's the point, really.
No. Since every source is biased that leaves you with nothing
Conceeding the point for a moment, bias is not an absolute quantity. It's like security in that regard. Any security system can be cracked, but that doesn't mean
they're all equally insecure. Leave your valuables unguarded in the street is not a rational strategy for securing them.
Similarly some news sources are much less reliable than others. When we say "biased" we generally mean a source that deliberate seeks to mislead, rather than one that occasionally and unconsciously shades its language.
You know, I think the parent was simply attempting to get the 'dotters to examine their own self-justification in their hatred of ACTA
Always presupposing that it is self-justification, of course which has yet to be established. I'm sure you meant to say that.
As for the GP, his post struck me as being quite baldly manipulative, framing itself as an even handed appeal for balanced judgement, whilst being utterly partisan, and quite one sided in its analysis. I mean we have:
The straw-man framing of the ACTA critics as extremists, opposed to any copyright at all
We have "evidence" aluded to but not cited, on the one hand, whilst simultaneously demanding a detailed cost/benefit breakdown
from the other side.
Accusations of bias, leveled at one side of the debate, only.
We do it all the time because, quite frankly, we are smug, intelligent, self-assured folk that have successfully surrounded ourselves with like-minded individuals in this medium (nerds and such).
... and there's also trying to trying to gain rapport by identifying yourself with a side of the debate that you don't especially seem to support.
However, as soon as a story comes up about increasing the scope of copyright law, our knee-jerk reaction is something along the lines of, "WTF?! It already sucks as it is! Can't everyone else see that?!"
ACTA is hardly a knee jerk reaction, however. It's been quite robustly debated on a number of occasions. I've yet to hear any persuasive points made in its favour. And the best I've heard from yourself and the GP boils down to "you're not really qualified to hold that opinion" which I reject.
Well, the answer is, apparently, "No."
Because if there wasn't some disagreement on the subject, we'd hardly be debating it. But the simple existence of
differing viewpoints is hardly an argument for one side or another.
Hell, there are quite a few people who consider copyright infringement to be on the exact scale of morality as physical theft. (And if you don't believe that, go down to your local farmer's market/community center sometime and try debating it with some non-tech oriented folks. They will look at you like you just ate a baby).
I'll tell you what: you go tell one of them how his fourteen year old daughter who spent all last night downloading music is a criminal and has caused thousands of dollars of damage. Report back when you're done. I'll wait:)
So in other words, I don't think lashing out at the parent is really in the best interest of discussion
What I don't think is in the best interest of the discussion is trying to tell people "you guys aren't really smart enough to make that judgement - wait for someone to tell you what everyone else thinks and then agree".. And if you think this was lashing out, you've clearly not spent much time around here. Or on the Internet for that matter.
I don't see a reason to pick apart his post and try to paint him as some sort of biased shill.
I picked the post apart because I found things too pick apart. If there's any specific thing I said that you think is unfair,
perhaps you might point it out and explain why, rather than simply painting me as some mean old kicker of puppies.
The parent isn't trying to make the case that ACTA, or harsher copyright, is a good thing. He is just saying that he likes to see people spending their time actually doing research and analysis on this topic
I read it as "doubt yourselves - but only if you think the ACTA is bad". But you know, if he's keen on research,
perhaps he'll set the ball rolling the evidence alluded to in his post.
Slashdot Mirror
I take your point, but we're speculating about possible consequences of continuing patent trollery, rather than discussing the world as it is right now.
If the demand is there, small shops will learn to Linux fast enough :)
Depends how much you need to pay for the privilege. If the costs of patent litigation get passed on to the consumer, and if patent trolling continues to escalate, then building your own could become worth many people's time.
But in fact, it's not an either/or proposition. Most local independant computer shops I've come across offer their own brand hand-built computers for sale. If the scenario proposed came to pass, I'd guess a lot of them would start offering ready-built linux boxes. So you'd get to dodge the MS Tax and buy a computer "just working". Win-win :)
Well, yeah. I mean if you assume that working as a children's entertainer under some form of NDA would be the only possible creative outlet for litterary talent in a post-copyright world, then that would make sense. I think you'd be hard put to establish that, however. I don't Shakespear wrote for a patron, and he made a living. Dickens made much of his income from speaking engagements. Neither of them had their works vanish into obscurity because. Neither did Michelangelo, come to think of it.
And of course, just because you write a novel doesn't mean it'll get published, nor is publication any garuantee of sales. So copyright doesn't do what you what it to do, and taking it away won't prevent you making a living as writer.
Well, clearly it matters to you, but I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the point at hand. You'd like the status quo retained, either because you make money as an author, or because you aspire to do so. This is understandable, but it doesn't offer much of a way forward.
The post-copyright world is coming, like it or no. The hard question is how to ensure that large scale creative endeavours remain financially viable. I'm not sure gregrah and I see eye-to-eye here, but he was asking exactly the right question.
Mind if I take a crack at it?
Well, if all the content people were illegally downloading were to disappear, of course it would be missed. But then, that's not likely to happen.
There's two parts to that; the question as to whether social incentives are needed in order for art to be created; and how best to fund artists without copyright.
In the fist instance, I don't believe that society needs to create incentives for artists to create art. Most artists create because they are driven to do so, rather than as the result of a business plan.
This isn't to say that artists shouldn't be able to make a living from their efforts, of course. However, there are existing models for such recompense. Michelangelo spent four years of his life paint the roof of the Cistene Chapel. And he did it without copyright to provide an incentive. Art has been commissioned by taking up a subscription in advance before now. So I don't see copyright as a necessary element in the recompense of the artist.
So the question then becomes, given that copyright is not essential, what benefits does it give us, that we should defend it?
Personally, I'm of the opinion that copyright worked well in an age when the means of reproduction required significant capital investment, and when placing a surcharge on distribution was sufficient to compensate the punblishers (and hopefully creators)of a work. Those conditions no longer hold true, and as a result I think copyright is increasingly impeding rather than facillitating the creative act. And I think that's only going to get worse as time goes on.
So, why defend copyright?
I rather read his point as "I don't want to develop on iOS, and since I'm not doing this for the money, pointing out how much money some people have made isn't particularly persuasive"
Yeah, Considering we all run on analogue hardware, we have a dismaying tendency to think in binary terms sometimes :)
As for the App store, from the reading I've done, I got the impression that the curve tailed off quite sharply. A handful of people making good money, maybe five times that making enough to get by, and then a hell of a lot who never recoup the cost of the dev kit. That said, I can't remember where I read that, so take it with a pinch of salt. Still, it sounds about right to me.
So your point is that if the had already become a successful mobile app developer in his spare time, then he would be able to quit his day job?
That seems an odd thing to say. The logic is unassailable, certainly, but I can't imagine you were saying anything the poster hadn't figured out for himself.
Thanks for the clarification, in any case.
Of course there is. The guy who jumps off the top of the Empire State Building and flaps his arms real hard on the way down, for example. He can try as hard as likes, but he's still going to lose. Big time.
Of course, if he learns to fly before he hits the ground, then I'm going to look pretty stupid. But unless his name is Arthur Dent, I know which way I'm betting.
That wasn't the way it came across to me. "You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do" Maybe there's an unintended ambiguity there.
Put like that, I don't have a problem.
On the other hand, it's the "making money" bit of that sentence that's problematical. I expect there are plenty of successful app developers who'll tell you they got that way by having fun and playing their cards right. The trouble is that the relationship rarely works in reverse. Having fun does not ensure success, any more than playing your cards right ensures winning the game.
I'm fairly confident that for every mobile app that makes a ton of money, there are a hundred that get maybe two or three sales. Not giving up the day job is a smart move.
That sounds very similar to the idea behind Wave.
Which is interesting, since it's not so long ago that the Wave creator quit Google for Facebook.
Let's see if the idea fares any better on facebook than it did on Google.
Having used both, I think that prize goes to FVWM. WindowMaker is nice, though.
Right. It's a niche language, very useful for a fairly narrow subset of programmers, but something of an impediment for the rest of us.
The point is that using an expanded set of glyphs didn't, of itself, make a language that was widely useful, let alone better. At the same time, it brought considerable drawbacks, many of which have already been mentioned in this thread.
Of course, that doesn't mean you couldn't leverage unicode to create a more expressive syntax. But TFA doesn't really have any ideas on how this is to be done apart from "obviously, more glyphs would be better", which I think APL disproves, at least in the general case.
None. But that doesn't matter, since you can't infringe a product.
In this scenario, Ambrosia is the hypothetical Martian product. Microsoft are simply patent holders, looking to find a patent broad enough to allow a claim of infringement against the Martians.
All very true, but only really relevant if the GP was saying "volunteers will definitely save the project". But he wasn't - the point was that a project is not necessarily screwed if it has to rely on volunteer labour
What? You point at objects and lightning bursts from your fingertips and incinerates them? I think that must have been one of the features dropped my Microsoft when they bought out Forethought, Inc.
I think you're working very hard to try and force distinctions where none exist. Maya as a common concept? On the streets of Delhi, maybe.
If I can jump in here: I use FVWM with a heavily customised config file. Languages of choice, depending on the task at hand, are C, C++, Perl, and (currently) Lua or Ruby. That's running Linux, rather than BSD. I do use some Gnome and KDE apps.
I've never used Java for anything significant. I did use Mono professionally for three to four years, a couple of years ago, I can safely say that I don't miss it in the least.
Gnome is all right, and I quite like KDE, but both of them consume a lot of resources to provide a set of integration features that I don't need and rarely use. And I've rather got used to having a desktop that does things my way, rather than whatever is current trendy in the relevant communities.
That still doesn't address the question I asked, and adds nothing new to your argument apart from some swearing.
We would seem to be done here. Thanks for playing.
mmm... and while that's perfectly valid if all you want to do is throw insults around, it doesn't do anything to address the original question.
Still, if that's the best you got, I guess that's the best you got.
People were having ideas long before there was a patent system. I really don't people are going to stop just because they can't get a monopoly on the idea. Still, at least we're addressing the issue now, which is a definite improvement.
That sounds like the person with the idea made a bad deal with the venture capital guy. Patents are not a substitute for business acumen, nor should they be.
There used to be a market for slaves. People were traded for a monetary value. Does that mean that trading and owning slaves should be enshrined in law? Because if not, then the fact that you can make money is not a sufficient justification for their existence.
All right. Let's suppose for a moment that I am as you suggest: stupid, unimaginative and covetous. That doesn't bring us any closer closer to answering the question.
Why should we reward abstract ideas rather than concrete implementation?
Seriously, why should they? I've yet to see any sort of justification for why an idea (as opposed to a product or an implementation) should be rewarded.
The closest I've seen ran along the lines of "that's the way the system works now, so that makes it ok", which doesn't really help very much.
I'll worry about that when I can play all my games on a netbook in the first place. They're not exactly intended as high-end gaming platforms.
You can make some judgements. Fox News went to court to establish their legal right to knowingly present lies as news, for instance.
It's a judgement call, but that doesn't mean we can't make the call.
Fair enough, I accept the clarification.
it was aimed at sycraft_fu more than yourself. I just saw your comment about "we are smug, intelligent self-assured" and it seemed like a neat way to link in the point. I do think "we" are considerably more diverse than you give us credit for, but it was a bit of a cheap shot in your case, and for that I apologise.
And if he'd devoted equal effort to trying to expand the midset of the pro-ACTA lobby as well, then I'd probably agree with you. As it is I don't propose to know what he intended, which is one reason I called him on his post, but I think I had grounds enough for what I posted, thank you.
Perhaps I should have used "sarcasm" tags. It was an attempt to point out the absurdity of suggesting that someone someone's judgement was called into question by the lack of universal consensus on the subject. Because that would mean you could only logically be confident in your judgement if your opinion was universal; which in turn would require a judgement call that you're now not qualified to make ... and so you wind up needing some authority figure to tell you what everyone thinks so you can think it too. Maybe I tied to condense that down too much.
And again, if he'd applied it to both sides equally, I doubt we'd be having this discussion.
Or alternatively I might have just meant the sentence I quoted, you know? That is the convention, I believe.
He just seemed to advocating that anti-ACTA slashdotters etc etc etc. That's the point, really.
Conceeding the point for a moment, bias is not an absolute quantity. It's like security in that regard. Any security system can be cracked, but that doesn't mean they're all equally insecure. Leave your valuables unguarded in the street is not a rational strategy for securing them.
Similarly some news sources are much less reliable than others. When we say "biased" we generally mean a source that deliberate seeks to mislead, rather than one that occasionally and unconsciously shades its language.
Always presupposing that it is self-justification, of course which has yet to be established. I'm sure you meant to say that.
As for the GP, his post struck me as being quite baldly manipulative, framing itself as an even handed appeal for balanced judgement, whilst being utterly partisan, and quite one sided in its analysis. I mean we have:
ACTA is hardly a knee jerk reaction, however. It's been quite robustly debated on a number of occasions. I've yet to hear any persuasive points made in its favour. And the best I've heard from yourself and the GP boils down to "you're not really qualified to hold that opinion" which I reject.
Because if there wasn't some disagreement on the subject, we'd hardly be debating it. But the simple existence of differing viewpoints is hardly an argument for one side or another.
I'll tell you what: you go tell one of them how his fourteen year old daughter who spent all last night downloading music is a criminal and has caused thousands of dollars of damage. Report back when you're done. I'll wait :)
What I don't think is in the best interest of the discussion is trying to tell people "you guys aren't really smart enough to make that judgement - wait for someone to tell you what everyone else thinks and then agree".. And if you think this was lashing out, you've clearly not spent much time around here. Or on the Internet for that matter.
I picked the post apart because I found things too pick apart. If there's any specific thing I said that you think is unfair, perhaps you might point it out and explain why, rather than simply painting me as some mean old kicker of puppies.
I read it as "doubt yourselves - but only if you think the ACTA is bad". But you know, if he's keen on research, perhaps he'll set the ball rolling the evidence alluded to in his post.